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

with the devil by way of self-promotion, so too Maddox considerably embellished the facts in the anecdotes he shared about himself. And like Faust, Maddox found himself immortalized in fiction after his death; the Russian writer Alexander Chayanov set one of his gothic short stories in the Petrovsky Theater. Planned for four years but built in just five months, the Petrovsky hosted all manner of entertainments, from ballets to operas to expertly translated Shakespearean dramas to masquerades. Trifling accounts survive about fabulous stage machinery meant to render astonishing meteorological and seismic disturbances. Characters seemed to pass through the floors and walls, while adolescent girls reportedly exposed intimate surfaces in the corps de ballet. Maddox pledged “cumulative” (meaning “harmonious”) entertainments, but he ran afoul of the imperial censors and lost some of his greatest actors to a rival troupe in St. Petersburg.¹ He was also competing with the noblemen who maintained serf orchestras, including the magnate Nikolay Sheremetyev, who had the resources to perform, for a few elites, ballets and operas at his estate outside of Moscow. The competition intensified when Maddox, a popular-theater man, reached past burlesque to offer more substantive fare. He failed to increase his audience. Upper nobles had their serfs to entertain them, and the pious, including the old merchant families of Moscow, stayed away. Maddox went bankrupt, and then, in 1805, his theater burned down—as candlelit, coal-heated theaters with wooden roofs were wont to do. His Jewishness was to blame for the fiasco, anti-Semitic gossip held, even if he had been baptized a Catholic.²

      MADDOX LEFT NO LIKENESS, and no references to his appearance exist beyond mention of the crimson cloak he wore year after year. The description of the theater in Chayanov’s fictional story is based on research by the author’s wife, Olga, a cultural historian. For Maddox himself, Chayanov relied on his mind’s eye, embellishing the contemporaneous accounts of the impresario’s “diabolical will” with a reference to “infernal breathing.” The protagonist of the story glimpses Maddox during an opera, illuminated by the chandeliers that remained lit during the performance, as was then the custom. He is imagined sitting amid “undulating waves of blue and black tailcoats, fluttering fans and sparkling lorgnettes, silk bodices and Brabant lace capes.” Maddox exits the auditorium before the second act; the protagonist follows through vaguely lit corridors, up and down stone staircases, past the dressing room of a soprano singing the part of a shackled slave. Maddox is described as tall, with a dusting of gray hair, dressed in a coat of antique cut, oddly blank in affect. “There were no tongues of fire circling him, no stink of sulphur; everything about him seemed quite ordinary and normal,” the novelist writes, “but this diabolical ordinariness was saturated with meaning and power.”³

      Maddox comes and goes in the story, which ends in the slush outside of the theater, the protagonist encased in the Moscow night and an atmosphere of neurosis.

      The real Michael Maddox was born in England on May 14, 1747, though he claimed to have ancient Russian roots. His Protestant ancestors had immigrated to Russia in the seventeenth century, the era of the Catholic Stuart monarchy, to escape religious persecution. He was the sole surviving son of the English actor Tom Maddox, “who with all his family and troupe” perished in a cargo-boat crash near the Port of Holyhead—all “except one infant who floated ashore in a cradle.”⁴ The orphan was raised by his uncle, Seward, a trumpeter. Following in his father’s footsteps, Maddox became an entertainer, performing tightrope acts in the 1750s at Haymarket Theatre and Covent Garden in London. He balanced a mere three feet above the stage, less to reduce the danger to himself than to his audience. Toward the end of the act, he would hover on one foot while balancing a straw on the edge of a glass and plinking a fiddle. Other anecdotes from London have him blowing a horn and banging a drum on the slack wire. He also tumbled and conducted unspecified physical and mechanical experiments. Outside of London he acted in saltbox theaters and manipulated fairground puppets, with Punch as his favorite. In York “during race week,” he and his troupe performed morning and evening at Merchants Adventurers’ Hall, among other venues.⁵ In the southwest English town of Bath, he entertained ladies and gentlemen along with the servants who held their places while their masters mingled at Simpson’s Rooms. “For a considerable salary,” Maddox pivoted and swung above the audience while balancing a coach wheel and juggling a dozen balls.⁶

