St. Petersburg : A Cultural History

Chapter 4

On December 6, 1916, according to the custom, all the churches in the capital of the Russian empire held a special service in honor of Nicholas II’s saint’s day. This time the feast of St. Nicholas was not marked with as much pomp as usual, because the bloody war with Germany had reached its third year. But for Georgy Balanchivadze (nicknamed “Georges”), a twelve-year-old charge of the Imperial Petrograd Theater School, and for his classmates, the occasion became quite special; he remembered and recounted it all his life.

Georges was learning to be a ballet dancer; he had been on a full scholarship for several years, paid out of the tsar’s treasury, in an enormous building that stretched the entire length of Teatralnaya (Theater) Street. On the morning of December 6, Georges and the other pupils were led to a service at the school chapel and in the evening were taken in a six-seater coach to a performance at the Imperial Maryinsky Theater. They were there not as spectators but as proud participants. The ballet was Nicholas’s beloved Humpbacked Horse, and Georges and his comrades were in the emperor’s favorite number, the final march.

When the performance was over, the little dancers changed into their parade uniforms from the ballet school. Georges liked his uniform—a handsome, light blue military-looking suit with silver lyres on the collar and cap. After lining up the children in pairs, their supervisors led them to be presented to the emperor. It was a solemn moment and the children caught their breath with excitement, but they stayed in line with their habitual professionalism. Georges Balanchivadze marched along diligently, too.

Everyone thinks that the royal box at the Maryinsky is the one in the middle. Actually, the tsar’s box was on the side, on the right. It had a separate entrance, a special, large stairway, and a separate foyer. When you came in, it was like entering a colossal apartment: marvelous chandeliers and the walls covered with light blue cloth. The emperor was there with his entire family—the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, the heir, his daughters; we were lined up by size and presented—here they are, Efimov, Balanchivadze, Mikhailov. We stood at attention.

The tsar wasn’t tall. The tsarina was very tall, a beautiful woman. She was dressed luxuriously. The grand duchesses, Nicholas’s daughters, were also beauties. The tsar had bulging light eyes and he rolled his Rs. He asks, “Well, how are you?” We had to click our heels and reply, “Extremely pleased, Your Imperial Majesty!”

Then we received a royal gift: chocolate in silver boxes, marvelous ones! And mugs of exquisite beauty, porcelain, with light blue lyres and the imperial monogram.^{331}

In 1981, in New York City, this is how the émigré George Balanchine, a celebrated seventy-seven-year-old choreographer, recounted this touching story to me, another Russian émigré who had come to America comparatively recently. It was one of many little legends that composed Balanchine’s reminiscences of the city that he stubbornly continued to call Petersburg, despite official and widely accepted name changes.

Balanchine must have sensed the almost saccharine quality of the picture he was presenting. That may be why he invariably added an ironic touch: the other youngsters reverently preserved the chocolate from the tsar as relics until the candy grew moldy. But Georges ate his immediately. “At that time it wasn’t in the least bit important tome.”^{332}

In Petrograd in 1916 perhaps it wasn’t. But in New York in the second half of the century, it became very important indeed—to remember and tell others, with delight and nostalgia. Balanchine in America, along with the Russian émigrés Igor Stravinsky and Vladimir Nabokov, created a powerful mythos of Petersburg: the New Atlantis that sank beneath the sea in the stormy twentieth century. The mythos, which eventually flourished in the West, was basically musical and balletic at its roots. In Europe it was initially planted right after the Bolshevik revolution by Diaghilev and his colleagues, of the formerly influential art group Mir iskusstva.

The intertwining of the Petersburg mythos with music and ballet was, of course, no accident. Alexander Benois of Mir iskusstva had maintained that Petersburg’s soul could be made manifest only through music. He added that the musicality of the Russian capital “seems to be encapsulated in the very humidity of the atmosphere.” Petersburg’s “theatricality” was considered just as organic. It could be seen as a magical consequence of the city’s architecture.

It was noted long ago that the architectural ensembles of Petersburg resemble stage scenery in their majesty. In 1843 the splenetic Marquis de Custine informed the civilized world, “At each step I take I am amazed to observe the confusion that has been everywhere wrought in this city between two arts so very different as those of architecture and decoration. Peter the Great and his successors seem to have taken their capital for a theatre.”^{333}

The sharp-tongued marquis cut to the essence of the problem. Peter the Great had founded Petersburg with a dramatic gesture, and it is not surprising that his theatricality remained with the city forever.

From an architectural standpoint, one of the main reasons for Petersburg’s beauty is that its buildings are stylistically unified throughout many parts of the city. In that respect the Russian capital differed radically from other great cities, which developed gradually over centuries. The comparative suddenness of the Russian imperial capital’s appearance also added to the dramatic sensation.

The city’s inhabitants were aware of that effect. In one of the first Russian historical novels, Roslavlev, or the Russians in 1812, written by Mikhail Zagoskin in 1831, the hero, arguing with a French diplomat in Petersburg, exclaims proudly, “Look around you! Tell me, did your ancestors build over the many centuries what we have erected in the course of one? Doesn’t it remind you of a quick change of scenery in your Paris opera, this appearance of magnificent Petersburg among impassable swamps and deserted northern expanses?”^{334}

At the start of the twentieth century, the theater metaphor was taken to an extreme by the members of Mir iskusstva. For Benois, the resemblance of Petersburg’s architecture to scenery was so incontrovertible that he traced its existence to the effects of theater performances: “After the Russian people received such pleasure for the brief span of an evening theater spectacle, they felt it necessary to immortalize it in constructions of stone and bronze.”^{335}

Petersburg for the Mir iskusstva crowd, who in a typically Petersburgian mix were imperially oriented though politically liberal, was a gigantic stage, “the arena of mass, state, and communal movements.”^{336} “Street theater” (in the words of Benois) was constantly taking place there: stunning parades, solemn, pompous funeral processions, ritualistic public dishonoring of criminals. Even the changing seasons for Benois and company were “theatrically effective”; after the sudden, “violent” spring, which Stravinsky recalled at the end of his life as “the most wonderful event of every year of my childhood,”^{337} came resplendent summer, then dramatic autumn led in terrifying winter.

Benois stressed yet another Petersburg tradition that had a theatrical aspect: “In the winter months, the Petersburg ‘season’ flourished—theaters played, balls were given, the main holidays were celebrated—Christmas, Epiphany, Mardi Gras. The winter in Petersburg was always harsh and severe, but in Petersburg people learned as nowhere else to turn it into something pleasant and splendid.”^{338}

The opera and ballet, both foreign flowers that had been transplanted in Russian soil in the first half of the eighteenth century and then quickly flourished, were the high points of the Petersburg season. In 1791 a Russian critic still had to justify ballet: “This art is not as vain as many imagine,”^{339} but fewer than fifty years later Gogol in his article “The Petersburg Stage in 1835-36” was proclaiming, “The ballet and opera have completely conquered our stage. The public listens only to opera and watches only the ballet; the public talks only about opera and ballet. Thus it is extremely difficult to obtain tickets for the opera and ballet.”

The soil for this flowering of opera and ballet was fertile because both theatrical institutions belonged to the emperor and were completely subsidized by the royal treasury. In Russia, the rulers traditionally did not skimp on support for the theater. When a reporter for the popular Severnaya pchela visited London in 1837, he had the opportunity to compare the staging of Rossini’s opera Semiramide in the capitals of Britain and Russia. Here is what he reported: “In London the staging of operas is miserly. The scenery is average, the choruses are thin. How can one compare Semiramide in Petersburg with the London production? Ours is lush, full, animated; here [in London] it is poor, thin, weak. We do everything that is possible; here they do not even do half of what is necessary.”^{340} Another author observed, “Our productions surpass those of the Parisians in magnificence and luxury.”^{341}

In a typical Petersburg ballet of the period, the sets were changed half a dozen times, and during the same performance the audience might also see “various dances, games, marches, and battles,” plus such effects as “mechanical rising and eclipse of the sun, earthquakes, mountains spewing flames, and the destruction of the Temple of the Sun.”

Nicholas I enjoyed a laugh or two at a fashionable French vaudeville and could be deeply touched by stolid Russian patriotic dramas, but he truly relaxed only when watching the ballet. The emperor was not an ordinary balletomane but an ideological one. In the words of the poet Afanasy Fet, “Emperor Nicholas, convinced that beauty is a sign of strength, demanded and got from his astonishingly disciplined and trained troops total subordination and uniformity.” These same qualities impressed the emperor in ballet, and it was no accident that the Russian corps de ballet became a model of discipline and training.

A witness of the Petersburg production of the ballet La Révolte au serail in 1836 gives a glowing account of how the corps was trained. The legendary romantic ballerina Marie Taglioni danced the part of a strong-headed beauty who led the army of concubines to rise against the sultan. Nicholas I sent his guard officers to train the “army” of dancers in military techniques.

At first this amused the girls, but then they got bored and grew lazy. Hearing of that, the tsar came to a rehearsal and sternly admonished the theater’s amazons: “If they did not practice seriously, he would have them stand outside in the freezing cold for two hours with rifles, wearing their dancing shoes.” You should have seen the zeal with which the frightened recruits in skirts went about their work.^{342}

After the triumphant premiere of La Révolte au serail, Nicholas never missed a single performance, enjoying the sight of the ballet regiment, armed, in the words of a playful Petersburg reviewer, “with the white weapons of full shoulders and rounded little arms.”^{343}

The unprecedented uniformity and precision of movement made the performances of the Russian corps de ballet the artistic equivalent of the military parades and maneuvers so typical of Petersburg. Classical ballet and imperial army discipline found a common aesthetic ground. As Yuri Lotman put it, “The question: how will this end? becomes secondary in both ballet and parades” because “precision and beauty of movement are of more interest to the connoisseur than the plot.”^{344} It is tempting to speculate that this imperial-militaristic inattention to plot in dance was one of the many impulses for the subsequent development of Russian plotless ballet, with Marius Petipa as its founder, Michel Fokine’s Chopiniana its first masterpiece, and George Balanchine its acknowledged master.

George Balanchine was born on January 9, 1904, the son of the Georgian composer Meliton Balanchivadze, who is still sometimes called “the Georgian Glinka.” His Russian mother, Maria, was the daughter of a German, and thus, Balanchine had Georgian, Russian, and German blood. Born in Petersburg, he visited Georgia for the first time when he was fifty-eight.

The first Georgians appeared in Petersburg soon after the city was founded. Their number grew rapidly after 1801, when Alexander I annexed independent Georgia, a flourishing state in the Caucasus with an ancient Christian culture; this was done, as the imperial manifesto put it, “Not in order to add to our powers and expand our borders, but to end the sorrows of the Georgian people.”^{345}

At first the Georgian nobility lived in Petersburg, most of them forcibly moved there so they would not interfere with their country’s absorption into the Russian empire. But when Georgia’s loss of independence became a certainty, many young Georgians—like the youth of other nations that made up the Russian empire—started migrating to Petersburg by choice to obtain a European education.

The Georgians are a warrior people, so in Petersburg many of them entered the military academy. Another characteristic trait of Georgians is their love of music and dance. Therefore it is not surprising that among the first students of the Petersburg Conservatory, which opened in 1862, was the Georgian Kharlampy Savaneli, who became a friend of Tchaikovsky. Thirty-seven years later, the ambitious thirty-seven-year-old Meliton Balanchivadze left Georgia to enter the same conservatory.

By that time the elder Balanchivadze had already lived a stormy artistic life. The son of an archbishop, Meliton had studied at the seminary and at age seventeen became a singer with the opera theater in the Georgian capital, Tiflis—first in the chorus, then as a soloist in Eugene Onegin and Faust. His exuberance led him in various directions. While still in Georgia, Meliton composed the first native European-style art songs, which became quite popular, and established an ethnic choir. In Petersburg he first set about continuing his singing studies, but then, on the advice of the conservatory’s director, Anton Rubinstein, he took lessons in composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In the Russian capital Meliton Balanchivadze started to write the first Georgian opera, Tamar Tsbieri (Perfidious Tamara), based on the epic poem of the national poet, Prince Akaky Tsereteli. According to the proud recollections of his son in New York City, he also “wrote choral works for all the big cathedrals” in the capital.

In Petersburg, the overactive Meliton continued to advocate Georgian folk music, which was little known there. He organized choirs, performed in special Georgian concerts, and published articles about the national style of singing. But he expanded in every possible (and often impossible) direction after winning an enormous sum in the state lottery; Balanchine spoke to me of one hundred thousand rubles.

Meliton gave the respected Petersburg musicologist Nikolai Findeizen the idea of collecting the letters of Mikhail Glinka, and paid for their publication, the first of its kind. Meliton threw his money around, making unrepaid loans to his numerous Georgian friends and financing Georgian restaurants all over the city, which went broke one after the other. Then he made a fateful mistake. According to Balanchine, his father wanted to get involved in a major financial operation—a crucible factory, which required importing special machinery from the West. He went bankrupt.^{346}

In 1917, Meliton Balanchivadze returned from Petrograd to his homeland, where an independent Georgian republic with the first democratically elected socialist government in the world had been proclaimed. The republic lasted only a few years, however, before it was swallowed up by Communist Russia. Balanchivadze became a leader of musical life there, chairing numerous societies, councils, and committees, and died in 1937, a highly respected and decorated People’s Artist.

At the time of his father’s departure George (named for the saint) was in his fifth year at the Petrograd ballet school. His friends still called him “Georges,” in the French manner. When in 1924 Georges became a member of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in France, the famous impresario shortened his Georgian surname to the still exotic-sounding but easier-to-pronounce “Balanchine”; with his arrival in the United States in 1933, “Georges” would change to “George,” the final transformation of his name.

Young Georges was nicknamed “Rat” because he was secretive, taciturn, and always wary and because he habitually sniffled, revealing his front teeth. In the enormous school where Georges and his classmates spent their days, he felt abandoned by his parents, despite the impressive appearance of the school building, designed by Carlo Rossi and located on one of the most beautiful streets of the city.

That was a typical Petersburg conflict—the pompous facade concealing a multitude of minor tragedies. And yet at the same time, again typically for Petersburg, the facade imperceptibly influenced the lives behind it, decisively forming (and deforming) the personalities of the building’s inhabitants.

This Petersburg facade certainly had a powerful influence on Georges, who learned to mask his emotions. Born in Petersburg, he became the quintessential Petersburger. Restraint became the determining trait of his character. He later admitted that this restraint had been inculculated in him in Petersburg, and he spoke reverently of Theater Street.

Coming from a ballet family, Carlo Rossi, the street’s architect, seemed fated to build the house for what would become the most famous ballet school in the world. The building is part of the architectural ensemble of magical harmony and severity. The secret of that magic was explained to me by the choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov. I once met him on Nevsky Prospect in the early 1960s. Resembling Gogol—if the writer had lived to a ripe old age—Lopukhov was hurrying back to his small apartment in the ballet school building. Before that, we had met in the Leningrad Conservatory, where Lopukhov headed the choreography department.

What luck to have had Lopukhov as guide, even for just twenty minutes! I still remember his exaltation when proclaiming that Rossi’s edifice had no equal.

Behold the Alexandrinsky Theater—there is nothing comparable in Europe! The Grand Opera in Paris, Covent Garden—they pale before Rossi’s creation. I assure you! They say that Russians don’t know how to work. It’s not true! The entire Teatralnaya [Theater] Street was built in three and a half months, eighteen million bricks laid by hand!

Lopukhov made me realize that the entire street is basically two huge buildings. One had housed the Ministries of Education and Internal Affairs since 1834; the one across the street had been the site of the administration of the imperial theaters and the ballet school since 1835. “Do you know, when you walk down this street to the theater, the columns of the buildings literally start to dance? Believe me! You’ll see, I’m right! I sometimes wonder—did Rossi do it consciously?”

Of course, I knew that the harmony of the street was the result of architectural calculation. It had been beaten into our heads since childhood that Theater Street is 220 meters long and the height of the buildings equals the width of the street—22 meters. In my Leningrad days the conventional wisdom was that walks along Theater Street (renamed by then to Rossi Street) cultivated the feeling for refinement and spiritual harmony. But I suspect the young Balanchine did not think much about it. It is hard to believe now, but initially he felt almost revulsion for his future profession. He was attracted by music, which he felt came from within and touched him, while dancing seemed forced on him from without.

