Alexandra’s account of the attack, which she turned into an official complaint against Guerinot, prompted an investigation and interviews with audience and staff members who had witnessed the incident or heard about it. The slap was described as but a flick in the comically muddled recollection of a certain Captain Lieutenant Mukhin, who recalled Guerinot “lifting his hand and flicking her on the left cheek right next to her eye.” Her “astonished and enraged visage” prompted him to conclude “that she had indeed been affected by the flicking.” But, he mused,
whether or not M. Guerinot kicked her in the shins, or she him, as M. Guerinot testifies, that I did not see, for I was looking above their legs. Yet, in all likelihood, and given that she was ahead of him, she would have had to direct her kick behind her to M. Guerinot. Still, I cannot say anything definitive about this. Upon returning backstage, I, as a person external to the proceedings and having no obligation to say anything, refrained from doing so until the Repertoire Inspector, Court Counselor Verstovsky, arrived, declaring: “M. Guerinot has quarreled with Mlle. Sankovskaya; she has called him a swine.” To which I, as an eyewitness to the event, deemed myself obliged to rejoin immediately: “And so is she justified, for M. Guerinot flicked her.”25
The case went to St. Petersburg for a ruling. Guerinot was fined two weeks’ pay by the minister of the court for his behavior—an indication, perhaps, that such incidents were somewhat routine. He was also made to apologize to his victim, which he did to her satisfaction, and advised that further incidents might lead to the termination of his employment. That the Russian word for “kick” is spelled with a soft sign in the Moscow records of the assault but without a soft sign in the St. Petersburg records—pinka instead of pin’ka—might seem a trifling detail, but it proves telling. People spoke differently in the two cities. Muscovites retained a domestic dialect that the court had abandoned; the Russian language was spoken more gently in Moscow than in the capital. But the art had a harder edge.
GUERINOT’S REPUTATION DETERIORATED. He was disparaged by the director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters, Verstovsky, who joked in a letter to his supervisor in St. Petersburg that “no matter how much one tries to teach Guerinot—to behave himself—he never ceases being a scoundrel.”26
His swan-song benefit was on October 29, 1845; next came the expiration of his contract and what decorum obliged those in the know to call “unpleasantness.” The unpleasantness, however, extended beyond Sankovskaya’s sister to another dancer, Luisa Weiss, whose beauty helped to compensate for her technical limitations. Weiss had begun her career in Darmstadt, Germany, dancing in the theater built by the grand duke of Hesse, and then relocated to London, where she performed, depending on the source, either to great acclaim or partial success. Prince Alexander Nikolayevich (the future Tsar Alexander II) had a strong connection to Darmstadt, having married Princess Marie of Hesse in St. Petersburg in 1841. He invited Weiss to Russia and showed an intense interest in her performances at the Bolshoi—so intense, in fact, as to suggest that the dancer from Darmstadt was his mistress. Gedeonov also expressed interest in her, editing the letters that she wrote to the Moscow Imperial Theaters in hopes of a more lucrative contract. Weiss’s ties to the court, and the special treatment she received, including imported footwear and payment in advance for her performances, made her a subject of gossip, as did her falling-out with Sankovskaya. The tattle within the theater was that Sankovskaya considered Weiss a threat and was conspiring with Guerinot to bring her down.
As part of the October 29, 1845, benefit for Guerinot, Weiss performed La sylphide, to constant, loud applause from most of the audience, the exception being Sankovskaya’s claque, who tried to drown out the clapping with catcalls. There were several curtain calls—ten according to one count, fifteen in another. During the last of them, an apple was thrown at Weiss from the loges, plopping unceremoniously down at her feet.
The next day, Verstovsky reported the incident in lavish detail to Gedeonov, noting that the apple toss was unprecedented and that he had ordered an investigation above and beyond what the officer on duty in the theater reported. Weiss, he added, refused to dance again at the Bolshoi, and her mother and brother, who lived with her in Moscow, were very upset. Thus was compromised his attempt to “counterbalance public opinion in relation to Mlle. Sankovskaya, who is an obvious attraction for the ballet but cannot always be relied upon by the directorate due to poor health.”27
Since Prince Alexander was Weiss’s benefactor and would hear about the incident from her, Gedeonov decided that he needed to get involved. He wrote a letter to the prince explaining what had happened in language suitable for a child, first mentioning that, in recent times, audiences had engaged in the commendable custom of gently lobbing bouquets of flowers onto the stage, and that, in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, audiences tended to behave themselves. Though the apple had caused no damage, he stressed the need to find the person who threw it. Prince Alexander took the matter seriously, appointing a special officer to investigate on his behalf.
Subsequently Gedeonov reported that Guerinot had distributed a large number of free tickets to students, including those of the fencing instructor in the theater. He also learned that, on the morning of October 30, a day after the apple toss, Guerinot was overheard asking one of the students whether the performance, including the final curtain call, had gone according to plan. The silliness of the drama escalated when Verstovsky decided to get involved. He interviewed everyone who might have had anything to do with the incident and then expressed frustration at the discrepancies in their accounts. One eyewitness claimed that Weiss had encountered the apple after her third curtain call, not her tenth, and that it was half eaten, chewed, in fact, right down to the core. Surviving chunks of apple served as evidence to prove that it had actually posed no threat to Weiss’s safety. Verstovsky dismissed this account as biased, coming from a dancer who “placed Mlle. Sankovskaya incomparably higher than Mlle. Weiss in all respects.”28 His investigation revealed, even less helpfully, that the apple had been thrown from a loge registered under the alias Zolotov. “A person by that name does in fact exist,” Verstovsky explained to Gedeonov, but he was a deeply spiritual man, “an Old Believer from the other side of the Moscow River, and does not attend the theater.”29 Someone else asserted that the apple had been thrown after most of the audience had departed, as the chandelier was being raised. But the chandelier, Verstovsky replied, was fixed in place.
Since Guerinot had a bad reputation (Verstovsky never forgot the flicking episode), he was blamed for disgracing Weiss, but Verstovsky also had extremely harsh words for Sankovskaya, whose alleged conspiracies against younger talents had exhausted his patience. “I am quite willing to accept that as long as she remains in the Moscow Theater she will constantly disrupt the order and disturb the peace with her tireless intrigues,” he fumed. “After several days discussing her benefit and all of her incessant whims all I wanted to do was collapse in bed!” The twilight of her career consisted of “making others feel sorry for her, as if she were some downtrodden waif or pig in the poke.” This was no way to treat his star dancer, Verstovsky knew, but he had had enough of Sankovskaya’s self-centeredness and the “little illnesses” that led her to petition for a reduced workload, performances of parts of ballets—a solo variation here, a pas de deux there—rather than entire works.30 She lay in her bed all covered in bouquets, claiming to be at death’s door but refusing to see a doctor.
Verstovsky was no less disgusted with Guerinot, who had taken sick leave for—he claimed—a bad leg but found time to go to the ballet school each day to “whisper in Sankovskaya’s ear for an hour or two.”31 He wanted both of them removed, especially Guerinot, and rejoiced at the thought of a twenty-two-year-old dancer and ballet master from St. Petersburg, Irakliya Nikitin, replacing him at the Bolshoi. The news of Nikitin’s coming to Moscow “finally lets the stone roll from my heart,” he told his supervisor.32
Weiss