Verstovsky must also have been distraught at what he had been forced to do. He adored his wife and would not be parted from her, just as he would not be parted from his true self—that of an artist, a composer, not a bureaucrat. Out of frustration with his lot, his paperwork, and the intrigue that he himself had promoted, he would one day wish the Bolshoi away.
But the Bolshoi was now more than a building. It stood as the symbol of a pursuit: the struggle for national identity through cultural identity. Because Moscow had borne the brunt of Napoleon, because it had burned and been rebuilt, because its populace had endured and finally triumphed, the formerly brackish backwater claimed the mantle of national purpose from the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Bureaucratic wrangling between Moscow and St. Petersburg aside, Moscow found itself ascendant. Its distance—from St. Petersburg, from Europe—proved a benefit rather than a hindrance. Even before it became the seat of power in the twentieth century, Moscow in the nineteenth, after Napoleon, began to assume importance. The Kremlin, and the Bolshoi, could bide their time on the bend of the river along trading routes that the government could only pretend to govern.
The struggle to represent Russia in the arts continued through the imperial Russian era, through the Soviet era, and into the present day; surely, it is a struggle without end, Romantic in the extreme for its investment in ideals of the people and the nation. Yet the Bolshoi could lay claim to that most clichéd of concepts: the Russian soul.
FLEET AS LIGHTNING: THE CAREER OF EKATERINA SANKOVSKAYA
ALEXEI VERSTOVSKY LEFT behind a long paper trail as first the inspector and then director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. The performers under his control did not. Neither did their performances. What survives from the first half of the nineteenth century are music scores, scenarios, the recollections of eyewitnesses, and the images collected, over time, by devotees such as Vasiliy Fyodorov, an art historian and director of the Malïy Theater Museum under Stalin. But even these collections are selective affairs, labors of love with huge chronological gaps that no scouring of archives, kiosks, and libraries could fill. The first half of the nineteenth century, the era of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, is even less well represented than the Maddox era—but for the case of the Moscow-born dancer Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Sankovskaya (1816–1878), whose career extended from October 1836 to November 1854. A diva before the phenomenon of the diva existed, Sankovskaya rivaled her illustrious European contemporaries Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler in both lightness and precision.
Yet her name, unlike theirs, has faded from the annals of ballet history, to the extent that the details of Taglioni’s performances in St. Petersburg from 1837 to 1842, and Elssler’s in St. Petersburg and Moscow from 1848 and 1851, are better known, even though Sankovskaya’s career was no less illustrious—and no less controversial—than theirs. Russian critics fawned with great ardor over Taglioni; one of them, Pyotr Yurkevich, even claimed her as St. Petersburg’s own: “Our incomparable sylphide, with one wave of her little foot, rends asunder all the heavy theories of encyclopedic construction,” he enthused, further waxing that she was “beautiful and unattainable, like a dream!”1 Knickknacks bearing her likeness appeared on the streets of the imperial capital, and a patisserie conceived an elaborate tartlet in her honor. The most famous, or notorious, piece of lore surrounding Taglioni’s guest appearances in St. Petersburg has her fans purchasing her dance shoes at auction for 200 silver rubles and then sautéing them for a feast.2 The behavior was odd, but it was not without precedent, as Sankovskaya herself would have known.
From her European role models, Sankovskaya adopted the distinctive features of Romantic ballet: the all-white, unadorned costume, including the tutu, and dancing with heels off the ground. For choreographic exotica, she donned pantaloons and Turkish-style slippers. Before her time, moving sur les pointes, or on the knuckles of the toes, had been an acrobatic feat, invented by Italian gymnasts and then adopted, for expressive purposes, by such French dancers as Fanny Bias and Geneviève Gosselin.3 Excluding the winsome oil portrait that hangs in the Bakhrushin Museum in Moscow, the extant images of Sankovskaya are fanciful, showing her floating, hovering. The lithograph that Fyodorov preserved of her comes from a staging of Le corsaire in 1841, when she was at the height of her powers. She is either landing from a jump with toes extended, or in piquée arabesque. She looks “as fleet as lightning” in the ballet—radiant for an instant, then gone forever.4
Little is known about her life, besides mention of her mother and sister, also a dancer, and the quarrels she had with rivals in their looking-glass world. Born in Moscow in 1816, Sankovskaya entered the Moscow Imperial Theater College when she was nine, on the petition of her mother. She boarded at the school as a kazennaya vospitannitsa, a nonpaying, state-supported pupil. Before learning character dances, she studied the mazurka, the quadrille, and other social dances considered indispensable for the perfection of bearing and posture. The most important initial instruction came from Mikhaíl Shchepkin. He was the dominant presence at the Malïy Theater, devising a method of acting that privileged emotion and sensation over thought. He rejected two-dimensional representations and stock characterizations, instead encouraging his students to connect as intimately as possible with their subjects. Although Shchepkin at first had doubts about Sankovskaya’s potential as a performer in his idiom, labeling her “talented, but capricious” in one of his notebooks, he became her mentor, instilling in her a commitment to naturalness of expression that she maintained throughout her career.5
Sankovskaya first danced small roles in ballets on historical and mythological themes, including Charles Didelot’s The Hungarian Hut (Vengerskaya khizhina), in which she appeared disguised as a boy, nerves setting her arms and legs atremble. Sankovskaya’s first solo appearance was at the Malïy Theater in 1831, at age fifteen, in the role of a smitten milkmaid. The ballet, one of Didelot’s more trifling concoctions, pits the milkmaid and the peasant lad she loves against her grandmother. In the role, Sankovskaya impressed the litterateur Sergey Aksakov. Despite grumbling about the corps de ballet coming too close to the front of the stage in the concluding village wedding dances and the lack of soulfulness in the pantomime, Aksakov noted a tremendous improvement in the teaching at the Theater College. Sankovskaya and her onstage partner “were sweet and captivating,” he wrote. “They will mature, and their gifts will bear brilliant fruit.”6
In 1836, Sankovskaya’s teacher, Félicité Hullen, decided to take her to Paris for the summer, “for the betterment of her talent.”7 The Imperial Theaters granted permission for the trip but did not fund it, so Hullen footed the bill. Little is known about the adventure. In Paris, Sankovskaya seems to have been brought into direct contact with Fanny Elssler, who saw in her less a performer in her own style—earthbound, tacquetée, defined by intricate footwork—than the likeness of Taglioni, capable of creating the illusion of supernatural lightness in her jumps, as befitted her slight build. According to a writer for the ephemeral arts and politics journal Moskovskiy nablyudatel’ (Moscow observer), “the spirit of the Parisian sylph [Taglioni] enlivened that of the petite Muscovite.”8 Sankovskaya absorbed the impressions gained from her time abroad into her own style, one that assimilated each step, each combination, into a single image. She returned to Moscow a professional, a Bolshoi ballerina.
The unknown author of the think piece in Moskovskiy nablyudatel’ noted that, owing to inexperience, Sankovskaya “sometimes sacrificed herself and her art by indulging