The unexpected change came during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, when little Georges appeared as a tiny cupid on the stage of the Maryinsky Theater. The curtain rose and Georges observed the Maryinsky Theater from the stage, with its breathtaking light blue and gold and a stylishly dressed audience. Contemporaries recall that for special occasions the lights were merely dimmed at the Maryinsky, and the audience and stage magically blended into one.

The music started, and Georges suddenly understood that he passionately wanted to be on that stage, as often as possible—he was prepared to spend the rest of his life there.^{347} He was carried away by the spectacle made up of music, movement, scenery, light, and the response of the audience. But music in that inseparable union always remained the first among equals for Balanchine. And that feeling was probably what propelled him to become the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century.

The author of the ballet masterpiece that had inflamed Georges’s imagination and changed his life was Marius Petipa, the Frenchman who came by boat to Petersburg at the age of twenty-nine in 1847. Balanchine came to America at the age of twenty-nine, also by boat, a significant coincidence for the superstitious Georgian. Living a long life, Petipa, whom many consider the greatest creator of classical ballet, served four Russian emperors “with faith and truth”—Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II. He choreographed dozens of ballets for the imperial theater, including such world-famous masterpieces as Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, and Raymonda. Together with Lev Ivanov, Petipa staged Swan Lake; much of the most popular version of Giselle today is his; and he also authored the scenario of The Nutcracker.

Balanchine never met Petipa, who died in 1910. But the teachers at the ballet school recalled the elegant old man with the neatly trimmed beard and gold pince-nez. The old-timers liked to repeat his comical Russian expressions (after sixty plus years in Petersburg, Petipa hadn’t learned to speak Russian properly), remembered with awe his temper and demanding nature, and delighted in the wealth of his choreographic imagination. Petipa created his finest works at the close of his life. Ill and weak, he continued to rehearse; work was for him, as it would be for Balanchine, the best medicine. But Petipa’s final years were clouded by conflict with Telyakovsky, the director of the imperial theaters, who considered the choreographer “old hat” and an obstacle to the progress of the Petersburg ballet.

On January 19, 1904, ten days after the birth of Georgy Balanchivadze, Petipa wrote in his diary: “They are rehearsing Sleeping Beauty at the theater. I am not going to the rehearsal. They do not inform me…. My marvelous artistic career is over. Fifty-seven years of service. Yet I have enough strength to work more. Presently, on March 11 I will turn eighty-six.”^{348} A day later, with barely disguised glee: “This evening is the 101st performance of Sleeping Beauty. My daughter is dancing. The emperor and dowager empress are present. Box office 2,866 rubles and 07 kopeks.”^{349} Petipa, it seems, never failed to note the exact amount of the ticket sales.

Balanchine read Petipa’s diaries and memoirs attentively, describing them to me with his sympathetic half-smile as “sad.” He was struck that Petipa had died an “unneeded and embittered old man.” The older Balanchine saw Petipa as the ideal choreographer. Petipa was not only enormously talented; for Balanchine, he was the right man at the right time in the right place. Balanchine saw him firmly established in the social landscape of his time, yet still free enough to compose dances not under the whip but out of an inner drive. Petipa felt proud to be “in his majesty’s service.” The Frenchman was lucky; Russia at that time, in Balanchine’s opinion, had a much greater life force than Petipa’s homeland. One of the main proofs of that for Balanchine was the well-known fact that the tsar’s treasury was the most generous in all of Europe for ballet.

Once Balanchine recounted to me an episode, recorded in Petipa’s memoirs, that apparently took on a special significance for the Georgian. Petipa was at the theater rehearsing the “grand pas with rifle” from Jules Perrot’s ballet Caterina, or La fille du bandit with the great dancer Fanny Elssler. Unexpectedly, Nicholas I arrived at the rehearsal. Seeing that Elssler was not holding the gun right, the emperor interrupted the rehearsal and said to her, “Come closer to me and do everything that I do.” The emperor then demonstrated how to use the rifle. Elssler copied his movements with agility. Pleased with her efforts, the emperor asked her the date of the premiere and then said, “I will come and applaud you.” Smiling mischievously, Balanchine added that when the courtiers learned of the incident the tickets to the premiere sold out immediately.

The director of the imperial theaters, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, once declared, “We must first of all please the royal family, then the public taste, and only third must we satisfy the purely artistic demands.” Balanchine, of course, was uncompromising on important artistic issues, but he also never forgot the choreographer’s duty to the public. And I suspect that in his American period Balanchine sometimes regretted the lack of august patrons.

That was the reason for Balanchine’s desire to establish contact with Jacqueline Kennedy when her husband was president. In modern America, the Kennedys were the closest approximation of a royal family. Mrs. Kennedy seemed to Balanchine to be a new empress who could become, in his words, the “spiritual salvation” of America. Characteristically, Balanchine remarked approvingly of one American who donated a substantial sum for the production of a ballet, “In Russia he would have been a prince.”

Another gift from Russia to Petipa, as far as Balanchine was concerned, was the “human material.” Choreographers express themselves through dancers, and much depends on the particular gifts of each dancer. Elizaveta Gerdt, a Petersburg ballerina Balanchine adored, liked to recall how Petipa invented variations for a dancer as Gerdt looked on. The dancer’s face showed that she was not happy. Petipa said, “Don’t like, I change it.” Then he started showing her another combination. Balanchine agreed that the choreographer could not be dogmatic and had to orient himself to a certain extent according to the individuality of each dancer.

According to Balanchine, Petipa was blessed in that regard: he had worked with Mathilda Kchessinska, Anna Pavlova, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Pavel Gerdt (Elizaveta’s father). Pavel, the quintessential danseur noble of Russian ballet, was one of Balanchine’s teachers. The young Georges was impressed to learn that he had created the leading parts in Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, and Swan Lake in Petersburg.

Balanchine always considered the French refinement and humor of Petipa’s choreography, the brilliance and wit of its inventiveness, and, most of all, its inexhaustible variety as the highest examples of what could be achieved in the art of ballet. But all these “French” traits were significantly complemented by specifically Russian softness and fluidity, which Petipa acquired while working with Petersburg artists. The great city influenced Petipa, too—the poetry of its white nights, the ever-present threatening breath of the stormy Baltic Sea, the harmony and grandeur of the classicist architecture, and the cult of high craftsmanship.

Some ballet critics have found in the famous shadow scene of Petipa’s La Bayadère the choreographer’s impressions of Petersburg’s constant floods and made a convincing parallel between the exquisite “white” (in white tunics) compositions of Petipa and the beautiful white nights of Petersburg. Vadim Gayevsky even saw the dream sequence from Petipa’s Don Quixote as a veiled portrait of the Russian capital: “Here is embodied the theme of Petersburgian idealism, one of the main themes in Petipa. Here is outlined the scheme of ‘Petersburg dreams.’”^{350}

This somewhat unexpected linkage with Gogol and Dostoyevsky is fair in the sense that the theme of lost purity can be found both in their works and in Petipa’s. In Swan Lake Petipa created the fatal image of Odile, the Black Swan, the moral opposite of the White Swan, Odette, transfiguring in that way the Petersburg graphic contrast of black and white into a battle between good and evil on the ballet stage.

Gayevsky maintained, “Petipa is the first true urbanist in the history of European ballet. The ensemble—the planning principle of the great city—is at the foundation of his choreographic plans.”^{351} From here comes the grandiosity of many of Petipa’s choreographic solutions. In the first version of the shadows scene in La Bayadère, he used sixty-four dancers. The sensation created by that cascade of white tunics on the stage of the imperial theater was overwhelming.

But the embryo of catastrophe always lay dormant in Petipa’s vision of Petersburg’s grandness. At the end of his career he decided to stun the capital’s audience with a particularly opulent production. He began work on The Magic Mirror, in which the main scenic effect would be a huge mirror on the stage reflecting both the stage and the hall. The mirror was filled with mercury and apparently exploded at one of the final rehearsals. Mercury poured out of the cracks in silver streams: a horrible sight and a bad omen. The superstitious Petipa was shocked.

Not long before the disaster with the mirror Petipa wrote in his diary:

My last wishes in regard to my funeral. Everything must be very modest. Two horses for the hearse. No invitations to the funeral, just an announcement in the newspapers. In this year of 1903 I am finishing my long artistic career—sixty-six years of work and fifty-seven years of service in Russia. I receive 9,000 rubles in annual pension, and will be listed in service until my death. That is marvelous. But I fear that I will not be able to use that marvelous pension.^{352}

The sense of change characteristic of fin-de-siècle Petersburg and the hovering expectation of doom did not leave Petipa. This was undoubtedly one of the reasons for his love for Tchaikovsky, who worked, we could say, on the same psychological wavelength. Petipa could easily have remained with the music of Cesare Pugni, Ludwig Minkus, or Riccardo Drigo—after all, some of his biggest successes were collaborations with those minor composers: La Fille du Pharaoh and The Humpbacked Horse (Pugni), La Bayadère (Minkus), and Les Millions d’Arlequin (Drigo).

These composers were masters of pleasant ballet music, but their works could not be compared with Tchaikovsky’s. However, an understanding of Tchaikovsky’s enormous contribution came surprisingly late. Even Minkus was considered “too serious” by Petersburg balletomanes. The reviewers of the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s first ballet, Swan Lake, ruled almost unanimously that the music was dry and monotonous. As one ballet fan summarized it, “Tchaikovsky put the audience and the dancers to sleep.”^{353} So the seventy-year-old Petipa’s decision to take on the choreography of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty should be considered a daring step. While the composer called Petipa a “sweet old man,” Petipa fully recognized the genius of his collaborator.

Tchaikovsky, who valued Petipa’s classicism, had flirted successfully with classicism in such scores as Serenade for string orchestra and the Mozartiana suite, which Balanchine used later for his choreographic masterpieces. And Petipa was drawn to Tchaikovsky’s music by its nostalgic character. Against the background of Tchaikovsky’s music, Petipa’s grand ball scenes and lush, mysterious rituals and ceremonies took on a new meaning. Ballet action soared beyond its conventional character, beginning to express complex contemporary emotions and moods.

Not long before that, the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin could wrathfully attack Petipa’s ballets: “Does The Pharaoh’s Daughter deal with convictions, honesty, love of homeland? Never!”^{354} But by 1890 the premiere of Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky and Petipa on the stage of the Maryinsky Theater enticed and inspired an entire group of aesthetically advanced young idealists, including Alexander Benois, Leon Bakst, and Sergei Diaghilev, the future organizers of Mir iskusstva.

Petipa had created a world where on the surface merriment and order reigned but that still lived precariously, as if threatened by an inevitable flood. The culmination of Sleeping Beauty, Petipa’s greatest work, is an unexpected catastrophe, and not one of individual lives but of an entire civilization. Based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault, La Belle au Bois Dormant, from Mother Goose, the parable by Tchaikovsky and Petipa about a kingdom plunged into a hundred-year sleep on the whim of an evil witch seemed to foretell the fate of Petersburg. The evil magic that was to freeze the kingdom in an age-long sleep: it was a prophecy that came to pass in Russia in the twentieth century. A pall of foreboding hung over the era that united Tchaikovsky, Petipa, and the Mir iskusstva crowd.

For all that, Benois and his friends, while giving Petipa his due, did not perceive him as a kindred soul, as they did Tchaikovsky. Their choreographic comrade-in-arms was Michel Fokine, who was born in Petersburg in 1880 and died in New York City in 1942.

Mir iskusstva’s aesthetic program was always rather vague, determined largely by individual preferences and temperaments. But it is hard to imagine a more eccentric amalgam than the artistic tastes and strivings of Fokine. His was a mix of yearning for realism, impressionistic sketches, symbolist ideas and decadent excesses, a love affair with pictorial concepts, and a serious interest in music as the basis for ballet movement.

In thirty-seven years Fokine, toward whom Balanchine always remained ambivalent, choreographed over eighty ballets, of which only a few were preserved intact, and only two—Chopiniana (called Les Sylphides in the West) and Petrouchka— became repertory standards. But even those two masterpieces give some idea of Fokine’s creative range. Chopiniana is often called the first completely plotless, abstract ballet. But one forgets that it appeared almost accidentally. After all, Fokine was not planning to make Chopiniana a manifesto of plotlessness in ballet. On the contrary, in its first version, staged in 1907 in Petersburg, Chopiniana was a series of romantic sketches “from the life of the composer,” accompanied by Chopin’s music in Glazunov’s orchestration. Only when it was ridiculed by Petersburg critics did Fokine turn his ballet into an abstract work.

Balanchine told me what he valued most in Fokine: “In Petipa everything was drafted along straight lines: the soloists in front, the corps in back. But Fokine invented crooked lines in ballet. And for me he really invented the ensemble in ballet. Fokine took a small ensemble and designed interesting, strange things for it.”^{355}

Balanchine loved Chopiniana in his youth, and in the early 1970s he asked the ballerina Alexandra Danilova—one of his greatest “muses”—to revive Fokine’s work for the New York City Ballet. The dancers in that production appeared on stage in practice clothes instead of the traditional long tulle dresses, and they were accompanied by a piano instead of an orchestra. The critics saw this as a manifestation of Balanchine’s desire to clarify and stress the purely dance aspects of Fokine’s ballet, but Danilova gave me a much simpler explanation for this austerity: “We did it out of poverty.”^{356}

Petrouchka was choreographed by Fokine for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The sensational premiere of this most Petersburgian of all Fokine’s works took place in 1911 at the Châtelet Theater in Paris. This was an extraordinarily important moment in the export of the Petersburg mythos to the West.

In the twentieth century the figure of the Russian artist seeking creative freedom in the West is well known. When people speak of such exiles, the first that come to mind are refugees from the Soviet regime. But the first cultural émigrés from twentieth-century Russia appeared in the West before the Communist revolution of 1917. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was in fact an émigré organization which began its Russian seasons in Paris back in 1907.

Diaghilev became an émigré not of his own volition; the logic of events led him to it. In the beginning, his greatest ambition was to take over the position of director of the Russian imperial theaters. He had all the necessary qualifications: refined taste, impressive erudition, an acute feeling for the new, and effective organizational skills. But handicapped by his lack of bureaucratic tenacity and ties to the court and his too-bold aesthetics, as well as his own open homosexuality, he couldn’t achieve his goal either through frontal attacks or complicated backstage maneuvering. As a result, in 1901 he was fired as director of special assignments for the imperial theaters and banned from any state jobs.

From that moment, Diaghilev concentrated on proselytizing Russian culture abroad, far away from court and bureaucracy. In 1906 Diaghilev organized L’Exposition de l’Art Russe at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, and in 1907, at the same place, the Historical Russian Concerts with the participation of Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff, and Chaliapin. In 1908 the Grand Opera ran Boris Godunov with Chaliapin in the title role. Then in 1909 Diaghilev inaugurated his Paris opera and ballet season. It was then that Parisians first saw Fokine’s Chopiniana, which Diaghilev had renamed Les Sylphides.

At first, through some clever maneuvering, Diaghilev managed to obtain the tsar’s support for his enterprise. He had to beg, intrigue, and explain the “state importance” of the export of Russian culture to Europe. In 1907 Diaghilev complained in desperation to Rimsky-Korsakov, “I must convince Grand Duke Vladimir that our enterprise is beneficial from a national point of view; the minister of finances that it is beneficial economically, and even the director of theaters that it could be useful for the imperial stage! And so much more!!!”^{357}

A typical reaction of the Russian bureaucracy to Diaghilev’s cultural initiatives was the highly irritated note in the diary of the director of the imperial theaters, Telyakovsky: “Basically this infamous spreading of Russian culture has brought the imperial theaters quite a bit of harm, for I still see little benefit from it.”^{358} By 1910 the Russian embassies in Europe were forbidden by a special circular from Petersburg to give any aid to Diaghilev’s enterprise. This meant not only a break in the ties between the court and Diaghilev but an open declaration of war. From then on, the Russian ambassadors in Paris, London, and other European capitals sabotaged Diaghilev’s work as much as they could.^{359} The confrontation between the tsarist bureaucracy and Diaghilev prefigured a much fiercer war against exiles waged by the Soviet government. A Russian tradition is, in fact, at work here. With the probable exception of Catherine the Great, Russian rulers were not terribly interested in exporting the country’s culture. For them, army bayonets were much more effective implements of Russian influence and prestige. Cultural exchange was one-sided—from the West to Russia, and even that was limited and strictly controlled from above. In essence, entertainment from the West was always suspected of being too decadent. Italian singers or French actors were fine for the cultivated elite, but the masses were to have the simpler, healthier native fare.

