In Paris in 1831, the ballet was cast in an eerie green light produced by a long row of gas jets lit one by one by an attendant. The garments worn by the dancers, catching the light, made strange shapes. The effect was dangerous (Taglioni’s pupil Emma Livry died in horrible fashion when her skirt brushed up against a gas jet on the stage) but alluring, transforming the Ballet of the Nuns into an etheric bacchanale. On the ghost abbess Helena’s cue, the ghost nuns remove their habits to reveal, in the ethereal moonlight, translucent tulle and the pale skin beneath it. Edgar Degas immortalized the scene in 1876 in an impressionistic painting. The ghost nuns are seen processing to the front of the stage, swooning and flopping onto their knees in supplication. A reviewer for the Parisian Journal des débats described the wraiths dropping “their veils and their long habits, revealing only their light ballet tunics. Each of them drinks deeply of Cyprus wine or Val de Pegnas to refresh her mouth in which spiders have perhaps been spinning their webs; this gives them the courage to dance, and here they are spinning like tops, dancing rounds and the farandole, and dispensing themselves like women possessed.”20 The spectacle also possessed Dmitriyev, though his description does not come from an actual gaslit performance of the Ballet of the Nuns in Moscow; at the time of his writing, in 1859, the technology had not yet been installed in the Bolshoi. The nuns he saw would have moved in dimness. Dmitriyev insists, against the historical record, that Sankovskaya surpassed Taglioni in the role of the ghost abbess and that she calibrated it perfectly, exposing the dangers of her art, its seductive Satanism.
Dmitriyev was sufficiently captivated by Sankovskaya to turn up night after night at the theater hoping to see her perform again, but she never did. That led him to conclude she had left for Paris, again, or London, or had perhaps even suffered the bittersweet fate of the sylph. His account is emblematic of the love she received from liberal Moscow students, who crowned her their own personal tsarina, while also attesting to the reverence with which critics of the period described each step and gesture in her embodiments of Esmeralda, Giselle, and Paquita. Certain sensational details are omitted from his tribute, including the evening when the police were called to the Bolshoi to restore order after the ovation from the fawning students threatened to exceed acceptable decibel levels—the theater being no place for mass demonstrations. The noise ordinance came directly from Tsar Nicholas I, who had quashed the uprising that followed his ascension to the throne, in December of 1825, and thereafter maintained order in the empire through callous means. His was a rule of censorship, intolerance, and the persecution of the foreign, the nonconforming outsider. Sankovskaya, the made-in-Russia emblem of spiritual freedom, was, for the social class most ground down, a light in the dark.
The adoration of youthful audiences, both for Sankovskaya the great artist and Sankovskaya the perspiring human being behind the pirouettes, brought the French phenomenon of the claque (taken from the French word for clapping) to Moscow. Her devotees—her claque—could be counted on to applaud, cheer, and stomp their feet at the end of intricate sequences, giving her a moment to regain her balance and sneak in a breath. The rest of the audience sometimes followed their example, making the success of the evening so resounding that no critic could quibble. In Paris, the claque could support or sabotage a performance, by talking or hacking or clapping off-beat, if the dancer fell out of favor with the claque or refused to provide free passes to the performance. There is no evidence to suggest that Sankovskaya ever offended her fans; their adoration lasted from 1836, when she made her debut, to 1854, when she left the stage.
INDEED HER FANS remained so overcommitted to her as to make the Bolshoi stage perilous for actual or potential rivals, and Sankovskaya was spared the indignities suffered by lesser lights. One of them was her own sister, the lesser-known Alexandra, who had a modest career in Romantic roles, together with folk fare and masquerades. But during her years at the Imperial Theater College and on the Bolshoi Theater stage, Alexandra—billed as Sankovskaya II—was bullied for her imperfections at the barre and, once to great alarm, abused in front of the entire theater.
The villain was the thirty-four-year-old ballet master Théodore Guerinot, a native of rural France who had danced in St. Petersburg for four years before accepting a renewable three-year position in Moscow in the fall of 1838. He specialized in mime and was touted for superb acting, his facial mannerisms extolled as “polysyllabic.”21 His behavior behind the scenes, however, lacked such nuance. He was, frankly, a cad. Guerinot enjoyed betraying his lover, the French dancer Laura Peysar, sometimes feigning innocence when caught in the act and at other times placing the blame on whatever insidious seductress had forced herself upon him that evening. Peysar exorcised her personal anguish by literally throwing herself into her art. She took on dangerous roles requiring elaborate stunts and almost killed herself when a boom holding her above the stage collapsed. She broke her leg in the fall. Her career ended, and Guerinot left town.
His debut in Moscow included the saltarello from the second act of the popular comic opera Zampa, ou la fiancée de marbre (Zampa, or the marble bride). Though the saltarello has benign rustic Italian origins, Guerinot and his onstage partner, Alexandra Voronina-Ivanova, made the quick triple-meter steps seem like devil’s work. He was hailed by an anonymous reviewer in Moskovskiye vedomosti for performing as though each phrase was an on-the-spot, in-the-moment invention. Guerinot provided “excitement in the randomness” of the phrases, “giving the dance a new look each time … You begin to think, in truth, that he is dancing on impulse, that each rapid change in his movement is the product of a rush of imagination, rather than being a requirement of this inventive dance.”22 After making this memorable first impression, Guerinot was appointed “ballet master and first dancer of mime” at the Bolshoi Theater in October of 1838.23
In Moscow he worked alongside, and then replaced, the Napoleon-era ballet master and pedagogue Adam Glushkovsky, who chose to retire from his position at the same time as Sankovskaya’s mentor, Félicité Hullen. Guerinot brought French ballets from St. Petersburg to Moscow and, for 17,000 rubles a year, masculinized them, making the roles of the men as compelling as those of the women. His productions at the Bolshoi included La fille du Danube (The daughter of the Danube), which Filippo Taglioni had choreographed for his daughter, Marie, as well as the slave-girl drama Le corsaire and Le diable boiteux (The devil on two sticks), whose Paris premiere featured Fanny Elssler in a Spanish castanet dance called the cachucha. Guerinot partnered with Ekaterina Sankovskaya in several ballets, and both of them were lauded in the press for their performances, though the critics in question lamented the underbudgeted, dreadful-looking sets and costumes in the Moscow version of La sylphide, as opposed to the lavish Taglioni version in St. Petersburg. Guerinot was as expressive and evocative in his mime, demonstrating that “male dancing can be significant in its own right.” Sankovskaya was “gentle” and, despite the disappointing staging, the ideal of grace. She might not have “floated through the air” and “glided through the flowers” as captivatingly as Taglioni, and her white tunic and wreath might have been a bore, but in the end she received five curtain calls—the same as Taglioni.24 And Sankovskaya was the better actress of the two dancers.
Trouble for Guerinot came in 1842 with a staging of Rossini’s opera William Tell, which has dancing in the third act. Since the opera concerns a rebellion against a repressive regime, in this case Austrian, the Censorship Committee of the Ministry of Education delayed approving it for production, having detected hints of revolution. To reach the stage, the opera had to be renamed Charles the Bold and the libretto reworked to enhance its patriotic as opposed to insurrectionist elements. The flash point, both onstage and off, was an aggressive pas de trois performed by Guerinot and the two Sankovskaya sisters. As soon