Glushkovsky took on overlapping duties and honed his ballet-making skills during the rebuilding of Moscow, its fantastical rise from the ruin of total war. Juggling the positions of dancer, teacher, and ballet master caused him great stress, however, and he begged the directorate for help. Yet in 1831 his duties only increased when he was appointed chief inspector of the ballet and its director. Glushkovsky had to be present at rehearsals and oversee the staging of up to eighteen ballets in a single season, by his own count. He had to haggle for funding, find replacements for ill and injured dancers, and provide both dancers and dances for operas, melodramas, and the ballet groups inserted into vaudevilles, among other things. Out of consideration for the colossal load on his shoulders, the directorate of the Imperial Theaters allowed him and his wife, Tatyana, herself a dancer, to escape Moscow for a month each summer to “correct” what he termed his “ruined health.”20 Having served with what his overseers termed “great zeal” and “commendable behavior,” Glushkovsky petitioned for retirement in 1838, at the age of forty-six, and thereafter received a pension of 4,000 rubles along with a parting gift of a pair of diamond rings. The pension was impressive for the middle class, though an abyss below what an aristocrat earned each year from his serf estates.
GLUSHKOVSKY’S CAREER IS associated with the invention of “Russian” ballet, which emerged at once as an assemblage, an orientation, and an ideal. The East Slavic Cossacks brought some of their traditional dances to the theaters and schools of the post-Napoleonic Russian imperial ballet, as did the inhabitants of the interior steppe, Siberia, and the Caucasus Mountains. Glushkovsky and his successors also had access to the dances of nomadic peoples. These were altered and exaggerated, losing their ethnographic substance to become symbols, stylized representations, of the “Russian” empire. Later, the folk fare would be relocated to dream scenes, hallucinations, or the parade-of-nations pageants as found in French ballets dating back to the time of Jean-Georges Noverre and Louis XIV. “Dances of the peoples” in nineteenth-century Russian ballets would be confined to the margins and would fall out of the plot.
Into the mix of Russian ballet was also added imperial court dances from Europe. The blending of non-Russian elements into Russian ballet seems paradoxical, but such was Glushkovsky’s aesthetic—at odds with itself. The more his dancers sought an angelic escape from gravity’s pull, the more important it became to have them step on the soles of their feet, flatly, in a flesh-and-blood, human manner. And the more important the plot, the freer the performers felt to shift out of character, to break the emotional and psychological frame for the sake of bravura athletic display. The divertissements of the post-Napoleonic period included a lot of talking and singing; muteness, the defining element of ballet, was surprisingly rare. Ballet in Moscow thus developed along its own lines, reflecting local conditions much like species of birds evolving on a remote island—particular, even peculiar, in its adaptations. Elsewhere, popular ballets and operas imported from the West ensured ticket sales. But Moscow offered a bounded space for Russian ballet, like Russian opera, to flourish.
A new public theater in Moscow was constructed under the administrative umbrella of the St. Petersburg court between 1821 and 1825, toward the end of Glushkovsky’s career. It rose from the craggy gorge where the old Petrovsky Theater once stood, yet was meant to represent a clean break from the past and reflect the new nationalist ambitions. Despite the patriotic turn in the arts, however, the spacious new theater, like the performances within, still derived from continental European models. Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and Paris’s Salle Le Peletier lurked in the conscience of the architect. As a symbol of a city making a new start, a city of the future rather than the past, it needed to be bigger, grander, than the theaters of France and Italy, standing above if not apart from them. Thus Imperial Russia’s orientation toward, yet projected dominance of, the West was translated into marble and plaster.
The impetus to build the theater came from Dmitri Golitsïn, who replaced the disgraced arsonist Fyodor Rostopchin as governor general of Moscow. A basic neoclassical concept was approved in 1819, but no specific plans were drawn up until the summer of 1820, when four members of the Imperial Academy of the Arts put their heads together. The lead planner was Andrey Mikhaílov, a senior professor of architecture, with three other members of the academy, including his brother, also participating. The first draft was subject to revision, and the budget went beyond what Golitsïn was prepared to approve on behalf of the court. The extravagant plan needed to be scaled back. Throughout his career, Mikhaílov, who also designed the hospital where Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821, saw numerous building projects either canceled or completed by others, the Bolshoi included. The court indulged him with commissions but recognized his limitations.
Another architect involved from the start, Osip (Joseph) Bové, modified the design with the approval both of Golitsïn and the tsar. Bové had long enjoyed official support and oversaw the post-Napoleonic reconstruction of Red Square and the restoration of façades throughout Moscow. He could not, however, control the imaginations of the private builders contracted for the restoration work, the result being a riot of reds and greens that displeased the tsar, who ordered the façades swathed in paler colors. (These pale colors characterize the older buildings in Moscow to the present day.) For the Bolshoi Theater, Bové exercised restraint, eliminating, for reasons of taste, the nineteenth-century version of a shopping center that Mikhaílov had envisioned for the first floor and lowering the flat roof. He did everything he could to control costs, including contracting the masons himself and transporting stone bases to the site on his own dray. It was also his idea to salvage whatever he could from the detritus of the old Maddox theater; not all traces of the past were expunged. But as the wiser men of the Imperial Theaters directorate had predicted, costs still ran well over budget, from the 960,000 rubles allotted by the treasury to the colossal sum of 2 million.
Construction of the theater lasted more than four years. In July of 1820, the first of the ditches was dug and the first of the thousands of pine logs forming the foundation hammered into place in the bog on Petrovka Street. (Estimates vary on the number of logs pounded into the mire: more than 2,100 for certain, more than 4,000 perhaps.) Construction involved hundreds of laborers in the winters, even more in the summers. It did not end until December of 1824, and then just barely. The zodiac-embossed curtain and scrims were completed after the extended 1824 deadline, and, because of the budget overrun, both Mikhaílov and Bové had to sacrifice the 8,000 rubles in imported chandeliers that they had intended to hang in the side rooms, replacing them with illuminations of papier-mâché and tin fashioned by local craftspeople. Bové also had to forego the giant mirror that he had wanted to hang in front of the curtain, allowing audience members to gaze at themselves; the mere thought of it terrified the directorate, as much for its radicalism as its cost.
The finished building was nonetheless luxurious, with the loges facing the stage drenched in crimson velvet, gold fringe, and braids, and the open boxes on each side suspended, as if from the air, from cast-iron brackets. Columns on pedestals framed the galleries, supporting the arabesque-decorated ceiling, from which a massive crystal chandelier was raised and lowered by pulley. Oil lamps provided lighting, along with two parallel rows of candles fronting the loges. Even Russophobe Europeans were impressed at what had been achieved. “Travelers who visit Russia expecting to find a people just emerging from barbarism are often astonished to find themselves in scenes of Parisian elegance and refinement,” the Illustrated London News opined. The new theater was the greatest example of this unexpected urbanity. Although the theater was slow to adapt to new technologies—gas lighting was not installed until 1836, in tandem with the building of a special gas plant—the “orchestra and chorus were strong,” making the theater “a favorite place of resort of the Russian nobility, who usually wear their stars and ribbons at the opera.”21
It could hold more than 2,200 people, but demand exceeded capacity, especially in the first years, prompting management to repeat programs and cram additional seats into the auditorium. The side rooms had enough space to host chamber concerts by touring foreign musicians. The entrance was graced with a portico and