Mir iskusstva became the first Russian art group to desire close contacts with the West. The influence of the growing Russian bourgeoisie, which thirsted for mutually beneficial exchange with western Europe, was an important factor. Therefore, the appearance of someone like Diaghilev was to be expected. That he turned out to be more than a traveling salesman of Russian culture, in fact a genius with a unique creative vision, can be considered an unexpected premium. But for the ambitious careerist, his talent was sometimes more of an obstacle than an aid. It made it impossible for him to compromise with the all-powerful imperial bureaucracy, which did not need visionary but merely energetic servants, like Telyakovsky.

That is why Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes turned into an émigré organization. It was basically Mir iskusstva transplanted from Petersburg to Paris, since Benois, like so many other members of Mir iskusstva, and Bakst before him became leading collaborators of Diaghilev’s enterprise. They were joined by Stravinsky and Fokine. In 1910, this group created the work that many consider to be the peak of Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons, Petrouchka.

The collaborative effort on Petrouchka was typical for Mir iskusstva. The main author was Stravinsky, who played an excerpt for Diaghilev while he was in Lausanne in 1910. The music came from a planned concert piece for piano and orchestra called Cry of Petrouchka. Diaghilev immediately wanted to develop this into a ballet, and he wrote to Benois in Petersburg, asking him to compose a libretto.

Benois was delighted. Petrouchka, the Russian Guignol, had been his favorite marionette character since childhood. Just recently Petrouchka had amused crowds in the capital at the fairs and shows set up on the Field of Mars during the pre-Lenten Mardi Gras, called Maslenitsa in Russian, or Butter Week. By the early twentieth century the tradition of popular festivities on the Field of Mars had died out, and Benois, a confirmed passé-ist, longed to immortalize that colorful Petersburg carnival.

Diaghilev returned to Petersburg, and the libretto for Petrouchka was born over the daily evening tea and bagels in his apartment. Then Stravinsky joined Diaghilev and Benois. Later Benois insisted that he had written almost the entire plot of Petrouchka, with the three dolls—Petrouchka, Ballerina, and the Moor—mysteriously coming to life and playing out their traditional drama of love and jealousy in the midst of the boisterous Russian carnival. But he admitted that sometimes the “program” was made to fit music that had already been written. As for Stravinsky, he was delighted by his collaborator: “This man is unusually subtle, clear-sighted, and sensitive not only to movement but to music.”^{360}

Benois later recalled that before the premiere, when they had to decide who would be presented as the author of the libretto, he suggested ceding the authorship to Stravinsky, and it was only after a combat de générosité that they decided both Stravinsky and Benois would be listed as authors. Stravinsky subsequently regretted the decision deeply, because it gave Benois the right to one sixth of the royalties not only from theatrical but also from concert performances of the ballet’s music.

Stravinsky lived abroad after 1910, and Petrouchka was composed in Switzerland, France, and Italy, and first shown in 1911 in Paris. Nonetheless, it was a purely Petersburgian composition. Stravinsky admitted this even at the end of his life, when he usually tried to minimize the Russianness of Petrouchka by insisting that its characters and even the music had been inspired by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Stravinsky “forgot” to add that at the turn of the century Hoffmann had been expropriated by Mir iskusstva; there was even a going expression, “Petersburg Hoffmanniade,” describing everything unusual, grotesque, or eccentric in the life of the capital. Benois constantly proclaimed that Hoffmann was his idol and artistic guide, and in that period Stravinsky used to acknowledge that he was fully in “Benois’ sphere of influence.”^{361}

The audience for the Parisian premiere of Petrouchka saw a picture of the fair in Petersburg in the reign of Nicholas I, around the 1830s, with the spire of the Admiralty in perspective and striped lampposts in the corners. Benois and Fokine invented a multitude of colorful types in the fair crowds: merchants, coachmen, nursemaids, military men, policemen, gypsies with a bear. Against the background of this festival the tragedy of Petrouchka unfolded—a marionette caught up in the storm of human passions. This traditional theme in Russian literature, the suffering of the little man, was seen through the prism of Hoffmann. “You could find here Gogol, and Dostoyevsky, and Blok,” stated a Russian critic after the show.^{362}

And the influence of Blok’s drama The Fair Show Booth on the concept of Petrouchka is evident. The Fair Show Booth, produced by Meyerhold in Petersburg in 1906, was the first to present the suffering marionette Pierrot (Petrouchka in Russia) on the Russian stage within the framework of a modernistic “little theater.” In this production Meyerhold strikingly combined music, dance, and dramatic action.

In February 1910, when Fokine staged a small ballet to Schumann’s Carnival for a benefit for the Petersburg magazine Satirikon, Meyerhold appeared as Pierrot. This was a reprise of his performance of Pierrot in Blok’s The Fair Show Booth, where Meyerhold appeared in white overalls with long sleeves: a sad marionette with angular movements, emitting pathetic moans from time to time. Meyerhold’s Pierrot was the direct predecessor of Nijinsky’s Petrouchka, who captivated the Paris audience of the Ballets Russes.

Contemporary French critics also wrote about the influence of Dostoyevsky on Petrouchka; the initiated sought hints and parallels with the scandalous liaison between Nijinsky and Diaghilev, in which the impresario allegedly played the role of the magician manipulator, and the dancer that of the poor marionette; but no one mentioned Blok or Meyerhold.

Petersburg had first caught the imagination of the European literary audience through Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It was a mysterious metropolis, similar to Dickens’s London and Balzac’s Paris, but more severe and scarier because of its distance and strangeness. For the European reader of Dostoyevsky, the exoticism of Petersburg had sinister overtones. Petrouchka was a different matter altogether. The tragedy of its plot was deftly wrapped up in nostalgic ethnicity.

After his heady European success, Petersburg seemed to Stravinsky “sadly small and provincial.”^{363} But, in fact, Petrouchka was greeted by Western audiences as an exotic, nationalistic work that succeeded in presenting the theme of Petersburg from a new aspect. Following the London premiere, the Times wrote, “The whole thing is refreshingly new and refreshingly Russian, more Russian, in fact, than any ballet we have had.”^{364}

It was extremely significant for the fate of the Petersburg mythos in Europe that Petrouchka was perceived by Western critics as an innovative work. “It is supremely clever, supremely modern, and supremely baroque,” marveled the London Observer in 1913, perceptively summarizing several of the striking features of the Petersburg avant-garde later echoed in the works of Vladimir Nabokov.^{365}

The Petrouchka of Stravinsky-Benois-Fokine-Diaghilev was the first Russian work to give Western audiences an idealized and romanticized image of Petersburg. And how fitting that this nostalgic image was created primarily in western Europe, mostly by semi-émigrés under the aegis of a semi-émigré enterprise. This is probably the only way that truly nostalgic works are born.

The imperial ballet school where the young Georges Balanchivadze lived and studied functioned almost as a monastery. The life of the pupils moved in strict rhythm under iron control; diligence was rewarded and disobedience punished, often with the maximum public humiliation. Pupils rose early, washed with icy water from a huge tank with numerous faucets, went for a walk under the viligant eye of their supervisor, and at ten in the morning began their lessons in classical dance. Then they studied academic subjects: literature, arithmetic, geography, history. Toward evening they had another session of dance. In the evening they did their homework and played piano. At eleven they went to sleep in a huge dormitory.

They were fed four times a day at a long table covered with a white cloth; the food was hearty, varied, and tasty. They had to eat quickly and make no mess. Their spiritual needs were served by the school church: they had early prayers before breakfast, and, during Passion Week, the last week of Lent before Easter, they were expected to go to confession and communion.

Like his school friends Georges could be certain of his future. After graduation, pupils were guaranteed a place at the Maryinsky Theater, the title of Artist of the Imperial Theaters, an excellent salary, and an early and generous pension. If they did their work diligently and flawlessly, they did not have to worry about anything else. It was often said in those days, “Those ballet people have all their brains in their feet.”^{366}

And that is probably why the only serious examinations in the ballet school were in the dance classes. Fokine complained that history, geography, and languages were taught and learned superficially: “At that time none of the artists traveled abroad, and French seemed like a totally useless torture to us.”^{367} Lopukhov claimed that Nijinsky, for instance, graduated without taking any exams in the academic subjects, because it was understood he would fail them anyway.

That was how the school was set up and it continued in that fashion for decades. The daily routine of the ballet monastery had its own appeal; it was in harmony with the state structure outside the school and yielded excellent professional results. As long as it was peaceful in Russia, it was peaceful inside the ballet school. But as the foundations of the imperial state started to tremble, unrest began among the dancers, too.

One of the first rebels was Fokine, soon followed by others. Lopukhov told me that at age fifteen he had decided he would not be “just some dumb little dancer.” “Fokine taught us to ask questions,” he recalled. “How had it been before? You came out on stage, did your work, and left. The important thing was for your pirouette to be good, but why you were doing it, whom you were portraying—most didn’t even wonder about that. After Fokine, dancing meaninglessly became shameful.”^{368}

The enticing rumors coming from Paris about Diaghilev’s enterprise had a profound effect on the school’s pupils. Western Europe did not seem so distant or abstract anymore. The Russian ballet was popular there, but not the traditional, academic sort that they were taught at the school, but a much more experimental one. As Danilova, who joined the school in 1911, told me, “Suddenly everyone wanted to move forward, and not keep endlessly rehashing the old.”^{369}

At the ballet school, the conflict between the comfortable routine and the distracting outside world only increased. We do not know how it would have developed if the political situation in Russia had remained stable. But in 1917 two seismic revolutionary shocks hit the country. The first revolution swept away the monarchy, the second eliminated the bourgeoisie. And along with them, most of the institutions of the ancien régime were destroyed. But a particularly heavy blow befell the imperial theaters: they lost both their august patron and their most loyal audience.

In this catastrophic new situation, the ballet school was simply forgotten at first. Ballet and opera performances in revolutionary Petrograd continued as if in a somnambulist’s dream, by momentum, while the former “monastery” was suddenly without supervision. Previously pupils had arrived at the Maryinsky Theater in special carriages under strict supervision. Now even the streetcars were not running, and the pupils had to get to the theater on foot.

In late autumn 1917, Balanchivadze and his classmate Mikhail Mikhailov performed in Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila. The incomparable Tamara Karsavina danced in the production, and one of the roles was sung by the legendary Chaliapin. Heatedly discussing the performance, Georges and his friend did not notice that the theater had emptied long ago. When they came out onto the street, it was already dark.

Petrograd at night was particularly eerie then. Shots rang out here and there and it was raining as well. Hunched over in their black topcoats, Georges and Mikhail jumped over big puddles to keep from getting their worn boots even wetter. No one had worried about the pupils’ clothes in ages.

A well-dressed gentleman strode boldly through the puddles ahead of the young dancers. His insouciance was explained by his marvelous new galoshes, which shone even in the dark. Hopping after the striding man, the boys eyed those galoshes enviously. Suddenly several shots could be heard and the proud owner of the galoshes fell face down into a puddle.

Georges and Mikhail ran off in opposite directions. Mikhail hid in the nearest doorway, where the gentleman in galoshes was soon brought. He was wounded and groaned loudly, repeating that one of the shots had killed the boy in a black overcoat who had been next to him. “Georges!” thought the terrified Mikhail. He ran to the scene of the shooting but found no one. He wandered around the nearby streets for a long time, trying to find out from the few passersby where the dead boy had been taken.

In despair, Mikhail returned to the school. “You can imagine my joy when Georges ran out of our small, agitated anthill toward me,” he later recalled. It turned out that Georges had also heard talk of a boy in a topcoat killed by the shots and decided that it had been Mikhail. He too had unsuccessfully looked for his friend and returned dejected to the dormitory, where he upset all his classmates with the terrifying story. Luckily, things had turned out all right that time.

Similar dramatic incidents were commonplace in the once-orderly life of the ballet school pupils. Previously insulated from the world outside, the school now reacted to every change happening around it. When Petrograd went hungry, so did the school. When the plumbing froze in the city, the children were without water, too. They were spared none of the horrors of a dying Petrograd. For Georges and his classmates, this sharp change in status must have been traumatic. Always resentful about his separation from his family, he was now deprived a second time of the comforts of a stable life and withdrew completely.

Still he made another attempt at “family life.” In the spring of 1922, eighteen-year-old Georges married the lovely fifteen-year-old dancer Tamara Zheverzheyeva (whose surname Diaghilev would later shorten to Geva) and moved to the apartment of his father-in-law, Levky Zheverzheyev, in house No. 5 in Grafsky Alley.

Levky Zheverzheyev, who played an exceptional and still underappreciated role in young Balanchine’s artistic development, was a Petersburg original. Of Oriental heritage, he inherited a lamé fabric plant from his parents as well as the capital’s largest church supply store, on Nevsky Prospect. Balanchine told me, “Before the revolution the Zheverzheyev factory made vestments and miters for the patriarch and other high clergy. Do you know what a patriarch’s vestment is like? The lamé cloth for it was thick and heavy, of pure gold. One inch of that cloth took a year to make!”

But Zheverzheyev’s heart was not in business. An amateur artist, even as a teenager he began collecting unique materials on the Russian theater: first editions of plays, original posters and announcements over a hundred years old, various documents, sketches for scenery and costumes, portraits of famous actors of the past and the present. His library of rare books—close to twenty-five thousand volumes—was one of the richest and most extensive in Petersburg.

Paradoxically, besides collecting antiques, Zheverzheyev became interested in the avant-garde. Every Friday he invited a group of noisy modernist youths to his home. These meetings soon became a fixture of artistic Petersburg. A reflection of Zheverzheyev’s reputation was the opinion of a leading innovator of that era, the director Meyerhold: “The city of Peter—St. Petersburg—Petrograd (as it is now called)—only it, only its air, its stones, its canals can create such men with such a desire to build as Zheverzheyev. To live and to die in St. Petersburg! What good fortune!”^{370}

At “Zheverzheyev’s Fridays” one could meet the futurist poets Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Alexei Kruchenykh, the artists Casimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Pavel Filonov, the art critic Nikolai Punin, and the violinist, composer, and painter Mikhail Matiushin. One of the habitués of Zheverzheyev’s salon recalled later, “The most modest and quietest person at the Fridays was the shy host, whom none of the guests noticed. He never took part in the heated discussions but sat in the corner and silently, attentively listened to the agitated, noisy speeches.”^{371}

The Russian avant-garde was going through its “heroic” period then. Despite the widespread misapprehension in the West, the leading Russian modernists were formed ideologically and artistically before the Communist revolution. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Russian culture had developed to an extremely swift tempo. The stunning changes in economic and social life were accompanied by radical shifts in aesthetic vision.

In 1895 Friedrich Engels wrote to a Russian fellow social democrat:

These “combinations of ideas” became even more bizarre when the Wall of China that Engels wrote about gradually disappeared. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, Russian youth had the opportunity to assimilate unhindered the latest artistic experiments of the West. The results were fantastic. In the space of ten or fifteen years Russian art managed to absorb, digest, and boldly rework the product of Europe’s lengthy process of development. The leading Russian avant-gardists rather quickly “left behind” impressionism, pointillism, Art Nouveau, symbolist aesthetics, and Cézannism. They tarried over cubism and for a while Picasso was their idol. But by 1912 Filonov announced that Picasso “had come to a dead end.”

The Russian avant-gardists were maximalists. Maximalism is characteristic of Russian culture in general, but in the feverish atmosphere after 1910, it grew more pronounced. Malevich and Tatlin and Filonov considered themselves not only artists but prophets of a new form of life. Artistic creation for them was a profoundly spiritual experience. Each of these artists was tied, in his own way, to the Russian religious tradition. In the paintings of each, one could find traces of the influence of ancient Russian icons. And in those artists’ speeches, refrains from religious and mystical ideas often echoed.

This could not have escaped Zheverzheyev’s attention, since he was a specialist in that area, owning a church supply store, after all. For him the ties between the Russian avant-garde and folk art were also obvious: they all adored the ancient designs, the primitive art of shop signs and serving trays, embroidery and ornaments. As a collector, Zheverzheyev knew those items well, too.

