Fenella uses an abbreviated arrangement of the music of a grand opera, La muette de Portici (The mute girl of Portici), by composer Daniel Auber and librettist Eugène Scribe. Set in Naples in 1657, the plot concerns a love triangle during a period of rebellion and volcanic eruption. Alphonse, the son of the Spanish viceroy of Naples, is betrothed to a princess, Elvire, but has seduced the fishermaid Fenella. The death of Fenella’s brother prompts her, at the end, to throw herself into burning lava. Neither the composer nor the librettist of the original 1828 opera intended for the heroine to be silent, performing only in mime, but the atypical absence in Paris of a suitable soprano for the role, and the presence of an alluring ballerina, Lise Noblet, led to the switch. Reviewing the score, Hullen decided that La muette de Portici should have been a ballet in the first place and so enlisted an arranger (Erkolani) to help her choreograph it for the Bolshoi. Fenella mimes rather than sings in the original five-act version for the Paris Opéra; in Hullen’s four-act version, she dances rather than mimes. Gesture is the domain of the other characters, those who tell the story; Fenella becomes an idealized conception. She feels and expresses her feelings in movement, but also reaches for higher spiritual values. Hullen gave the part of Fenella to another dancer for the April 15, 1836, premiere, with Sankovskaya, listed as a student on the playbill, in supporting parts. Soon thereafter, the starring role was hers.
Sankovskaya was contracted to dance in ballets, operas, and divertissements as instructed by the Imperial Theaters and as her strength and stamina permitted. Her first solo dance at the Bolshoi was a pas du fandango. Announcements in Moskovskiye vedomosti have her partnering in a new Parisian pas de châle on November 27 and December 28, 1836, and appearing in the lead role in the one-act ballet La servante justifiée (The serving girl justified) on December 11. Eleven announcements for Sankovskaya’s performances appear in 1837 and encompass everything from benefits to appearances in masquerades. Her talent and popular appeal convinced the directorate of the Moscow Imperial Theaters to make her promotion retroactive; it was moved back from the opening of the 1836–37 season to the opening of the 1835–36 season. She earned 800 rubles per year in the first three years of her professional career, along with 200 rubles in housing allowance. She was also granted a shoe budget, but it was rescinded in 1845, when she was told that she would have to pay for her footwear herself, and also absorb the growing costs of her dresses, gloves, tights, and hats. An impressive stack of documents from 1845 finds her urging the release from customs of the twelve pairs of “white silk shoes” she had ordered from Paris, but the specifics of the design of the footwear, essential to the understanding of Sankovskaya’s technique, are not listed.12 The assumption is that she skimmed the stage, like Taglioni, on some combination of half-, three-quarter, and full pointe, but the sources are vague. As a student, the dancer Anna Natarova recalled seeing Sankovskaya in La sylphide. “She astonished everybody by running around the stage and going through her pas, all on pointe,” Natarova claimed. “This was new at that time.”13
Tsar Nicholas I took a special interest in Sankovskaya, as did many nobles with Moscow ballerinas, the imperial ballet being during his reign a harem of sorts for the court. Upon signing her first contract, Sankovskaya received an oversized diamond from the tsar and a lump-sum bonus of 150 rubles. Sexual affairs with dancers were a rite of passage for an adolescent nobleman, and it was not uncommon for older nobles to rely on the ballet school for lovers, plucking them from classes like fruit from hothouse gardens. Nicholas’s son, the future Tsar Alexander II, inherited his father’s tastes, and there is evidence to suggest that he took one of Sankovskaya’s rivals as a mistress. Besides personal pleasure, however, Nicholas found within the corps de ballet a model for obedient troop behavior. And vice versa: For a performance of the ballet The Revolt of the Harem (Vosstaniye v serale) in 1836, he assumed the duties of a ballet master by assigning the dancers weapons training.14 He broke down their initial resistance to the idea by making them rehearse outside in the snow.
The extent to which the Bolshoi Theater became a seraglio, and whether Sankovskaya was abducted by infatuated noblemen, will never be known. It is clear, however, that she existed above and apart from the lesser, poorer dancers whose futures lay in the laundries or on the streets as licensed prostitutes, dressed in yellow, carrying medical checkup forms of the same color. The term “ballerina” and the Table of Ranks for dancers (first dancer, second dancer, coryphée, corps de ballet) had not yet been codified by the Imperial Theaters, but there is no doubt Sankovskaya rose to the top, and stayed there. She far surpassed her teacher to become the finest Russian dancer of the first half of the nineteenth century. The administration of the Moscow Imperial Theaters recognized her talent early, increasing her bonus to 500 rubles and then 1,000 rubles upon the signing of contracts in 1838 and 1839. Later, she earned bonuses based on the number of times she starred in a ballet, seven rubles per outing in 1845, rising to ten, fifteen, eighteen, and finally twenty-five in 1851. Her contracts also guaranteed her an annual benefit or half-benefit performance, a lucrative perk, and for one of them she tried her hand at choreography, restaging the 1845 ballet Le diable à quatre (The devil to pay), which Joseph Mazilier had originally choreographed to music by Adolphe Adam, for presentation at the Bolshoi at the end of 1846. The subject of class conflict (a hot-tempered marquise magically trades lives with the good-hearted spouse of a cobbler) might have explained its appeal to Sankovskaya, but it was also chockablock with madcap caprice, including an episode in which a hurdy-gurdy player has his instrument broken over his head. Sankovskaya also performed in St. Petersburg and in 1846 toured abroad to Hamburg and Paris, among other cities—a first for a Moscow-trained dancer.
Bohemian students idolized her for reasons both religious and philosophical, as did the prominent theatrical observers Sergey Aksakov, Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, and Mikhaíl Saltïkov-Shchedrin. Appraisals and descriptions of her performances in the press are nonetheless few and far between, since the theatrical review had only just been legalized in 1828 for the semiofficial culture and politics newspaper Severnaya pchela (The northern bee), and strict rules were put in place, by the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Moscow police, about who could write reviews and how it was to be done: nothing anonymous, nothing unsolicited, and so nothing troublemaking. The gaps in critical thought were filled by periodicals like Moskovskiy nablyudatel’, diaries, and memoirs. Sankovskaya’s devotees saw spiritual liberation in her movement and found it difficult to believe that she was merely human, prone to injuries. Injuries excited alarm but also, like Taglioni’s and Elssler’s infirmities, increased Sankovskaya’s allure.
She had rivals, both early in her career and later on, and gossip raged, as it tends to, about her efforts to damage their careers. The first in the long list of competitors was Tatyana Karpakova, who had also trained with Hullen and had also been taken to Paris for exposure to the more rigorous lexicon of the Parisian repertoire. Karpakova danced from childhood and had sufficient nuance and timing to earn parts in theatrical comedies, though a critic of the time lamented her refusal to surrender cliché, the crass jumps that dancers recycled from ballet to ballet. Two years after graduating from the Moscow Imperial Theater College, Karpakova married a classmate, Konstantin Bogdanov. She had children whom she did not raise, ceding their upbringing, in keeping with the habit among artists, to the Theater College. As Karpakova slowed down, her name faded from the repertoire, and, after Sankovskaya’s ascension, the theatergoing public forgot about her altogether. In 1842, tuberculosis sentenced Karpakova to a premature death around age thirty.
KARPAKOVA HAD A DIFFICULT time escaping the strictures of academic classicism: her pantomime was considered cold, impersonal. Sankovskaya, in contrast,