Yet the Russianness of the Bolshoi remains a matter of debate. The very concept is fraught and paradoxical, never quite borne out by the ethnographic facts, and has inspired spurious claims of exclusiveness, otherness, and exceptionalism. Dance critic Mark Monahan swoons over Olga Smirnova’s “swan-like neck” and the “unmistakably Russian” undulation in her arms, but her syntax and affect are neoclassical and neoromantic, much indebted to traditions outside of Russia.14 And what the ballet master Marius Petipa contributed to nineteenth-century Russian ballet has its continuation not in Soviet circles but in the creations of George Balanchine in America and Frederick Ashton in Britain. The annals of the Bolshoi do not bear out claims of Russian exceptionalism. Moscow exceptionalism, perhaps, but even that assertion is debatable, since most of the great Russian dancers, past and present, moved back and forth between the academies and stages of the old imperial capital of St. Petersburg and the new one of Moscow.
Regardless, the Bolshoi as a “brand” remains paramount. The theater and its dancers have always been marketed abroad. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the ballet served the Kremlin as a cultural exchange operation and a conduit for low-level espionage by the agents who kept the dancers in check. Some performers defected, including, at the top of her career, the Kirov prima ballerina Natalya Makarova. So too did the soloist Mikhaíl Baryshnikov, who flourished in the West. In a July 2013 newspaper interview, the still-active Baryshnikov likened events at the Bolshoi, past and present, onstage and backstage, to a “non-stop ugly vaudeville.”15
In fact, the Bolshoi began its life as a vaudeville hall. Its co-founder and driving force had infamous (at least in the eighteenth century) problems with creditors and was forced, for financial and political reasons, to recruit amateur performers from an orphanage for his fledgling theater. Before catastrophe struck in the form of a fire, boys and girls of the Moscow Imperial Foundling Home took the stage as participants in light entertainments. But the Bolshoi only became the Bolshoi—a symbol of Russia itself—after the Napoleonic invasion of 1812. From the 1830s on, it produced a plethora of superb performers. Since that time, the dancers of the Bolshoi have been stereotyped for their athletic prowess, their physical culture. Yet they are also storytellers, gifted mimes. The first great ballerinas of the nineteenth century were trained by actors, and the admixture of dance-free miming and plot-free dance persisted at the Bolshoi long after it had been abandoned elsewhere.
During these early years, the brightest star on the Bolshoi stage was Ekaterina Sankovskaya, a Moscow-born ballerina who inspired a generation of intellectuals through her freedom of expression and expression of freedom. She performed from the late 1830s into the 1850s, and was seen by her most ardent fans, including liberal students of Moscow University, to imitate, and rival, the illustrious European Romantic ballerinas Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler. Her appearances in La sylphide inspired a sycophantic cult following, a “claque” whose obsession with Sankovskaya, and ballet in general, worried the Moscow police.
The theater she inhabited came into being as an imperial institution with the opening in 1856 of Cavos’s new building, resurrected from the ashes of the devastating fire in 1853. The ballet struggled, however, and was almost liquidated; the dancers from the exploited poorer classes faced life as laundresses, mill workers, or prostitutes, even starvation on the streets. The Bolshoi and its machinist nonetheless, almost despite themselves, hosted a dazzling revival of the swashbuckling ballet Le corsaire, along with the premieres of Don Quixote and Swan Lake. The annual “incident reports” at the theater in the 1860s and 1870s detail the commercial gas wars in Moscow (of concern for the Bolshoi because it was gaslit) along with the eccentricities of the directorate of the Imperial Theaters, which oversaw the Bolshoi’s operations under the last tsars. The ballets survive as remote versions of their original selves, which have been lost to the stage and doubtless would have little appeal even if they could be reconstructed from the extant floor plans, lithographs, musical scores, and recollections. Who authored the original libretto for Swan Lake was until 2015 a mystery, and indeed Tchaikovsky’s music seems to be calibrated for a plot line that no longer exists. The gaps in knowledge are no fault of the official record-keepers, who turn out to have been exceedingly meticulous when it came to realizing the mad and beautiful dreams of choreographers and set designers. The search for a reliable donkey for the 1871 staging of Don Quixote was pretext for dozens of pages of conscientious bureaucratic handwriting; finding the props for the act 3 spider scene forced one scribe to overcome his arachnophobia.
Maya Plisetskaya, the vessel of Bolshoi bravura during the Soviet years, died just before her ninetieth birthday, which the Bolshoi marked on November 20 and 21, 2015, in a memorial gala called “Ave Maya.” She remains the source of some of the more reductively persistent assumptions about the Bolshoi ballet, including Jennifer Homans’s assessment of the Khrushchev-era Bolshoi as somehow “stranger” than other troupes, “more oriental and driven less by rules than by passions—and politics.”16 In honoring one of its greatest ballerinas, a deeply passionate artist both celebrated and constrained by politics, the theater revisited its own troubled history even while still struggling to emerge from the aftermath of the macabre attack on its artistic director.
FILIN COMPLETED HIS contract but remains at the theater in charge of an atelier for up-and-coming choreographers. After months of conjecture, Makhar Vaziev was appointed the new artistic director of the ballet. Vaziev comes from Milan by way of St. Petersburg, and his hiring, as Ismene Brown summarizes, “satisfies both the Bolshoi conservatives’ need for a director with a credibly conventional profile and suitable leadership CV to command the dancers’ compliance, and the pressure for an acceptable conductor of renovation and refreshment.”17
The healing of the present divide permits reflection on the ruptures and sutures of the past. The story of the Bolshoi Theater, its ballet, Russia, and Russian politics can only, however, be traced in gestures and revealed against mottled backgrounds in occasional close-ups. This book starts with select scenes from the beginning, but ends far from the end. The focus here falls only on the ballet, although the Bolshoi is, of course, a world-famous opera house as well; opera is excluded from the discussion, except insofar as it might illuminate the ballet, the national brand’s signature product. Ultimately, like ballet itself, this book proves paradoxical in documenting at times disenchanting truths—the complicated existences of the dancers, their art, and its venue—in hopes of at least suggesting what might be sublime, what might redeem, what could still elevate us above it all.
FROM THE START, the Bolshoi Theater was rife with political and financial intrigue. On March 17, 1776 (O.S.), Catherine the Great granted Prince Urusov of Moscow exclusive rights for the presentation of entertainments using performers foreign and domestic, including serf theaters. The license was granted for ten years, but just four years later, in 1780, it ended up in the hands of an Englishman named Michael Maddox. He ran the theater, then called the Petrovsky, into the ground. The tale of his mysterious business practices long pre-dates the sensational productions of the Bolshoi, but he made the theater fascinating.
MADDOX WAS EITHER a mathematician or a tightrope walker during his youth, and the theater that he helped to found in Moscow either employed professional actors or exploited the talents of orphans—all depending on what half-remembered tale is to be believed. Actual evidence is scant. Maddox advertised his magic shows in Moscow and St. Petersburg newspapers, signed official papers, and implored government officials for forgiveness when he ran into trouble with his numerous creditors.
The stories about his early years in England have a suspicious amount in common with those of Johann Faust, the traveling magician,