In the annals of the Russian avant-garde theater, there is an example of the influence on contemporary innovation of Zheverzheyev’s collection and his interest in historical rarities. He commissioned a model of the famous “Scene in Hell,” which was the finale of the once-popular old Russian show The Secrets of Saint Petersburg Underground. In the center of the model stood the figure of Satan, and from his open mouth demons in red tights jumped out, while hell fire and clouds of smoke surrounded all.

Mayakovsky came to the craftsman’s studio while he was working on the project and peppered him with questions on the traditional techniques of folk fairy plays and mysteries. A while later Meyerhold produced Mayakovsky’s new play, Mystery-Bouffe, which also had a scene in hell. The sets were by Malevich.

Every major Russian avant-garde artist wanted to be a leader and felt he had the right to be one. And among themselves, the artists fought fiercely. This worried Zheverzheyev, who wanted to make peace among these warring talents, believing it would be easier for them to confront the philistines among the public if they were united. So he took pains to help organize the Union of Youth, a society of avant-garde artists, in 1910.

The Union of Youth lasted almost four years, giving seven major exhibits, producing three issues of a daring magazine, publishing books, and holding debates that drew attention to the new art. None of this would have been possible without Zheverzheyev: the magazine, the exhibits, and all the rest were paid for out of his pocket.

And in general without his peacemaking and unifying presence, the Union of Youth could not have lasted as long as it did. As its chairman, Zheverzheyev insisted that Moscow avant-garde artists and futurist poets join this Petersburg society. Such a goal was not easy to achieve, but the results included two extraordinary theatrical presentations that left a deep impression on the history of the Russian avant-garde: the performances in Petersburg of the tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky and the opera Victory over the Sun.

Russian avant-gardists believed the theater was the best instrument for expressing their ideas. This conception originated with the Russian symbolists, who had always maintained, “From art will come a new life and the salvation of humanity.” For them, the theater was not simply inseparable from ethics and religion but became a means for transforming the spirit. Andrei Bely preached that “at the heart of the goals proposed by art there are religious aims: those aims are the transformation of humanity.”^{373}

These messianic ideas were vividly reflected in the late work of Alexander Scriabin, who conceived the great music and dance work Mysterium. Its performance, according to the composer, would lead to “the end of the world,” when material force would perish and sheer spirit would triumph. All humanity would become participants in the Mysterium, the composer dreamed. Scriabin visualized an incredible theatrical happening in which there would be no distinction between actors and audience. This was the apotheosis of the symbolist concepts of the mystical role of the theater.

Scriabin’s Mysterium remained, of course, a utopian conception, but that fact did not dampen the dreams of the Russian modernists. “The musicality of contemporary drama,” wrote Bely, “its symbolism—does this not show the desire of drama to become a mystery? Drama came out of mysteries. And it will return there. And once drama returns to mystery, it will inevitably leave the boards of the stage and spread into life. Do we not have here a hint of the transformation of life into mystery?”^{374}

Even though they attacked the “obsolete” symbolists, the Russian avant-gardists retained a mystical belief in the lofty mission of the theater. Their theater fixation was all-encompassing, as it was for the symbolists. Following the symbolists, the futurists were turning daily life into theater. The symbolists “theatricized” their relations with one another. The futurists brought this “home” theater into the streets. Malevich strolled down the streets with a large wooden spoon in his lapel. Mayakovsky showed off in a shirt of bright yellow, which had been designated the official color of futurism. The futurists painted their faces, drawing flowers on their cheeks and gilding their noses. They also earned pretty good money from shocking, theatricized debates, which attracted large, curious audiences.

Zheverzheyev organized one such debate in November 1912 at the Troitsky Theater of Miniatures, which he had founded and financed. This was one of the first theaters of its kind in Petersburg. Avant-garde art, rejected by established institutions, had access to the public on the stage of the Troitsky Theater (and similar small stages) and in the semiprivate cabarets like The Stray Dog. The manager of the Troitsky Theater was Alexander Fokine, the choreographer’s brother, a colorful figure and former race car champion. An unknown but promising young poet and artist was recommended to Zheverzheyev as someone who could deliver a lecture on the latest in Russian poetry. He was brought to Zheverzheyev, the arts patron liked him, and thus the debut of nineteen-year-old Mayakovsky in Petersburg took place under the aegis of the Union of Youth.

Tall and handsome, Mayakovsky shocked the audience with a statement made in his velvety voice that “the word requires spermatization,” and that in painting, as in other arts and literature, one needs to be a “shoemaker.” As Mayakovsky’s friend, the futurist poet Alexei Kruchenykh, who liked to wear a couch pillow tied around his neck with a string, explained, “so that it writes tight and reads tight, more uncomfortable than greased boots or a truck in the living room.”^{375}

And in the summer of 1913 in that “tight,” rough language Mayakovsky wrote a tragedy that he intended to call either The Rebellion of Objects or The Railroad. But since the play was written in haste, the author sent it to the censors for approval with a title page that simply said, “Vladimir Mayakovsky. A Tragedy,” that is, without any title. Once it was passed by the censors no changes could be made. Mayakovsky was pleased: “Well then let’s call the tragedy ‘Vladimir Mayakovsky.’”

That wording was particularly appropriate because the poet was in fact the main character of his play. A young Boris Pasternak was stunned when Mayakovsky read it to him:

I listened, forgetting about myself, with my whole entranced heart, with bated breath. I had never heard anything like it in my life. The title concealed a brilliantly simple revelation, that the poet is not the author but the object of lyric poetry, addressing the world in the first person. The title was not the name of the writer, but the name of the contents.^{376}

Mayakovsky’s tragedy was written under the obvious influence of the then-popular ideas on monodrama of the playwright and director Nikolai Evreinov, who was once sarcastically depicted thus by Viktor Shklovsky, an ally of the futurists:

Hair combed back, trimmed, very handsome, an official sadist, who published The History of Corporal Punishment in Russia.

When you come to his house, he claps his hands, and the fat young maid comes in. Evreinov says, “Bring some pheasants.”

“The pheasants are all eaten,” the maid replies.

“Then bring tea.”

This is called Theater for Oneself.^{377}

Shklovsky, of course, was caricaturing the post-symbolist theater innovations of that great paradoxicalist, the “Russian Oscar Wilde,” Evreinov. He maintained that life was a constant “theater for oneself,” through which the personality defends itself from the chaos of the unknown world. He considered executions and torture as theater, too. Evreinov explained his concept of monodrama this way: “A dramatic performance, which, while trying to relate to the viewer the protagonist’s spiritual state as completely as possible, presents on stage the world around him as it is perceived by the protagonist at a given moment of his stage life.”^{378}

Besides the Poet, the characters in the tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky were Man Without Eye and Leg, Man Without Ear, and Man Without Head—all various versions of the author, as Evreinov had prescribed. The futurist Benedikt Livshits observed that in his play, “Mayakovsky fractured and multiplied in a demiurgic frenzy.”^{379}

In November 1913 posters were pasted all over Petersburg announcing that the Luna-Park Theater in early December would present “the world’s first four productions by Futurists of the theater”: Vladimir Mayakovsky and the opera Victory Over the Sun would each be given twice. Since the newspapers were writing a lot about the futurists then in the most sensational terms, the tickets sold out instantly, despite the high prices (as much as Chaliapin commanded). Le tout Petersburg attended.

The “Futurist Festival” opened with Mayakovsky’s play. Meyerhold and Blok were present. The brazen spectacle was undoubtedly connected to their theatrical ideas—the dreams of the symbolists for a ritual theater in which poet, actors, and viewers blended into one.

The tragedy took place against backdrops by Pavel Filonov and Ilya Shkolnik, depicting the city. (The sets were lost in 1924 during major flooding in Leningrad.) One of the backdrops was particularly memorable: “an agitated, colorful city port with numerous, thoroughly painted boats on the shores and beyond them, hundreds of city buildings, each of which was detailed down to the very last window.”^{380} At least one viewer was stunned by the scenery: “Perhaps what I saw then on that cardboard was the truest depiction of a city that I had ever seen…. I felt a movement inside myself, I felt the movement of the city in eternity, its horror as part of chaos.”^{381}

Mayakovsky came out on the stage in his famous yellow shirt, supposedly playing himself. He was a marvelous actor, and many people in the audience were deeply moved when he melodramatically compared himself to an unneeded tear rolling down “the unshaven cheek of the squares.”

That cry of desperation by the young poet against the background of Filonov’s urban painting summed up the romantic and symbolist tradition of alienation in Petersburg. Pasternak, the Muscovite, recalling Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Andrei Bely’s magnum opus, emphasized Mayakovsky’s traditionality vis-à-vis Petersburg: “He saw beneath him the city that gradually rose up to him from the bottom of The Bronze Horseman, Crime and Punishment, and Petersburg … a city in the mist of eternal fortune-telling about the future, a needy Russian city of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”^{382}

All the performances were done under the aegis of the Union of Youth and paid for by Zheverzheyev. It was his finest hour. He recalled that the dress rehearsal of Mayakovsky’s play was attended by

the police chief himself (there were only four in the entire city) as well as the censor and the local policeman. In the breaks between acts and at the end of the rehearsal, the police chief pestered me with questions: “For God’s sake, tell me honestly, is this truly only futurist showing-off and nonsense? To tell the truth, I don’t understand a thing. There isn’t anything in it that’s … you know? … no? well, … seditious? There’s nothing I can put my finger on, I admit … I admit … but I feel that something’s wrong.^{383}

That episode amply demonstrates the paradox and uniqueness of Zheverzheyev’s position in Petersburg. For the authorities he was a wealthy and respected businessman, the owner of a famous store for church supplies; thus he was connected to the most traditional and stable institution in tsarist Russia. But Zheverzheyev gave all his sympathies to a small group of enthusiasts of a shocking new art. He was not pretending or being a hypocrite but lived naturally in two worlds that were far apart from each other. His quiet confidence helped him to persuade the police authorities of the “innocence” of Mayakovsky’s play, which is now widely acknowledged as a pinnacle of the young futurist’s early work.

Mayakovsky’s avant-garde comrades complained that his tragedy was too accessible: “it never tears the word away from its meaning; it does not use the sound of the pure word as such.”^{384} This was the reaction of Mayakovsky’s friend Mikhail Matiushin—violinist, composer, painter, and one of the founders with Zheverzheyev of the Union of Youth. Matiushin, who was over fifty, was the oldest of the futurists; Blok noted sarcastically in his diary that he was “futuristically trying to look young.”

In the summer of 1913, Matiushin, Malevich, and Kruchenykh, meeting outside Petersburg, decided to write an opera. They proclaimed themselves the “First All-Russian Congress of Futurists” and issued a manifesto of their goal: “To swoop down on the bastion of artistic sickliness—the Russian theater—and to transform it decisively.” Interestingly, this manifesto was immediately published by many Petersburg newspapers; the public curiosity in their domestic futurists was quite high.

Matiushin wrote music to Kruchenykh’s libretto. They called the opera Victory Over the Sun, because in it two Strongmen-futurists knocked the sun, the embodiment of the traditional concept of “beauty,” out of the sky. Matiushin recalled that the first rehearsals of the opera greatly inspired Zheverzheyev; and Alexander Fokine, the manager of the Troitsky Theater, shouted happily, “I like these fellows!’”

Only fragments of Matiushin’s music survive. It resembled the neoprimitivist works of the French composer Erik Satie and the Russian composers of The Stray Dog circle. In some parts of the opera, Matiushin experimented with “ultrachromaticism,” using quarter tone intervals. But the music did not make an impression on audiences. Its performers had not rehearsed sufficiently, the vocalists were third-rate, and to make matters worse, they sang to the accompaniment of an untuned upright piano.

The center of attention became the scenery and costumes by Casimir Malevich. He had been presented to Petersburg audiences more than two years earlier, also under the aegis of the Union of Youth. Afterward, Zheverzheyev organized a performance by Malevich at the Troitsky Theater of Miniatures. Shklovsky recalled that Malevich wanted to explain his painting: black-and-white women in the form of truncated cones against a red background. In the course of the explanation, he referred to the recently deceased artist Valentin Serov, who had been universally beloved and respected, as a “mediocre dauber.” People were upset. Malevich calmly continued: “I’m not teasing, this is what I think.” But he was not allowed to finish: a commotion ensued and an intermission had to be announced.

In his work on Victory Over the Sun Malevich, who had moved from postimpressionism to cubism in just a few years, came face to face with abstract art. Kruchenykh’s libretto was constructed out of zaum (“non-sense” language). Malevich strove for the same effect in his costumes and scenery. The characters resembled animated cubist paintings. Matiushin recalled how Malevich dressed the Strongmen: “He gave them shoulders on the level of their mouths and made heads in the shape of a cardboard helmet—it created the impression of two gigantic human figures.”

Malevich used lighting in a bold, new way: colored theater lights captured individual parts of brightly colored cardboard figures otherwise hidden in darkness—first hands, then heads, then legs. This underscored their geometric, abstract character. Part of the audience applauded, but the majority laughed and booed. Petersburg critics were outraged both by the play and the audience: “Shame on a society that reacts with laughter to mockery and that allows itself to be spat upon!”

The critics apparently had forgotten that in the theatrical city of Petersburg, the spectacle was all: it didn’t matter how incongruous and outrageous a performance was, as long as it was unusual and amusing. Petersburg’s cynicism and avowed curiosity for the new went hand-in-hand here. As a proud observer of his city, an artist, snob, and high-society denizen noted, “To admire an amusing bit of rubbish is not something given to everyone!”^{385}

The Russian modernists fought desperately for success in the capital and power over the soul of skeptical Petersburg. With the opening of the Artistic Bureau of N. Dobychina in the fall of 1912, selling works of art became a real business in Russia. Nadezhda Dobychina (née Fishman) became the first professional dealer in the country; she not only organized exhibits for artists and sold their paintings but also directed their work. It was considered inappropriate for a woman, and a Jewish one at that, to interfere so unceremoniously in the capital’s artistic life, and so Petersburg men spoke of Dobychina with grudging respect, appreciating her power: “Yes, that woman was a hidden lever in the life changes of many artists…. She was very ugly, and perhaps that fueled her energy, life force, ambition, and desire to triumph.”^{386}

In December 1915, Dobychina gave the “Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 (Zero-Ten)” at her Artistic Bureau. Malevich dominated the show, with close to forty works, next to which he hung a sign Suprematism of Painting. These were geometric abstract works of the greatest intensity and rigor. High in a corner, in a place Russians traditionally reserve for icons, reigned Malevich’s painting Black Square. Achieving notoriety, it became the icon of abstract art in Russia and, with it, Malevich proclaimed the leadership of the Russian avant-garde in world art. This painting transmuted the deceptively elementary form of the black square into a symbol of the new sensation of limitless space and universality of existence. Black Square was fortified by Malevich’s idea that abstract art would open the way for the spiritual cleansing of the masses, hence the challenging unity of form and color in his seminal work.

Malevich’s letter to Matiushin explains the origin of the term the artist used for the new direction in art he had created: “I think that suprematism is the best because it means sovereignty.”^{387} The painter’s symbol of suprematism originated in a sketch he had done for Victory Over the Sun, when the artist first drew the square on paper. Later Malevich wrote about that sketch, “This drawing will have great significance in painting. That which had been done unconsciously is now yielding extraordinary fruits.”^{388}

Zheverzheyev understood the importance of Malevich’s sketches for Victory Over the Sun. At the same time as Dobychina’s exhibit, Zheverzheyev was showing “Monuments of Russian Theater” in Petrograd, consisting of precious materials from his legendary collection. Right after the performances of Victory Over the Sun, he bought nineteen sketches for the opera from the artist. Now they were in the exhibit of Zheverzheyev’s collection, next to posters from the early eighteenth century.

Malevich pronounced, “Color is the creator of space…. The keys of suprematism open what is still unconscious. My new art does not belong to the Earth exclusively … in man, in his consciousness lies the striving for space, the desire to break away from the planet Earth.”^{389} Like every real missionary, Malevich tried to conquer avant-garde Petrograd with his philosophy. And for that, he had first to conquer Nikolai Punin’s circle.

