In March of 1843, her doctor recommended that Sankovskaya be permitted to travel to Bad Ems, Germany, the preferred summer retreat of the European and Russian nobility, to take the thermal mineral waters and sea salts. She was suffering from myriad ailments: frail nerves, gastrointestinal disorder, irritation of the liver, persistent low-grade fever, and constant back pain. The request was rejected because Sankovskaya had not herself discussed her situation when she was in the offices of the Moscow Imperial Theaters to arrange a benefit performance, and because the doctor’s report did not explain how the facilities in Bad Ems could help. She filed the same request in March of 1844, by which time the back pain had increased and Sankovskaya had developed a cyst on the inside of her left thigh above the knee. In addition, she had a hernia, the result of a pulled groin. Her doctor also noted abdominal pain and the discoloration of the skin characteristic of jaundice. On April 10, Sankovskaya was given leave to travel abroad and issued a foreign passport for four months of treatment in Bad Ems, her pay suspended for the duration, from May to August. Before leaving, she had to prostrate herself before the intendant (director-in-chief) of the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, Alexander Gedeonov, pledging, once she had recovered, to dedicate herself to justifying his benevolence. She perhaps did not need to go so far, since Gedeonov was, as the ballet master Marius Petipa recalled, a “very kind” man. Though he seemed harsh, earning the nickname “grumbler benefactor,” he generally forgave bad behavior. (Petipa relates the case of a “bit player” who turned up drunk for a performance and threw up onstage. Gedeonov admonished the “disgusting creature” but allowed him to keep his pension, even after the actor pulled a pair of pistols on him.)15
The thermal mineral springs, despite their reputation as a fountain of youth, did little to alleviate the abuse Sankovskaya’s body had suffered through the years. Her health continued to decline. In August of 1848, she was fined 259 rubles and 54 kopecks for failing to perform; she had been out sick for three months. When she finally returned to the Bolshoi, she was upstaged by a visiting dancer from St. Petersburg.
Her health problems obliged her to work, for a period, without a contract. She took her last bow near the end of 1854, having established the benchmark for subsequent generations. Official papers exchanged between the Moscow and St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters indicate that, to Verstovsky’s consternation, she received special treatment in her final years onstage. Sankovskaya retired past her peak but not conspicuously so, beloved by the Moscow public as “the soul of our ballet,” a hometown girl made good.16 A farewell benefit was arranged at the Malïy Theater but canceled, due again to her health, but also to a decline in the size of her audiences. Verstovsky thereafter started to promote her protégés, especially the bright young Praskovya Lebedeva—the one dancer, in all his years of correspondence, to earn his genuine praise. Sankovskaya received another diamond and a pension equivalent to her salary in the late 1840s. After leaving the stage she taught social dances to girls and boys in gymnasia and manor houses. One tale has her setting a “sailor’s dance” on the future great method actor Konstantin Stanislavsky.17 His technique owed much to Sankovskaya’s childhood instructor Mikhaíl Shchepkin. Before her death on August 16, 1878, her career had come full circle.
FIVE YEARS AFTER Sankovskaya’s retirement from the stage, a tribute of sorts was published in the journal Otechestvennïye zapiski (Notes from the Fatherland) under the title “Recollections of a Moscow University Student.”18 The text is autobiographical, but it is drenched in mystical perfume and meanders from what is known about Sankovskaya’s career. The student in question, Nikolay Dmitriyev, exhausts superlatives in describing the effect on him of Sankovskaya’s dancing during a glum time in his life. He recalls her performance in 1837 of the lead role in La sylphide, an early staple of the repertoire first choreographed by Filippo Taglioni in Paris in 1832 for his daughter, Marie, who overcame serious physical challenges to serve as her father’s muse. La sylphide was profoundly influential, providing the archetype for, as an obvious example, the act 1 madness scene and act 2 dance-love-nexus of Giselle. At its most basic level, La sylphide concerns striving for the ideal, but it ends in grief and leaves open the question as to whether the eff ort merited the sacrifice. Marie Taglioni was in St. Petersburg performing the part of the ethereal heroine on the exact same night that Sankovskaya danced the ballet in Moscow. This was neither a scheduling coincidence nor a conflict but what Sankovskaya’s teacher, Hullen, had conceived as a duel in satin slippers.
Sankovskaya triumphed—at least according to Dmitriyev. In his recollections, he arrives at the Bolshoi in a foul mood, burdened, like Goethe’s Werther, by suicidal thoughts caused by boredom, loneliness, and the harsh autumn frost. He seeks distraction, but there is no Academy of the Arts in Moscow for entertaining edification, no Hermitage. For “aesthetic feeling,” he has recourse to the theater alone. His spirits sink further when he realizes that the program for the evening is neither a play nor an opera but a benefit for a ballerina. There is no point in returning to the “dreariness,” “grief,” his neighbor’s “stupid mug,” and the “inescapable samovar” of his room, so he surrenders the seven rubles in his pocket, a colossal sum, for a ticket. The crowds in the side rooms of the theater beam obtuse happiness, and he grinds himself into his seat thinking that they have all been duped. The orchestra interrupts his recollection of Lermontov’s verses on the torments of ignorance.
And then he sees her. The curtain rises to reveal a house in a mythical elsewhere (Scotland) and a man flopped in an armchair, napping, or in Dmitriyev’s description, tugged to sleep by forces beyond his control. Sankovskaya comes into view in a window above the stage and then glides down over the railing of a ladder to the floor, her skin and tulle white as the moonlight. She kneels before the armchair and then, again in Dmitriyev’s description, rises to dance for the man, expressing her unreserved willingness to submit to his desire. Then she disappears, as ungraspable as “air’s pure translucence.”
The man in the chair, James, is soon to be wed, but he is dissatisfied with his intended bride, Effie, a conservative, salt-of-the-earth type. He seeks the escape symbolized by the sylph, the enchanting other, and falls in love with her. Dmitriyev too became smitten with Sankovskaya, waiting for her to return to the stage with his heart stopped and then, when she did, watching her skim across the floor, rapt. He grew aware of the interloping temporalities, the places where the music ends but the dancer continues her delicate runs, and appreciated the special visual effects: the sylph’s ascent into the ether with her partner at the end of the first act, and her disappearance through a trapdoor in the second. Nothing is said of the tragic ending of the ballet, when James, desperate to possess the sylph, flees his bride for the forest (the realm, in the Moscow staging, of benign witches illuminated by street lamps). There in the woods James grasps the sylph, trapping her in his cloak. She loses her wings, the source of her power, and dies. A writer for the fashion journal Galatea provides the detail Dmitriyev excluded: “The expression on her face as she battled death was uncommonly aff ecting.”19
Beyond noting the perspiration that accumulated on Sankovskaya’s body like “spring dew,” Dmitriyev revealed little about the specifics of her dancing: how high Sankovskaya jumped, how often she rose up en pointe, whether or not she soared above the stage with wire supports, the thickness of the leather on the heels of her slippers. The details were apparently incidental to the spell that she cast on him and his fellow students and professors.
La sylphide was the centerpiece of Sankovskaya’s career, but Dmitriyev believed that her dancing was most true to herself in the Ballet of the Nuns scene from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s supernatural