      Lore has it that Maddox was engaged in mysterious business dealings throughout Europe, which perhaps explains his connections to the English and Russian diplomats (George Macartney and Nikita Panin) who brokered his first visit to Russia in January 1767. Notice of his tightrope act appeared in St. Petersburg in October of that year. The language in the newspaper bulletin suggested a certain age-of-curiosities excitement about Maddox’s debut in the imperial capital: “Herewith it is declared that the celebrated English equilibrist Michael Maddox will be demonstrating his art in the wood winter home, to which all inclined respectable individuals are invited.”⁷

      Maddox went to Russia without means—and without knowing the language—but managed, after falsely claiming an Oxford education and some teaching experience, to find work amusing Pavel I, son of the Russian empress, Catherine the Great. Pavel was delighted by his new tutor’s “Cours de recréations mathematique et physiques.”⁸ Maddox must have exceeded expectations, and Catherine declared her gratitude to him in the form of an official letter of commendation. That kept him away from the rabble of the fairground.

      He returned to London to direct a theater, but in the 1770s St. Petersburg lured him back. Maddox shelved the magic shows for clock making and the invention of fanciful automatons, including music-box dancers. In tribute to his benefactress, Catherine the Great, he designed an elaborate clock whose bronze and crystal figurines allegorized her achievements. The figure of Hercules, who represented Russia’s suppression of Sweden, stood in the middle of three columns atop a music box. The base was formed by statues of maidens gesturing toward the four corners of the Earth. Every five minutes—the preferred length of meetings at Catherine’s court—chimes rang and miniature eagles dropped jewels from the top of the columns into the open beaks of eaglets in their nests. The gilded vignette was meant to illustrate how the Russian empire nurtured its conquered territories. Engravings on the pedestal and atop the music box showed stars, planets, and the rays of the sun. Catherine the Great herself never saw or heard the clock, however, having died of a stroke in 1796, a decade before Maddox completed it. It was privately sold then put on public display, and during the Revolution confiscated by the state. Eventually, in 1929, it ended up in the Kremlin Armory.

      The peregrinations of showmen led to appearances in other Russian cities, including the comparative backwater of Moscow, where the nongovernmental university newspaper Moskovskiye vedomosti (Moscow gazette) announced an exhibition of Maddox’s curiosities. Apparently the show found a following. In a subsequent bulletin from February 1776, he offered (through his Russian-language scribe) heartfelt thanks to the Moscow public for making the show such a huge success, solicitously adding that “after the end of this month the showings will cease, and so as not to deprive pleasure from those desiring to take them in once more, an invitation to attend is with all suitable deference extended.”⁹ He was mindful of competition from other entertainers. The “mechanic and mathematician M. Megellus” also plied his wares in the same newspaper, advertising exhibitions of “various wonders” at the parish of St. John Baptist for 1 ruble (50 kopecks for the cheap seats).¹⁰ The newspaper is crowded with varied squibs that survey the social, cultural, and economic scene at the time. Notices for French-language history books, translations of English publications about plowing, portrait sales, and land auctions appear beneath epigrams to the empress and verses to the New Year. Besides granting space to Maddox, Megellus, and the occasional freak show, Moskovskiye vedomosti printed stories from afar: that of the 175-year-old Argentinian man and the beef-and-millet diet that sustained him, and that of the “girl, age seven or eight, from the French village of Savigné-l’Évêque, who has sprouted hair all over her body and has a beard and moustache hanging from her chin down to her shoulders.”¹¹ Weather reports appeared after the fact: “There was thunder and lightning yesterday afternoon at 5 o’clock and some hail fell, but it did not last for long.”¹²

      In Moscow, Maddox improvised an existence for himself as an impresario, catering to a public in search of amusement. Entertainment was prohibited