At meetings of the club, the intense, brooding Malevich, according to Punin, spent hours “convincing you with astonishing pressure that was hypnotizing and forced you to listen, spoke as if piercing you with a rapier, putting things to you from the most unexpected angles; pushing hard, he would leap back from his interlocutor, shaking his hand and his short fingers, which trembled nervously.”^{390}

But Malevich had a mighty rival in his battle for Petersburg’s heart. Someone brought a masterful cubist drawing by the Muscovite Vladimir Tatlin to Punin’s circle. The members of the club were astonished, and chipping in ten to fifteen kopeks apiece, sent Tatlin a collective telegram: “Come! All Petrograd’s young artists and critics await you as our teacher, laying a new path in Art. We’re waiting!”

Tatlin immediately showed up in Petrograd. “He had a unique look,” recalled a member of the Punin circle. “He was tall and ugly … his whitish hair lay in some kind of tresses on the back of his head. He resembled a pelican.”^{391} At that time, Tatlin, who had renounced painting, was obsessed with his innovative “counterreliefs.” These were sculptural paintings that heralded constructivism—beautifully arranged strange and powerful combinations of various materials: metal, wood, and glass.

Tatlin’s ideas were even more radical than Malevich’s. His counterreliefs did not serve as symbols of some mystical yearnings, as did Malevich’s paintings. They were not intended to give viewers spiritual impulses but simply stated the right of various materials and objects to sovereign existence as objects of art. The prosaic and utilitarian qualities masking the refined beauty of Tatlin’s counterreliefs found resonance in restrained Petersburg, besides which Tatlin himself made an indelible impression on young artists there. As Punin recalled, “Then his every opinion, every thought he expressed about art was a breakthrough to a new culture, to the future.”^{392}

Under the powerful influence of Tatlin’s ideas, the avant-gardists in Punin’s circle began working enthusiastically

on constructing expansive models, on various kinds of selection of materials of different qualities, characteristics, and shapes. We sawed, planed, cut, rubbed, stretched, and bent; we almost completely forgot about painting; we talked only about contrasts, combinations, tensions, aces of intersections, textures. From the side, it might have looked rather strange, but actually, this was the creative tension of people who thought that through their efforts the world would at last shift away from the age-old canons and “enter into a new Renaissance.”^{393}

And so, Space Composition by the Petrograd Wunderkind Lev Bruni utilized a large steel linchpin, stretched leather, glass, mica, and tin. Bruni’s piece didn’t make it through the years of the revolution; his widow, Nina, told me about it.^{394} Pyotr Miturich’s composition consisted of plywood, glass panes marked with wax, purple paper, and “silver” foil.

Punin spoke of the incessant rivalry between Tatlin and Malevich.

For as long as I can remember them, they always divided up the world between them: the land, and the sky, and interplanetary space, establishing their spheres of influence everywhere. Tatlin usually claimed the earth for himself, trying to shove Malevich into the sky because of his abstractness. Malevich, not refusing the planets, did not yield earth, either, justly assuming that it too was a planet and therefore could be abstract as well.^{395}

Malevich scorned Tatlin, accusing him of having a “narrow view” and maintaining that “iron blocks Tatlin’s horizon.” Tatlin responded in kind.

That war for spheres of influence was not limited to ideological clashes. Before the opening of a show at Dobychina’s Artistic Bureau, the broad-shouldered Malevich and the agile giant Tatlin actually came to blows. Shows of the avant-gardists in Petrograd were becoming more like happenings at every occasion, but this soon-to-be-legendary fist fight contributed overwhelmingly to the overall theatrical nature of the event.

The ivory tower did not attract the Russian avant-gardists; they always thought of the potential audience and considered its possible reactions. That may be why attempts to reconstruct Victory Over the Sun, undertaken in the early 1980s in the United States and Europe, were not completely successful. Educated audiences reacted to the performance as to a landmark in the history of modern art. But respect was the last reaction the innovative authors wanted from the outrageous original production of 1913 in Petersburg.

The burning desire of the Russian avant-garde to conquer a mass audience took on religious overtones. Their proselytizing left its mark even on their appearance: “Malevich looked like a hermit, Tatlin, a martyr, and Filonov, an apostle.”^{396} Their activity was a tightly woven combination of creative enlightenment and pragmatic calculation, mysticism and scholarly reckoning, utopian ideas and striving for immediate changes in daily life. They were all interested in the study of the “fourth dimension,” a mystical “new reality,” the quest for which became fashionable after the publication in Petersburg of two books by the Russian theosophist P. D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Dimension (1909) and The Key to Mysteries (Tertium Organum) (1912).

In May 1913 Malevich wrote to Matiushin that he could see a time “when big cities and the studios of contemporary artists would be held up on huge Zeppelins.”^{397} In 1917 he casually informed Matiushin, “back in the summer I proclaimed myself chairman of space.”^{398} Therefore, it is not surprising that many avant-gardists hailed the Communist revolution, thinking it would clear the way for the realization of their radical ideas.

For all that, most of the leaders of the new Russian art had little interest in the social and economic aspects of the Russian Revolution. They were primarily concerned with artistic and moral issues, and the liberating promise of the revolution. Punin later recalled with bitter irony, “We imagined art autonomous of the state, perhaps even a dictatorship of art over the government.” The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, agreed to cooperate with the avant-garde only out of practical considerations. Most of the major art figures of a traditional orientation had emigrated or tried to sabotage the new regime. Someone had to run the enormous cultural empire that the Bolsheviks had inherited from old Russia. People’s Commissar of Education Lunacharsky intoned, “The work of protecting the palaces and museums, definitively passed on to the people, must not be put off.”^{399}

Zheverzheyev was one of the first respected art figures of the capital to cooperate with the new regime. The Bolsheviks nationalized his enormous theater collection but named him its curator. Early in 1917 Zheverzheyev headed the Left Bloc of the Petrograd Union of the Arts. Its members included Mayakovsky, Punin, Meyerhold, and Nathan Altman. After the Bolshevik revolution they took top positions in the new apparatus for managing culture, and naturally did not forget Zheverzheyev.

Here is one of many examples. In 1918 Zheverzheyev applied to the state publishing house with a request to publish a manuscript on African art by the artist and art historian Vladimir Markov (pseudonym of the Latvian Voldemar Matvejs), who had died young. Markov was one of the most active members of the Union of Youth, which formally ceased to exist some years before the revolution but which, in Punin’s words, still stood as a landmark over Petrograd.

At that time people in Petrograd were starving, and basic necessities were lacking. But Mayakovsky zealously supported Zheverzheyev’s idea. At a meeting of the Petrograd Art Collegium, which under the Bolsheviks managed the day-to-day business of the arts, Mayakovsky said that the proposal to publish Markov’s book came “from comrade Zheverzheyev, whom we all know: during the darkest reactionary times, he held the banner of art high.”^{400} The history of the culture of the twentieth century will note that in 1919 in Petrograd, where the plumbing had frozen, public transportation had stopped, and a horse that had fallen on the street was stripped down to the carcass by hungry citizens, one of the world’s first serious studies of African art, Art of the Negroes, with a cover designed by Altman, was published through the joint efforts of Zheverzheyev, Mayakovsky, and Punin.

A unique and curious child born of the bizarre combination of events in revolutionary Petrograd was propaganda porcelain: dinner services and commemorative plates depicting the slogans and symbols of the new regime, as well as portraits of its leaders. In a period of extreme shortages of many necessities, including paper on occasion, Petrograd’s porcelain factory miraculously discovered large supplies of unpainted plates left over from imperial days.

Russian porcelain production was one of the oldest in Europe. By the beginning of the twentieth century it had lost its artistic attractiveness. New ideas in this field, as in others, were presented by members of the Mir iskusstva group, primarily Sergei Chekhonin, an accomplished artist of mousy appearance whom friends called a “lurking mosquito.”

Chekhonin’s imagination blazed after the revolution, when, working in his factory studio, he painted virtuoso renditions of revolutionary appeals on porcelain plates and cups intertwined in intricate designs. This paradox could not exist anywhere but the Petrograd of those years, a hungry city in which exquisite dishes worthy of the most luxurious table were decorated with blunt Communist slogans, rendered with the greatest imagination.

Chekhonin collected a group of innovative artists around him, and the Bolsheviks wisely decided to use that creative potential for their propaganda goals as well as profit. The dinnerware and figurines produced in Petrograd were sold in the West for much-needed hard currency. As a result, Western collections today display the exquisite porcelain plates painted by Chekhonin, Dobuzhinsky, Altman, Kustodiev, and even such avant-garde artists as Malevich and Nikolai Suetin.

Another paradox of that terrible and fantastic era was the proliferation of theaters. Zheverzheyev, who had a wealth of experience as a producer, became the head of a new theater, the Hermitage. He and Meyerhold had come up with the idea of it together. The Hermitage Theater was registered as the forty-fifth in the city; at that time in dark, hungry Petrograd, over forty different productions were available almost every evening.

Zheverzheyev had worked with Meyerhold before, when the latter had produced Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe in Petrograd for the first anniversary of the Communist revolution. Malevich did the scenery. His sketches for Mystery-Bouffe did not survive and they are rarely mentioned now.

Meyerhold had begun experimenting in his studio on Borodinskaya Street in Petrograd, even before the revolution, in the area of “people’s theater,” that is, a theater with mobile troupes that could, theoretically at least, perform on public squares, in the streets, and at fairs. Meyerhold worked with his actors on improvisation and acrobatics and took them to the circus, suggesting that they study with the jugglers. He devoted a lot of attention to pantomime with musical accompaniment, and he always made his students move “on the music,” and not “to the music”—subsequently one of the most important elements of Balanchine’s aesthetics. Among the numerous guests of the studio, the young Sergei Radlov, the dandy and future avant-garde director, stood out. Leaning casually against the door jamb, Radlov closely observed Meyerhold’s experiments.

After the revolution Meyerhold spoke with unfeigned enthusiasm of art for the broad masses. But his proposal to present plays for the mass audience at the Hermitage Theater apparently had not been wholly serious; the charming hall, built in the late eighteenth century and then reconstructed by Carlo Rossi, had only two hundred seats. Plays for the imperial family were staged there, and sometimes its members took part.

And now Zheverzheyev was proposing turning the Hermitage Theater into “the bearer of new forms of theater art.” Just how avant-garde the new enterprise was to be is clear from Zheverzheyev’s list of designers, including Altman, Chagall, and Tatlin. The whole concept was going to be under the aegis of the People’s Commissariat of Education, where modernists like Mayakovsky, Punin, and Arthur Lourié set the tone in the arts section.

Zheverzheyev, however, met many obstacles right off the bat. Meyerhold, who could not stand the hungry life, fled south from Petrograd. The city authorities did not allow performances at the Hermitage Theater, citing the danger of fire. (Curiously, the same excuse was given to me when, half a century later, I tried to obtain permission to use the Hermitage Theater for the struggling Experimental Studio of Chamber Opera).

But in the end, the avant-garde artist Yuri Annenkov managed to produce under Zheverzheyev’s auspices an influential production of Leo Tolstoy’s play The First Distiller at the Heraldry Hall of the Winter Palace. Annenkov had audaciously transformed Tolstoy’s didactic parable about the dangers of drinking into a circus show with acrobats, dancers, clowns, accompanied by accordion and balalaika players. The second act of Tolstoy’s morality play took place in hell, and Annenkov later recalled that it gave him the opportunity to go all out:

The scenery was made up of multicolored crisscrossing ropes, slightly camouflaged trapezes, various swaying platforms suspended in space and other circus equipment, against a background of abstract blobs of color, primarily in a fiery spectrum. The devils flew and tumbled in the air. The ropes, trapezes, and platforms were in constant movement. The action developed simultaneously on the stage and in the audience.^{401}

This “people’s” production was banned after four performances because the Bolsheviks were offended on Tolstoy’s behalf and found this “bourgeois modernization of the classics” unacceptable. However, Annenkov’s radical experiments were immediately picked up and continued by Sergei Radlov, who opened his theater, the “People’s Comedy,” in the Iron Hall of the Petrograd People’s House in 1920.

The observant Shklovsky noted, “Radlov, coming in a direct line from Yuri Annenkov, proceeds tangentially from Meyerhold’s pantomime.”^{402} In Radlov’s productions the actors also improvised, did complicated acrobatic turns, and juggled fire. Only a few of them came from traditional theater (one of them was Lyubov Mendeleyeva, Blok’s wife), for Radlov had recruited most from the circus or variety stage. The action could take place in Russia, Paris, or New York, with transformations, fights, and almost cinematic chase scenes.

During Meyerhold’s absence from Petrograd, the energetic Radlov became the recognized head of the avant-garde theater. But Meyerhold soon returned and made directly for Radlov’s theater, where he created a loud scene, accusing his follower of plagiarism. The horrified actors watched the infuriated Meyerhold, dressed in the Bolshevik “uniform”: leather jacket, rough boots, and cap with a badge depicting Lenin, also in a cap. Meyerhold ran from the Iron Hall shouting curses. As of that moment, he and Radlov were mortal enemies. But Zheverzheyev continued to maintain friendly relations with both.

A little taller than average, well built, and always calm, Zheverzheyev was self-confident in the stormy seas of Petrograd’s artistic avant-garde. His temperament made him the ideal arbiter for settling the innumerable disputes and conflicts of superinflated egos. Before the revolution, the authorities had respected him for being rich. After the revolution the new authorities continued to respect Zheverzheyev because he had given up his wealth easily and gracefully. The avant-gardists respected him before and after the revolution for his steady support for their experiments and for his organizational skills. In the early 1920s Zheverzheyev was still in the middle of Petrograd’s cultural life.

For the young Balanchine, Zheverzheyev’s apartment was a haven, and its owner must have become a father figure. George even began imitating Zheverzheyev, who wore his hair long and parted on one side. Balanchine got the same hairdo. Zheverzheyev had beautiful hands (his daughter Tamara described them as “Botticelli-like”), and George started paying attention to how his hands looked.^{403}

It was in 1922, when Balanchine moved in with the Zheverzheyevs, that the young dancer was in particular need of advice and support. Petrograd’s ballet people were bewildered, discouraged, and frightened. That year the Kremlin seriously discussed shutting down the Maryinsky Theater for economic and ideological reasons. The government was catastrophically short of money. Expenditures for opera and ballet in those circumstances seemed particularly extravagant. Those arts were proclaimed not only useless but even reactionary and harmful to the masses. The leader for “proletarian culture,” the Bolshevik Platon Kerzhentsev, wrote, “Opera and ballet in their essence are more appropriate to an authoritarian regime and to bourgeois hegemony.”^{404}

But the most important reason was the opinion of Bolshevik Number One: Vladimir Lenin, who considered opera and ballet “a piece of purely big landowning culture.”^{405} Trying to save the Maryinsky Theater from the “present attempt to stifle it,” Lunacharsky appealed to Lenin with a desperate letter (“Urgent and for him personally!”), in which, with some exaggeration, he pressed the case for opera and ballet as a necessary and useful entertainment for the proletarian masses: “Literally the entire laboring population of Petrograd treasures the Maryinsky Theater so much, since it has become an almost exclusively working-class theater, that its closing will be perceived by the workers as a heavy blow.”^{406}

The pragmatic Lenin was more impressed by Lunacharsky’s argument that guarding the empty Maryinsky Theater would cost almost as much as maintaining the acting troupe. As a result, the state subsidy for the Maryinsky Theater, which had been cut to a minimum, was retained.

But the ideological storms surrounding the ballet did not quiet down. Ballet was rejected by many of Zheverzheyev’s avant-garde friends. Tatlin proclaimed that the modern factory was the highest form of ballet. Mayakovsky sarcastically spoke of dancing “Elfs, Zwelfs, and syphilides.” Yet Mayakovsky remained one of the young Balanchine’s idols, and he became “a walking encyclopedia on Mayakovsky, quoting his pronouncements, and once met the author and was terribly proud of this acquaintance.”^{407}

Balanchine told me that he had seen the Petrograd production of Mystery-Bouffe in 1918. The play and particularly the scenery by Malevich had made a great impression on him, but he had not known then that one of the producers was Zheverzheyev. Balanchine recalled that Tamara Zheverzheyeva had introduced him to Mayakovsky. Balanchine explained to me in 1981 in New York,

In those years I liked to recite Mayakovsky, because I was young and did not have much taste in poetry. Mayakovsky’s poetry is made up of striking aphorisms. I thought that I could find the answers to all my questions in it. It was the poetry of adolescence. For instance, when I courted girls, I recited Mayakovsky’s

and that sometimes made the needed impression.^{408}

Balanchine had no trouble when he was near eighty quoting Mayakovsky’s narrative poem A Cloud in Trousers. His memory for poetry set him apart in his youth. At the ballet school, he was often recruited for performances in the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater when a boy was needed in a small dramatic role. The actor Yuri Yuriev, in the classical comedy in verse Woe from Wit, by Alexander Griboedov—the story of a failed rebellion by a young Russian intellectual named Chatsky against the hypocrisy of his conservative milieu—made an indelible impression on Balanchine. To the end of his life Balanchine would declaim Chatsky’s final monologue, which in Yuriev’s presentation had elicited tears from young Georges, as he himself admitted in later years:

Those romantic lines practically foretold Balanchine’s future. His emotional reaction to their open melodrama lifts a window into the choreographer’s soul that subsequently was shut forever.

