Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today. Simon Morrison

to humiliate her during the October 29 benefit. But the catcalls from the “450” students who had received free tickets failed to quell the enthusiasm of the general public, who called her to the stage fifteen (not ten) times after the performance of La sylphide. The apple was “huge,” Weiss recalled, “and it was thrown at me with such force that it broke into small pieces when it struck my breast, and certainly would have killed me had it hit my head.”³³

      That was the end of Guerinot. Gedeonov refused to renew his contract. Sankovskaya, too, was removed from the Bolshoi, but just to give tension over the apple attack a chance to dissipate. Gedeonov dispatched her to St. Petersburg, where she performed La sylphide at the Great Stone Theater before touring abroad. She triumphed. Although Verstovsky engineered her departure, he regretted the significant loss to ticket sales and recognized that nothing could compensate for it. Sankovskaya’s Moscow fans remained feverishly committed to her while awaiting her return; they exacted revenge for her banishment by pulling pranks on those who presumed to take her place—pranks that were far more bizarre than the dancers themselves ever contrived.

      Weiss recovered from the apple attack, performing two weeks later on a program that featured Zampa, ou la fiancée de marbre to sustained applause from the auditorium and the loges. “After my performance yesterday I was received very warmly,” she informed Gedeonov with gratitude; “1,000 rubles in bouquets were tossed to me by the local nobility.”³⁴ She remained in Moscow (there is reference to her performing in an 1846 vaudeville depicting “a day in the life” of a hapless theater prompter, Ein Tag aus dem Leben eines alten Souffleurs), and she must also have appeared in St. Petersburg. Toward the end of her run, she suffered the minor misfortune of having a scarf and gold bracelet stolen from her Moscow apartment, after a man posing as an administrator with the Imperial Theaters lured her and her mother to an official meeting. Another long investigation followed.

      The claque dreamt up their worst prank, however, against another, much more gifted dancer, Elena Andreyanova, who had the double misfortune of rivaling Sankovskaya and partnering with Nikitin, the dancer who had replaced Guerinot.

      Like Sankovskaya, Andreyanova performed in a manner evocative of Taglioni and Elssler and came into prominence at the time that those two ballerinas, the twin poles of the Romantic era in dance, visited St. Petersburg. She was nicknamed the “northern Giselle” when she toured in the role to Paris, but she suff ered terrible nerves and, according to a corpulent theater observer named Jules Janin, “trembled like a northern birch tree” when she made her first entry on the Paris stage.³⁵ The consensus among critics was that Andreyanova had tremendous power in her limbs and had committed herself to a heroic bearing. Her chiseled facial features, thick brows, and dark eyes added to her expressiveness. Comparisons between Andreyanova and Sankovskaya inevitably emphasized the former’s boldness, resolve, and strength, and the latter’s gentleness, lightness, and smoothness in transitions. The distinction was that of the real versus the ideal, with Andreyanova revealing the effort, making her triumph over hardship explicit. Sankovskaya, in contrast, concealed it.

      In Moscow, Sankovskaya’s supporters found Andreyanova lacking in refined lyricism, the gift of being able to sing a phrase with her body. But she was celebrated in St. Petersburg and received special treatment from Gedeonov, who lavished food and wine on her. Once she became his mistress, she was protected from other officials and officers of the court and felt sure that she did not need to purchase support, as had Sankovskaya, from a claque. The old balletomanes of St. Petersburg fell hard for her, as they did for other dancers, seating her in her carriage after performances before retiring to oysters and Champagne in private dining rooms to luxuriate in unrequited love, but they were harmless compared to the zealots in Moscow.

      Aware of Gedeonov’s intimate relationship with Andreyanova, Verstovsky made sure to praise her talent to the heavens when she performed Giselle at the Bolshoi Theater at the end of 1843. He also felt obliged to ridicule Sankovskaya—and her fans—after her appearance in a vaudeville by Jean-François Bayard, as part of a December 17 benefit performance for the actor Alexander Bantïshev:

      Although M. Bantïshev’s benefit brought him only 2,000 rubles, the public, especially the upper ranks, shouted to their hearts’ content. No sooner had they caught sight of Mlle. Sankovskaya than they let out three hurrahs! If someone had been brought into the theater blindfolded and asked where he was, doubtless he would have said that he had been brought to the public square just as a high-ranking general had arrived, the hurrahing being of just such a distinction! Desiring to show that she had been moved to tears by the ovation, Mlle. Sankovskaya made of her body a pose so filthy that I would be embarrassed to name it. Then, upon making her typical coarse gestures, those that rope-climbers make as they climb up ropes, she began to dance in a manner so unseemly that I couldn’t bear to look at it, especially now that we have come to love Mlle. Andreyanova’s dances.³⁶

      Verstovsky acknowledged that Sankovskaya was a skilled entertainer, amusing a broad swath of the public in the up-tempo, satiric grab bags of “music, singing, dancing, calembours [puns], marivaudage [affectation],” and ridiculous happenings that defined the French vaudeville and its Russian derivations.³⁷ But, he claimed, she had a disastrous outing on December 17. Trolling for laughs, she went too lowbrow, embarrassing herself before the merchants and audiences in the crowd. Verstovsky made it seem as though she had given the vaudeville a bad reputation by crossing the thin line in her performance between delicate ballerina and bawd. He would make the same invidious comparisons to Andreyanova—and repeat his tales of conflicts with Sankovskaya over dressing rooms and costumes—in 1845 and 1848, when Andreyanova returned to the Bolshoi Theater as part of extensive tours around the Russian Empire. He was unable, however, to change the minds or tame the behavior of the ballet-goers known as “Sankovistï.”

      His decision, in February of 1845, to assign Sankovskaya additional vaudeville appearances at the Malïy Theater while Andreyanova starred at the Bolshoi backfired. There were no apples thrown or flicks administered, but Andreyanova was subject to jeering from the free-ticket-holders in the galleries. The noise threatened to drown out the legitimate applause from the gentlemen in the seats and dampened the enthusiasm of the ladies, who expressed their approval through the vigorous shaking of their kerchiefs. Meanwhile, at the Malïy Theater, bouquets covered Sankovskaya’s ankles as she took her last bow. Andreyanova rightly anticipated trouble for her subsequent engagement at the Bolshoi in November of 1848 and reserved even more seats than she had in the past for her fans from St. Petersburg.

      According to the nineteenth-century journalist Mikhaíl Pïlyayev, the incident occurred during Andreyanova’s benefit performance of Paquita, a ballet best known for its Grand Pas classique, which exists in various versions in the present-day repertoire. The full-length version danced at the Bolshoi in 1848 was choreographed by Marius Petipa and Pierre-Frédéric Malavergne, tomusic by Édouard Deldevez and Ludwig Minkus. The three scenes and two acts told of the love of a Spanish gypsy for a French officer during the Napoleonic Wars. The gypsy discovers that she is of noble blood and, as the fates ordained, the cousin of the officer, which allows the two of them to get married. The pas de trois of the first act and grand classical pas of the second were created with Andreyanova’s skills in mind, sculpted, as it were, onto her body. She danced the 1847 premiere in St. Petersburg before bringing the ballet to Moscow.