Balanchine knew a lot of Pushkin by heart, particularly from The Bronze Horseman. For a true Petersburger, this was obligatory and served as a kind of password. In avant-garde circles, the equivalent was reciting Mayakovsky by heart. The artist Milashevsky recalled that he made the acquaintance of young Viktor Shklovsky in the summer of 1913, when he began reciting Mayakovsky aloud in the street and Shklovsky joined him.

Shklovsky was among the first to respond to A Cloud in Trousers when it was published in 1915: “In Mayakovsky’s new mastery, the street, which had been deprived of art, has found its words, its form.”^{409} Even earlier, as a twenty-year-old student, Shklovsky, who looked like “a rosy-apple-cheeked boy who had leaped into Futurism straight from the nursery,”^{410} read an aesthetically and politically radical lecture entitled “The Resurrection of the Word” at The Stray Dog. Shklovsky announced there that the avant-garde was saving culture, returning it to its face and soul: “We are removing filth from precious stones, we are awakening Sleeping Beauty.” Shklovsky warned that Mayakovsky and other futurists, whom their contemporary audience considered at best harmless madmen, were actually “clairvoyants, who sense with their raw nerves the coming catastrophe.”^{411}

That was December 1913, getting onto three in the morning, and the Petersburg nouveaux riches who had come to The Stray Dog to view the fashionable avant-gardists did not quite understand which catastrophe he meant. But Shklovsky’s persuasive powers were such that he forced “the large audience, half made up of ‘tuxedos’ or low-cut ladies to listen without a murmur.”^{412}

Shklovsky quickly became one of the leading figures of avant-garde Petersburg, taking part in the work of the Union of Youth and befriending Mayakovsky, Matiushin, Tatlin, and Zheverzheyev. A group of young linguists who had gathered around Shklovsky created in 1914 the Society for the Study of the Theory of Poetic Language, or Opayaz, the acronym of the Russian name. Shklovsky recalled, “And then we had the idea that poetic language differs from prose in general, that it was a special sphere in which even lip movements are important; as is the world of dance: when muscle movements give pleasure; as is painting: when vision gives pleasure.”^{413}

According to the young Shklovsky and his friends, art was the sum total of the devices (priemy) used in it. The “content” of art dissolved without a trace in its form. Therefore, the “content” of an author’s work had no interest or significance for him. The “content” was merely an excuse for using whatever formal devices the author desired.

These views, first formulated by Shklovsky in a bombastic and categorical manner, unusual for a scholar, created some shock waves. The members of Opoyaz, among whom were the linguists Yevgeny Polivanov, Lev Yakubinsky, Yuri Tynyanov, and Boris Eikhenbaum, were dubbed “formalists.” This militant group made some extraordinary theoretical discoveries. For instance, the formalists introduced the important distinction in the theory of narrative between fabula (story) and suzhet (plot). They used fabula for the chain of events described in the work; suzhet referred to the actual presentation of those events by the author. Fabula is “what actually happened,” and suzhet is “how the reader learned about it.”

Shklovsky wrote “How Don Quixote Is Made,” and his close friend Eikhenbaum wrote “How The Overcoat Is Made” (punning on Gogol’s famous Petersburg story). One of the characters in the tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky is named Old Man with Dry Black Cats, who is several thousand years old. If you pet the cats, Mayakovsky used to say in his public lectures, you get electric sparks. Shklovsky later explained,

The point of the cat was this: you can get electricity from a cat. That’s what the Egyptians did. But it’s more convenient to get electricity using a power station, rather than messing with cats. Traditional art, we thought in those days, obtained artistic effects the way the Egyptians obtained electricity, while we wanted to get pure electricity, pure art.^{414}

Shklovsky created his theoretical works in a completely unacademic setting. Born in Petersburg to a Jewish family he didn’t even finish university because he volunteered for the army during World War I and was awarded the coveted St. George Cross for valor in battle. He took part in the overthrow of the tsar but did not support the Bolshevik revolution and even participated in an anti-Communist conspiracy. He was heavily wounded; while taking a shell apart to retrieve the precious explosive, the shell burst in his hands, peppering him with shrapnel. He recalled, “They couldn’t remove the pieces, there were too many. They came out by themselves. You’d be walking along and your underwear would creak: that was a piece of shrapnel that came out. You could remove it with your finger.”

Shklovsky was constantly generating ideas, which, in fact, came out of him like the pieces of shrapnel. It was he who invented the cultural term “ostranenie” (defamiliarization), which became fashionable worldwide. Our actions and perceptions, Shklovsky maintained, gradually become automatic: “Automation devours things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war.”^{415} Art struggles against automatic perception, placing a usual thing in an unusual context, describing it from a different angle or as if the object or phenomenon had never been seen before. This concept was popularized by Bertolt Brecht and became famous as the “alienation effect.”

Shklovsky described other devices the author uses: parallelism, contrast, retardation. The critic Prince Dmitri Sviatopolk-Mirsky (D. S. Mirsky) called Shklovsky “the father of almost all ideas by which contemporary aesthetics lives.”^{416} The ideas Shklovsky generously imparted and that first seemed too radical and lacking in scholarly respectability were quickly picked up and assimilated by the mainstream academic audience. By 1922 Mandelstam wrote that Shklovsky was “the most daring and talented literary critic of new Petersburg, coming to replace Chukovsky, a real literary battleship, all stormy flame, sharp philological wit, and literary temperament for a dozen.”^{417} Fewer than ten years later, Shklovsky would be forced to renounce formalism in print, to repent his literary “sins,” and to denounce his “mistaken” ideas. But they would flourish in the West.

The similarity between Opoyaz and the Anglo-American New Criticism is striking. But the methodology of Russian formalism was widely used in later years not only in the theory of literature but in linguistics, history, semiotics, and anthropology. Eventually Shklovsky’s categories of automation and alienation found application in the theory of computers.

Shklovsky died in December 1984, two months short of his ninety-second birthday. I visited him in his Moscow apartment in the winter of 1975-1976. He sat in his armchair, his shiny bald head, popularized by caricaturists, resembling a mushroom cap. Explaining why he had married a second time, Shklovsky joked, “My first wife told me I was a genius, my second that I was curly-haired.” He let flow a cascade of brilliant monologues onto his captive listener on every imaginable topic, his favorite, apparently, the life and films of Sergei Eisenstein. Shklovsky spoke the way he wrote, in brief, choppy phrases connected by association—the speech of an incorrigible formalist.

He told me,

Music is not my forte. But I like Shostakovich. I wrote about him. I even wrote about the ballet. There was a time when I went to the ballet, in Petrograd, in the early twenties. Everybody started going then, because it was no fun sitting around in cold, dark apartments, and it was light at the Maryinsky. I saw Mandelstam, and Akhmatova and Kuzmin there. Even Zoshchenko went to the ballet. Probably to meet ballerinas. The audience at the ballet in those years was rather fantastic. My neighbor, some soldier or sailor, would often ask, “And when are they going to start singing or declaiming?”

Shklovsky’s article on ballet, printed in the journal Petersburg in 1922, is typical of his no-nonsense, aphoristic style.

The Russian classical ballet is an abstract matter.

Its dances are not depicting a mood or illustrating something. Classical dance is not emotional.

This explains the pathetic and silly nature of the old ballet librettos.

They were barely needed. Classical pas and their combinations existed according to the inner laws of art.

Classical ballet is as abstract as music, the dancer’s body does not determine the construction of a step so much as serve as one of the loveliest of abstractions in itself.^{418}

Shklovsky transferred his idea of art as a sum of its own devices to ballet. The modern, sophisticated viewer brought up on Balanchine’s choreography is unlikely to argue with Shklovsky’s opinions. But at the time, his article was revolutionary, especially in Russia. Classical ballet was a formalized art to the highest degree. But it flourished—and this was the paradox—in Russia, where art traditionally was given an active social role. It was demanded that art be useful. And the dubious social usefulness of ballet was constantly being debated by many liberal critics. It was fashionable to attack ballet from the right and the left, and its very existence was questioned. The defenders of classical dance preferred to overlook its abstract tendencies and stressed ballet’s “emotional content.”

That is why Shklovsky’s blunt article created such a stir in the Petrograd ballet world of 1922. It was perceived not without reason as a ballet “manifesto” of the formalists and the radical dancers and choreographers allied with them. Sixty years later in New York, Balanchine still recalled that article with great satisfaction. “I met with Shklovsky, talked to him, and had attended several of his lectures,” Balanchine told me in 1982.

It was difficult listening to Shklovsky, because he kept getting sidetracked. But his article on ballet was another matter. It was written like a poem. And it seemed very important right away. I was young then and I wanted to be progressive. And who was I then? “Ballet boy,” “dancer-prancer”—we were always called names. People didn’t take us seriously. That’s why I am so grateful to Zheverzheyev. He introduced me to all these modern things through the back door, so to speak. The front door was closed to people like me.

“Take Mayakovsky,” Balanchine went on.

I adored him, but he didn’t pay any attention to me. He didn’t understand a thing about ballet. Zheverzheyev had exhibits in his living room on Saturdays, mostly from his own collection. I saw the works of many left artists, including Malevich. I liked the pictures, even though I didn’t understand them completely. The artists came to Zheverzheyev’s, had tea, talked. They mocked ballet: “it’s funny,” “no one needs it.” You see, whenever I read that in the newspaper or a magazine, I got very upset. I was ashamed: why was I bothering with something so useless? But then I saw those people at Zheverzheyev’s. And I thought, well, they may be geniuses, but they’re not gods. They are still men. And they don’t understand ballet. That’s why I was so happy when I read Shklovsky’s article in a magazine. Shklovsky was also a very progressive, very left person. But he wrote of the ballet with respect, not trying to kill it off. He explained why ballet didn’t need complicated plots. And why you could dance without “emotions.” And it was written clearly and simply—not like the muddled and verbose articles on ballet by Volynsky.”^{419}

Akim Volynsky (his real name was Chaim Flekser) was, with André Levinson, the first truly professional ballet critic in Russia, and in the opinion of some dance historians, in the world. Small and thin with a yellow, wrinkled face and always wearing an old-fashioned black suit coat, he was a Petrograd landmark. Volynsky could talk about ballet for hours in grandiloquent passages. He wrote the same way “in language combining an educational tract with a lover’s muttering, a laboratory analysis with a religious service,” in the words of a sympathetic contemporary.^{420}

In the spirit of the symbolists, Volynsky maintained that ballet must return to its source—religious ritual. Lopukhov reminisced about him, not without irony:

Starting with raptures in honor of Duncan and praise of the glory of Hellenism, he then moved over to the salon of Mathilda Kchessinska and began singing the praises of the most rigid classical ballet, discovering in it the same Hellenism. Now his adulation went to Kchessinska and his damnation to Fokine.

Balanchine, discussing Volynsky with me in New York in the early 1980s, was even more sarcastic (and unfair): “He loved ballet girls and built a whole ballet theory around them: that the most important element in ballet was eroticism and so on. He used to describe the big thighs of his favorites.”

Volynsky saw Fokine as the destroyer of classical ballet and the assassin of ballet stars like Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky. Volynsky never tired of repeating that Fokine’s choreography was merely an illustration of the music. That was the criticism from the right. But in Petrograd of the twenties, Fokine was also attacked from the left, because some young avant-gardists became enthralled with ballet, despite its “archaic” principles.

Balanchine told me that he met Shklovsky at the home of his friend Yuri (“Tuka”) Slonimsky. The apartment of Slonimsky, who was two years older than Balanchine and a student at Petrograd University, was next to the ballet school, on the corner of Fontanka River and Chernyshev Alley. In 1918 Balanchine started giving Slonimsky private ballet lessons and soon became a virtual member of the household, sometimes improvising at the piano for hours on end.

Slonimsky recalled that Balanchine “had the amazing ability to make you like him instantly.”^{421} He was, according to Slonimsky, one of the “desperadoes”—the term Yevgeny Mravinsky, then an extra at the Maryinsky Theater and later the conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, used for his friends—wild Petrograd youths obsessed with art.

In 1919 two other desperadoes joined Slonimsky and Balanchine’s crowd—Boris Erbstein and Vladimir Dmitriev, who were students of the respected modernist painter Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin at the Academy of Arts and had studied with Meyerhold. Dmitriev, the oldest in the group, soon became its leader. “That young man was not what you call handsome, but he was pleasant in a feminine way. A maiden’s face with gentle contours. It was that Slavic type that was so highly valued at the slave markets of Baghdad—of course, in the era of Scheherazade and Sinbad the Sailor,” was how the artist Milashevsky described Dmitriev, with some extravagance.^{422} But Dmitriev’s eyes were steely gray. He spoke little, in a low voice and curt phrases—and one sensed the weight and experience behind every word. It was Dmitriev who brought Stendhal’s De l’Amour to his friends, recommending it as “the higher mathematics of love.” According to Slonimsky, they made Stendahl’s book their bedside reading, having discussed it from cover to cover and constantly checking it against “practice.”

The friends also devoured Stefan Zweig’s melodramatic novellas about love; their favorites were Amok and Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman’s Life. Alas, the wild, romantic escapades were mostly imaginary; real-life circumstances were much more prosaic. When Balanchine and Slonimsky dared to take two young women from the graduating class of the ballet school to the theater to see the popular American play Romance, by Edward Sheldon, there was a scandal. The next day the school inspectress, known as “hateful Varvara,” ruthlessly interrogated the young women in front of the rest of the school, accusing them of “depravity.” Balanchine and Slonimsky were declared “seducers of young souls.”^{423}

Dmitriev, Slonimsky, Erbstein, and Balanchine spent almost all their free time together attending the theater, exhibitions, lectures, and all kinds of cultural disputations. Dmitriev commented on everything. He could address Meyerhold as an equal as well as Kuzmin, and the artist Golovin, who was a mentor. Dmitriev spoke proudly of a meeting with Blok, to whom Meyerhold himself had introduced him. Blok, of course, was an idol of Dmitriev’s. Slonimsky recalled how the friends had gone to one of Blok’s final appearances in Petrograd, and on the day of his funeral had been present when the body was brought out of the church. They also walked part of the way to the cemetery.

Dmitriev was an inveterate Petersburger. He could lead his friends around the city for hours, reciting from Gogol’s Petersburg Tales or Dostoyevsky’s novels. Dmitriev frequently recalled The Queen of Spades—both Pushkin’s and Tchaikovsky’s. Later, the scenic design for the opera was perhaps Dmitriev’s best work. I remember virtually shuddering when the curtain rose in the Bolshoi Theater, where The Queen of Spades was performed with Dmitriev’s design until the early 1970s, and saw the gloomy grandeur of a deserted Palace Embankment on a snowy Petersburg night. It was a visual symphony of black, dark blue, white, and gold—an unforgettable landscape by a great master, creating a Dostoyevskian atmosphere subtly enhancing the tragic music.

The year 1922 was the hundredth anniversary of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s death. In Dmitriev’s circle the phrase “Petersburg Hoffmanniade” became popular once again, signifying the phantasmagorical aspects of the city’s mythos, which was so fascinating for these young people. The friends found that eccentric Hoffmann touch in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and in Meyerhold’s staging of Masquerade. Dmitriev used to bring up Bely’s novel, Petersburg. And then, as if to counter the complicated symbolism of that work, he would recite the precise, severe poems of Akhmatova about Petersburg.

But the main topic of conversation by members of Dmitriev’s group was, of course, ballet in all its aspects. They discussed the stars of the Maryinsky Theater; they spoke most of the ballerina Olga Spessivtseva, with whom Dmitriev was madly in love. She died near New York City in 1991 at the age of ninety-six, and was hailed as perhaps the greatest Giselle in the world. Spessivtseva was a legendary figure in Petersburg in the 1920s. “I saw O. A. Spessivtseva in the box and I was stunned. Do you know who she reminded me of? A heroine out of Maupassant,” wrote young Shostakovich to his friend the composer and future critic Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky.

In 1970 in Leningrad, Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who had become my mentor, recalled,

Shostakovich, naturally, was in love with Spessivtseva. So was I, and how! Sometimes I thought that all Petrograd was in love with her. How can I describe her? An astonishingly lovely face, dark hair, big sad eyes. It was the Akhmatova type. Who knows, that may be why Spessivtseva was so incredibly mysterious and attractive. Akhmatova herself was crazy about her. Spessivtseva danced tragic roles, making them even more so, extremely tragic. Even recalling that is torment. She was taciturn, and wore an all-concealing black dress, like a nun. All of that also reminded you of a heroine of Akhmatova’s poetry.^{424}

Slonimsky maintained that Spessivtseva, who was not very impressed by innovation in ballet, made an exception only for Balanchine. Alexandra Danilova, in a conversation with me, recalled Balanchine’s relations with Spessivtseva with slight jealousy:

George adored her. Spessivtseva was a goddess: a marvelous figure, marvelous legs. But she was eccentric. George did La Chatte for her at Diaghilev’s. The music by Henri Sauguet was rather simple—not like Stravinsky. But Spessivtseva was very unmusical, so even that simple music, you had to count out for her backstage, and then push her on stage and pray that she hit the beat. I remember Balanchine went to Paris to do a ballet for Spessivtseva. That was in 1929. He got sick and Lifar finished the ballet. And ten years later Spessivtseva left the stage and spent twenty years in a mental hospital. That was a tragic fate, almost like Giselle’s.^{425}

The Dmitriev group hotly debated Fokine’s ballets. Dmitriev himself defended them fiercely; Balanchine and Slonimsky were more critical. They were thrilled by the plotless Chopiniana but were rather skeptical of Petrouchka. Slonimsky even insisted that Fokine’s Petrouchka was not ballet at all but a brilliant pantomime. The friends also rejected Eros, Fokine’s ballet to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. One of the impulses that led Balanchine to create his signature ballet Serenade in 1934 to the same music was his desire “to cleanse” Tchaikovsky’s work from Fokine’s interpretation.^{426}

Isadora Duncan’s tours of Petrograd added fuel to the debate on the direction ballet should take. A passionate supporter of the Bolsheviks in those days, Duncan settled in Soviet Russia and often performed to the music of revolutionary songs and the “Internationale,” wearing a red tunic and waving a red banner. In a dance to the music of the Slavonic March, according to a rave Soviet review, she depicted the “thorny path of the Russian working class, oppressed by the tsarist boot, and eventually tearing off its chains.”^{427} Balanchine was furious. Danilova told me that he had said scornfully of Duncan, “She dances like a pig.”^{428}

Shklovsky, egged on by Dmitriev and his friends, wrote haughtily, “We hail Duncan from the high shore of classical ballet.” That poisonous phrase became popular in ballet circles in Petrograd and was repeated almost like a password. When in 1927 Duncan died in a car accident, Shostakovich’s closest friend and a pal of Balanchine’s Petrograd days, the critic Ivan Sollertinsky, summarized the attitude toward the dancer this way: “Duncan danced only herself. Her dancing was a curious combination of morality and gymnastics. She did not have a free mastery of her ‘liberated’ body. Her movements were monotonous and schematic: leap, bent-knee position, run with arms held high.”^{429}

The experiments in free dance by the Muscovite Kasyan Goleizovsky, who brought his Chamber Ballet to tour Petrograd in the fall of 1922, made a much more serious impression on Balanchine. He presented vivid, highly erotic miniatures, performed by almost naked dancers, and some critics, accusing Goleizovsky of attempting to shock the public, wrote in irritation about “constant embraces with legs.” Goleizovsky used sophisticated music for his numbers—Prokofiev, Scriabin, Nikolai Medtner. Balanchine’s friends recalled that at first he was practically delirious about Goleizovsky and went to the hotel where the Moscow guests were staying to express his praise. Goleizovsky liked Balanchine. At one time Goleizovsky planned to move his Chamber Ballet permanently to Petrograd, away from the Moscow authorities, and have Balanchine teach a special class in “choreographic improvisation.”

But from Balanchine’s friend Slonimsky we know that the Dmitriev group gradually grew disenchanted with Goleizovsky. Another comparatively brief surge of interest came for the dance experiments of two other Muscovites—Lev Lukin (who, like Goleizovsky, choreographed erotic numbers to avant-garde music like Prokofiev’s “Sarcasms”) and Nikolai Foregger. Resembling the film actor Harold Lloyd in his horn-rimmed glasses, the tranquil and elegant Foregger gained fame as a creator of “mechanical dances,” or “dances of machines,” in which the performers imitated the work of complex, fantastic mechanisms. The lasting impressions from Foregger’s productions undoubtedly were reflected later in Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, with music by Prokofiev, which was premiered by the Diaghilev company in Paris in 1929.

But Balanchine soon had a new idol—the Petrograd choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov. Slonimsky wrote,

The revolution brought Lopukhov out of anonymity. If not for the revolution, Lopukhov would have perished in the stifling atmosphere and stagnation of the imperial theater of the early twentieth century.^{430}

In 1922, when it became clear that Fokine, who had emigrated to the West, would not return to the Maryinsky Theater, Lopukhov became the artistic director of the ballet troupe. An enthusiast and dreamer always in pursuit of one idea or another, Lopukhov tried to involve the whole company in his bold experiments:

In the evenings, at the theater, he got into fierce arguments with young people in the artists’ box or sat backstage on a stepladder like a huddled, skinny bird, and reacted violently to what was happening: approving some, encouraging others, ruthlessly criticizing those who made even trifling mistakes.^{431}

Lopukhov, whose sister, Lydia, was a star in the Diaghilev ballet and married the famous economist Lord Keynes, was a quintessential Petersburg avant-gardist, that is, the desire “to change everything” coexisted within him with a profound respect for the old masters, especially Petipa, whom Lopukhov adored. Lopukhov began his career as head of the Maryinsky ballet with a revival of the Petipa-Tchaikovsky Sleeping Beauty, and the following year he revived The Nutcracker. He introduced some changes in both productions, and the debates about the suitability of those changes polarized Petrograd’s ballet world.

Balanchine naturally sided with Lopukhov. Besides, even the head of Mir iskusstva, Benois, wrote an article called “Piety or Sacrilege,” reflecting the heat of the debate, in which he announced that the old ballets must not be treated like “embalmed remains.” Benois, a passionate fan of Sleeping Beauty, had been rather pleased: Lopukhov’s pastiches were so close to the original that to this day some of them (for instance, the Lilac Fairy’s variations) are performed throughout the world as the work of Petipa himself.

Volynsky, who plotted in vain to have Lopukhov dismissed from his position in order to take his place, responded to Lopukhov’s revisions of Petipa’s ballets with a vitriolic article entitled “Lousy House Painter,” referring to Pushkin’s famous lines:

Volynsky spewed forth even greater invective over Lopukhov’s Grandeur of the Universe, to the music of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony—a unique attempt at a new ballet genre, which the choreographer called tantssimfonia (dance symphony). Lopukhov’s idea, which he had started to work on in 1916, was that the leading elements of ballet should be the classic dance in its most intricate and complex form, based on great symphonic music without resorting to what Lopukhov considered distracting literary plots, elaborate scenery, and sumptuous costumes. Balanchine later introduced similar asceticism in his New York productions.

Lopukhov began rehearsing his tantssimfonia in the summer of 1922 with a group of young enthusiasts that included Balanchine, Danilova, and Pyotr Gusev. His production brought out, to the music of Beethoven’s opening adagio, eight young men bathed in blue light, who slowly walked past the viewers, one hand covering their eyes, the other extended forward. A chain of eight young women followed the men. Lopukhov explained that this symbolized “The Birth of Light.” Then came “The Birth of the Sun.” Later in tantssimfonia Lopukhov commented on the idea of evolution with rather abstract dance patterns of the “Pithecanthropuses,” “Butterflies,” and “Birds.” The Grandeur of the Universe ended with “Perpetuum Mobile,” in which all the participants, now in red light, formed a spiral symbolizing the universe.

Lopukhov did not try to use dance to illustrate literary concepts. He was inspired primarily by Beethoven’s music and followed the unfolding of the large symphonic canvas, creating parallels and counterpoint to it through bold, abstract movements. Balanchine used some of Lopukhov’s innovative ideas in his first American ballet, Serenade, which eventually won immense popularity.

Tantssimfonia had a different fate. It was shown only twice—first in September 1922 in the rehearsal hall of the Maryinsky Theater for specially invited colleagues and friends and then on March 7, 1923, at a benefit for the corps de ballet, after Swan Lake. Besieged by doubts, Lopukhov wrote in the margins of his libretto, “Won’t there be even one person who understands me?”

He could have found the answer to this bitter question at rehearsal, where Balanchine, enthralled by the avant-garde concepts of his mentor, enthusiastically explained to the worried dancers how best to realize the choreographer’s innovations. One of the participants in tantssimfonia recalled, “All the rehearsal work, all the finishing and detailing was done by the performers. Lopukhov would come and just sit there happily, observing the embodiment of his dream … he burned, glowed, and was as pleased by every successful trifle as a child.”^{432}

Dmitriev’s group came to the closed viewing of The Grandeur of the Universe, in which Balanchine had taken such an active part, in full complement and supported Lopukhov vociferously. At the ensuing discussion, Petrograd’s leading avant-garde critics, Asafyev and Sollertinsky, both recognized the immense importance of tantssimfonia. But at the performance for the regular audience of the Maryinsky Theater, the reaction was just the opposite: “Instead of the usual roar of applause, there was deathly silence. The audience did not applaud, or laugh, or boo—it was silent.”^{433} Lopukhov’s political enemies took advantage of this failure, and The Grandeur of the Universe vanished from the repertoire.

Sollertinsky tried to excuse the lack of success of Universe with the mass audience as follows: “The form seemed too abstract and scholarly; the added-on murky metaphysics with cosmic circles and world hierarchy completely mixed up the viewers.”^{434} Sollertinsky insisted that compared with the experimentation of Fokine, Lopukhov’s work had made an important step forward:

As opposed to the intuitive Fokine, Lopukhov is a rationalist to his bone marrow. Starting off with a music score, Fokine was inspired by its pathos and emotional flight. Lopukhov, on the contrary, takes it apart to the smallest units, and carefully invents appropriate primary choreographic movements for them.^{435}

This could just as well be an analysis of Balanchine’s future productions in New York.

To explain the lasting influence of The Grandeur of the Universe on Balanchine’s work, it is important to understand that Lopukhov, as opposed to Goleizovsky, continued to use classical dance. In the work of Lopukhov, even when he was introducing heretofore unheard-of acrobatic tricks into ballet, the general silhouette of the dance remained Petersburgian: severe, finished, elegant. That is why some Russian dance historians consider Lopukhov’s Grandeur of the Universe the first neoclassical production in ballet theater.

In review of the post-premiere discussion of the tantssimfonia, the author’s speech was summarized: “Lopukhov believes that this idea will not die.”^{436} That faith was not unwarranted; Yuri Slonimsky, the Dmitriev’s group leading theoretician, later recalled, “The tantssimfonia became the main stimulus in the life of the younger generation, and personally in Balanchivadze’s. Other Lopukhov productions too. The revival of the complete Sleeping Beauty, too.”^{437} But it was a long way to that belated admission, and when it came, Lopukhov was merely a shadow of his idealistic, energetic, and prophetic young self.

The persecution began right after the premiere of the tantssimfonia. The attack was headed, alas, by Volynsky, who began his devastating review of The Grandeur of the Universe this way: “Once a promising staff scribbler dreamed of the grandeur of the universe,” and so on in that mocking tone. Furious, Balanchine retaliated with a review of the graduating concert of a private ballet school headed by Volynsky. In the fashion of the times, Balanchine used a literary allusion in his title, filled with heavy irony: “The junior officer’s widow, or How A. L. Volynsky whips himself” (a reference to a character in Gogol’s comedy The Inspector General). Balanchine was no less sarcastic than his foe Volynsky; he described the students of the school as “provincially saccharine shop clerks with pretensions to solo roles.”

Balanchine did not spare Volynsky’s school: “It lacks the basic rules of classicism…. It all creates a depressing impression.” And as a final observation of the school’s effort, “It is left with nothing but a broken trough,” another literary reference, this time to Pushkin’s popular fairy tale.^{438}

Teatr, the magazine in which Balanchine’s lampoon appeared, featured the attack and printed the artist’s photograph on the cover: Balanchine, in heavy makeup like some decadent Pierrot, stared piercingly as if playing the role of a libertine, cynic, and skeptic.

The same magazine later published a playful satire on Volynsky entitled “The Demise of Theaters. Horrible Events in Ballet.” It described the fantastic “nightmarish tragedy” of the Maryinsky Theater, when Volynsky was allegedly confirmed as its director (the ballet world in Petrograd knew that this was his dream). Volynsky the director decided on a ballet performance and then asked Volynsky the writer to lecture the audience before the start of the show and invited Volynsky the critic to read his review at the end of the performance right from the stage. This led to a tragic end, according to the satire: listening to Volynsky’s endless presentation, “one of the audience died … and dying, whispered, ‘Too much water!’” (In Russian, “water” in a speech or lecture is like water in a ham—unnecessary filler.) Soon afterward, the rest of the audience followed suit and died, the magazine reported in mock horror.^{439}

The satire on Volynsky was not signed, but ballet connoisseurs knew that it was written by Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, the already notorious leaders of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS). It was an avant-garde theater studio, but the word “studio” seemed hopelessly old-fashioned to its creators, who replaced it with “factory.” In the anthology Ekstsentrizm (Eccentricity), published as the cover announced in the city of “Eccentropolis (formerly Petrograd),” Kozintsev proclaimed the “Americanization of the theater”:

Further, Kozintsev defiantly listed the “parents” of FEKS:

On September 25, 1922, FEKS performed The Marriage (“Not after Gogol”) to a stunned Petrograd audience; the poster had promised operetta, melodrama, farce, film, circus, variety, and grand guignol all in one. The whole thing was called “A Trick in Three Acts,” and Kozintsev and Trauberg were its “engineers,” rejecting the antediluvian term “director.” The characters in this amazing Marriage were Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, and three suitors who came on stage on roller skates: robots running on steam, electricity, and radioactivity. The latter explained, “Marriage today is ridiculous. The husband goes away, the wife suffers. Radium, a new force, works at a distance. A radioactive marriage is truly modern.”

The outraged public, suspecting it was being mocked, went wild. Kozintsev came out on stage and thanked the shouting patrons “for a scandalous reception of our scandalous work.” The action of The Marriage was a cascade of acrobatic tricks, satirical couplets, tap dancing, fox trot music, and sound-and-light effects. The performers had to be specially trained, because no one in Russia knew how to do all these things. The Factory of the Eccentric Actor prepared them in a marvelous old town house whose owner had fled to the West. Here seventeen-year-old Kozintsev and twenty-year-old Trauberg and their acolytes lived according to the motto borrowed from Mark Twain, “It’s better to be a young pup than an old bird of paradise.” Leading Petrograd avant-gardists were announced as teachers: Punin, Annenkov, Evreinov, and Lourié. But in fact they did not take part in the studio’s work.

One of the reasons could have been the excessive cockiness of the inventors of eccentricity. This is a description by Sergei Yutkevich, a leader of the early FEKS, of a visit to Annenkov, who was already a famous avant-garde artist and director, in a letter to Eisenstein from Petrograd:

Yuri Annenkov, a fine fellow, joined eccentricity, and our respect for him grew when he came to see us in striped pajamas (black and orange), in which he previously appeared in the circus, riding on the back of a donkey. Besides which, he can do handstands, tap dance, and draw smutty pictures. But that doesn’t matter! He wanted to get in on an exhibit of eccentric posters and we said: well, well, where were you before?^{440}

But Kozintsev and Trauberg did invite Balanchine to teach dancing and acrobatics. Later one of the participants in FEKS, the talented actress Elena Kuzmina, recalled him as one of her favorite teachers. Other classes at FEKS included boxing, fencing, horseback riding, and “cinema gestures.” FEKS’s experimentation resembled (in some cases outstripped) the attempts by Meyerhold and the early Eisenstein. In a huge hall with marble figures in niches along the walls reflecting in a multitude of mirrors, students dressed in “feksosuits”—white shirts and black overalls with big breast pockets and wide shoulder straps—boxed, tumbled, and danced the foxtrot to piano accompaniment. Balanchine felt right at home.

Kozintsev declared in the FEKS manifesto: “The double soles of an American dancer are dearer to us than five hundred instruments of the Maryinsky Theater.” But for all that, Kozintsev and Trauberg were habitués of the Maryinsky. They were great fans of Lopukhov’s productions, including his revivals of the Tchaikovsky ballets, and they pressed Balanchine for the subtleties of classical dance. Balanchine, in his turn, shared the FEKS love of American movies.

It was then that Balanchine developed his taste for Westerns and American comedies with madcap chases. Even earlier, in the winter of 1920-1921, he was stunned by Griffiths’s film Intolerance, to which their progressive director, Andrei Oblakov, took the students of the ballet school. Long after the show, the young people continued to reenact scenes from the film. Balanchine would pretend to be King Balthasar and his partner, Lydia Ivanova, was “the girl from the mountains.”

At FEKS Balanchine learned as he trained the young artists; he became more casual, daring, and eccentric. There, he was assured that the love of supposedly “low” entertainment—music hall, circus, movies, and jazz—was not a sign of poor taste or aesthetic “backwardness.” On the contrary—that was the real avant-garde of the most audacious and potentially the most fruitful kind. The “Americanization” of Balanchine started at full speed at FEKS, long before he arrived in New York City.

Balanchine’s life, like that of Petrograd and all of Russia, changed sharply in the spring of 1921. After several years of total state control, Lenin—sobered by the explosion of anger and dissatisfaction in the country—decided to loosen the reins somewhat. He had been particularly shocked that when in March 1921 the sailors at Fort Kronstadt, not far from Petrograd, rose against the Bolsheviks, many people in the city supported them.

Petrograd was threatening to become the center of a new, anti-Bolshevik revolution. Lenin worried that a rebellion in that unpredictable city could once again change the fate of all Russia, so he decided to act first. On his orders, the Kronstadt uprising was cruelly suppressed, and then, using the carrot after the stick, he announced significant economic liberalization, which he called the New Economic Policy (NEP).

Retreating from his rigorous Communist ideals, Lenin once again allowed the existence of small private businesses. The effect of that decision was astonishing. Most food and fuel shortages evaporated. Many stores appeared, cafes and restaurants opened where, for the first time in almost four years, one could order a bottle of wine and have some pastry.

Numerous new private theaters, cabarets, and variety shows flung open their doors. Multicolored advertising reappeared on gray building walls. Currency speculators on Nevsky Prospect were selling dollars, pounds, and marks. There was something febrile in life under the NEP. Everyone sensed that this breathing spell could not last long, so people tried to get as much as possible out of it.

With their wives wrapped in expensive furs, the newly rich filled the casinos, restaurants, dance halls, and movie theaters springing up in the new environment. To amuse their clientele, the owners of these establishments needed floor shows—preferably with dancing, definitely made up of short numbers, and most certainly with an erotic motif.

One of the popular producers of this sort of entertainment in Petrograd under the NEP was Balanchine, who began choreographing short numbers for his friends while still in ballet school. As a dancer Balanchine was considered good but no one raved about him; some of his peers were much more popular with audiences. But as a choreographer, he gained a reputation very quickly.

Balanchine felt that his first successful attempt was a piece to the art song “Night,” by Anton Rubinstein. This work already showed traits that would be present in Balanchine’s later productions: no plot, quasi-classical steps, and eroticism.

As Danilova recalled, “At the end of the piece the young man lifted the girl in an arabesque and carried her offstage. Today that is the usual thing, but then it was shocking. The impression was that the girl had given herself to her partner without a word.” The inspectress, “hateful Varvara,” cried in shock, “It is amoral!”^{441} But the students of the Petrograd ballet school, at whose graduation concert in 1920 “Night” first saw the light of day, were delighted. The number quickly became popular.

Another production by Balanchine that appeared on many Petrograd stages was “Valse triste” to the music of Sibelius, which Balanchine did for Lydia Ivanova. She appeared before the audience as if fleeing some evil pursuer, perhaps Death itself. Like a blind woman or a somnambulist she moved toward the edge of the stage, and just as the spellbound public expected her to fall into the orchestra pit, she turned abruptly and froze with her back to the audience.

In the finale of “Valse triste,” Balanchine boldly used an expressionist device reminiscent of the works of Edvard Munch but undoubtedly reflecting the influence of silent movies: emoting horror, Ivanova opened her mouth in imitation of a cry for help, without uttering a sound. The effect was extraordinary. The number was repeatedly staged in Russia after Balanchine left for the West, but without his name; it became public property. He later revisited and developed the motif of somnambulism in his ballet La Somnambula.

The young Balanchine’s reputation was also based on the respect his musicianship elicited. They knew at the Maryinsky Theater that even Marius Petipa had never learned to read a musical score. As Lopukhov recalled, the ballet school usually graduated “poorly educated people, even though they knew how to wear a ballet costume and conscientiously perform their dance parts.”^{442}

Of course, Michel Fokine played the mandolin well, and Lopukhov was known as an excellent guitarist. But Balanchine, with his broad musical education, had moved far beyond that. Even in the ballet school he had amazed his peers with his piano improvisations. He had also organized an amateur orchestra for which he arranged music using some very eccentric “instruments”: pots and pans, jars, tubs, and combs. As a friend of those years, Pyotr Gusev, recalled, in the finale of the overture to Carmen (orchestrated for combs), when the fate theme sounded, some of the performers fell as if dead at the first chord and the others followed suit on the second. It was a clever idea, and the public always reacted with enthusiasm to this amusing trick.

In 1919, while still a student at the ballet school, Balanchine decided to enter the Petrograd Conservatory. With the encouragement of the director, the composer and author of the ballet Raymonda, Alexander Glazunov, he was accepted in the piano class of Sofia Zurmullen, who had been brought to the conservatory by Rubinstein.

The sixty-three-year-old Zurmullen had reason to be pleased with her student: Balanchine quickly learned quite difficult works, soon playing Beethoven sonatas and Chopin etudes. In those years Balanchine enjoyed improvising at the piano and also composed a lot, primarily piano pieces in the style of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, as well as art songs.

Balanchine wrote an art song to the poetry of Yevgeny Mravinsky, later a celebrated conductor and the first interpreter of many of Shostakovich’s symphonies but at the time an extra at the Maryinsky Theater and a pianist at the ballet school. In 1982 Balanchine recalled wryly, “I wasn’t very knowledgeable about poetry then, and I thought, well, he seems sensible, a poet. So why shouldn’t I write music to his poem? And so I did.”^{443} Balanchine set great store by Mravinsky’s interpretation (with his orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic) of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies. Mravinsky’s recordings of the symphonies were kept in a conspicuous place in Balanchine’s office at the New York City Ballet.

Balanchine even showed his compositions to Leonid Nikolayev, a respected composer in Petrograd who was famous as a professor of piano at the Petrograd Conservatory. His students included three rising stars—Vladimir Sofronitsky, Maria Yudina, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Later in life Balanchine felt little love for Shostakovich, finding his work esthetically alien. But Shostakovich admired Balanchine in his Petrograd years both as a choreographer and as a dancer.

There is curious documentary proof of the latter. Young Shostakovich and his best friend of those years, Bogdanov-Berezovsky, carried on a lively correspondence in the early 1920s, even though both lived in Petrograd. When Bogdanov-Berezovsky died in 1971, over one hundred of Shostakovich’s letters from his collection were returned to the composer. The letters, as Bogdanov-Berezovsky himself once told me, were priceless: the sixteen-year-old Shostakovich unabashedly shared his impressions of books he had read, plays he had seen, and concerts he had attended. After he got the letters back, Shostakovich destroyed them. When I later asked him why, he looked away and, drumming on the table with the fingers of his right hand, replied laconically, “Too many four-letter words, you see. Youth!”

But in his lifetime, Bogdanov-Berezovsky managed to have published a few fragments from those letters. One was even reproduced in facsimile in one of Bogdanov-Berezovsky’s books. In this miraculously preserved fragment (extraordinary in its open, joyful pleasure that vanished almost completely in the later Shostakovich), the composer lists the stars of the Petrograd ballet he liked: “My dear, why is so much in this world so good? Long live our Ballet!!! Long live M. A. Kozhukhova, Gerdt, Danilova, Ivanova, G. Bolshakova, Dudko, Balanchivadze, Ponomarev, Chekrygin, Leontiev, Khristapson, and many other glories, hurra-a-ay!!!”^{444}

Dmitriev’s group was fascinated by ballet; they argued about it and dreamed of new paths ballet might take. But the only ballet professional in the circle was Balanchine. Moreover, he was the only professional musician. This explains why Dmitriev asked Balanchine to head a small group of young dancers for ballet experimentation.

About fifteen people showed up for the first meeting of the future ensemble. One participant later recalled, “We united to try to use our common efforts (as we so proudly put it) to push our art from its dead spot. Of course, the only justification for our daring was our youth.”^{445} And so they called the new dance group the “Young Ballet.” It is unlikely it would be remembered today if its chief choreographer had not been Balanchine, all of nineteen years old.

Dmitriev had made the right choice, becoming the first “impresario” to trust Balanchine. Others followed, including Diaghilev and Lincoln Kirstein. Balanchine was always “selected” to lead companies. He never forced himself, not knowing how nor caring to insist on his superiority. Either that superiority was recognized or the choreographer walked away.

In choosing Balanchine to lead the Young Ballet, Dmitriev had several considerations in mind. Being part of the world of theater and art, Dmitriev proudly recalled, “Meyerhold considered me an adopted son … and was jealous of everyone.”^{446} The twenty-three-year-old artist, a snob at heart, was impressed that Balanchine’s father-in-law was the famous patron of the arts and influential collector Zheverzheyev, who was respected by Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, and Dmitriev’s teacher at the Academy of Arts, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Dmitriev believed that being related to Zheverzheyev gave Balanchine an entree to the artistic elite of Petrograd.

Moreover, Dmitriev adored eccentricity. He styled himself a “Petersburg eccentric.” His best friend, the theater designer Boris Erbstein, had walked on all fours along the Nevsky Prospect on a dare, to shock the “NEPman shits.” Dmitriev considered Zheverzheyev to be a Petersburg eccentric, too. Balanchine basked in the reflection of his father-in-law’s eccentricity. The fact that Balanchine was a clothes horse was important, too. His white summer trousers were the envy of all his friends. In short, he was a “personality”: Dmitriev’s highest category.

Balanchine was the ideal leader for the Young Ballet not only because of his choreographic gifts; he also knew how to use his talent to help his troupe. Before the NEP theaters did not have to worry about the box office because they were fully subsidized by the state and tickets were handed out free of charge in factories, offices, and military units. Thus Petrograd theaters usually played to full houses. The reactions of the new public were often unexpected. Sailors and soldiers laughed loudly when Othello killed Desdemona. Ballet audiences stamped their feet and whistled when they got bored. “Today’s audience is much more expansive than the old one,” was the cautious assessment of the leader of the Maryinsky Theater’s ballet company in 1918 to a newspaper reporter.

This changed abruptly with the start of the NEP. The state cut back subsidies even to such established theaters as the Maryinsky. Theaters were forced to raise prices and the audiences diminished. The situation was even worse for many private enterprises. They fought for their lives to draw audiences. The experimental “People’s Comedy” run by Sergei Radlov, addressed to a proletarian audience, was forced to shut down under the new conditions. For Balanchine, who had often attended Radlov’s plays at the Iron Hall of the People’s House, this catastrophe was a harsh lesson.

Balanchine explained to me in New York,

The Iron Hall was called that because its two levels were made of iron constructions. The lacework railings of the balconies were also iron. Radlov’s audiences were the simplest people, among them many street urchins. They also had opera at the People’s House, the audience was a bit better there. But the opera itself was rather bad. They had no money. I remember they had to do the Polovtsian dances in Prince Igor. They could afford only two dancers, and they invited me and my friend to dance. I accepted, I accepted everything then. The two of us quite successfully presented the Polovtsian masses.^{447}

His unpretentiousness and flexibility as both dancer and choreographer made Balanchine the ideal leader for a small ballet ensemble during the NEP. He knew how to survive. Danilova maintained that in hard times Balanchine stole food to keep from starving.^{448} His character as well as the existence he led completely turned Balanchine away from snobbery. He was no longer affected by Volynsky’s attacks, who in an attempt to publicly humiliate Balanchine sneered in a newspaper article that “he is treading the Petrograd stages in a specific type of piquant, unbridled dance.”^{449}

Shostakovich in his later years liked to quote Chekhov: “I write everything except denunciations.” Balanchine could have signed that profession de foi, a statement typical of a Petersburg professional of high caliber who combines pride in his or her craft, respect for the so-called “low” art genres, and a quiet, ethical purity.

Although the revolution deprived Balanchine of imperial patronage, it taught him to work for the audience. The NEP in Petrograd completed Balanchine’s education. Now he would make a face whenever anyone said he “created” ballets. “Only God creates,” he would counter with a shrug. “I am only a chef cooking up another dish for the audience, that’s all.” That idea, repeated throughout his life with slight variations, would be the linchpin of Balanchine’s aesthetics.

On June 1,1923, a few months after the group of enthusiasts met and elected Balanchine director of the Young Ballet, the new ensemble gave its first concert in a theater appropriately called the Experimental. It was in the building of the former City Duma, located on October 25th Prospect (formerly Nevsky, renamed to commemorate the Bolshevik revolution). “The star turn of the program was Chopin’s ‘Marche funèbre’ choreographed by Georges Balanchivadze,” recalled one of the participants.

It was performed by almost all the females in our little troupe and several men. We moved on the stage in self-oblivion, wearing the fantastic black costumes that barely covered our bodies, designed by Boris Erbstein. We diligently performed the movements invented by the choreographer, shifting groups and poses that were imbued with deepest depression and grief.^{450}

The public liked the Young Ballet. As for the critical reaction, it was predictably divided along aesthetic lines. Volynsky attacked Balanchine; a young critic, Yuri Brodersen, who was under his influence, called the performance “a whole evening of stage triteness.” The progressive critics, among them the authoritative Alexei Gvozdev, an admirer of Meyerhold’s, were approving.

Balanchine got the hall of the Experimental Theater for the debut of the Young Ballet from the director of the theater, Vsevolod Vsevolodsky-Gerngross, who also headed the Institute of the Living Word. Vsevolodsky was one of the first to reconstruct and perform authentic ancient Russian rituals: weddings, wakes, and circle dances. He was fascinated by the folkloric, preprofessional roots of the theater. “We are also for a ‘left theater,’ but a Russian theater,” he announced. “We are not interested in Americanism, or constructivism, circuses, fox trots, or the cinema—no! We want to develop a line of spirituality in the new Russian theater!”^{451}

Vsevolodsky wanted to assert what he called “the theater of Logos.” In practice, this meant the domination of declamation, in which Vsevolodsky’s Experimental Theater became incredibly virtuosic. One of his most sensational productions was a performance, jointly with Balanchine’s Young Ballet, of Blok’s narrative poem The Twelve. Balanchine’s group danced to the accompaniment of a chorus of Vsevolodsky’s students declaiming Blok’s verse.

As a participant later recalled, Balanchine did not produce an illustrative pantomime but a complex dance in Russian folk traditions. Blok’s verse, which Vsevolodsky’s ensemble performed using sharp contrasts of tempo and dynamics, juxtaposing chorus and soloists and male and female voices of the most varied timbres, provided a sophisticated rhythmic base. It was a striking and entertaining show.

Before the revolution the music of Blok’s poetry lulled the audience. The Twelve, that portrait of revolutionary Petrograd that Shklovsky compared to Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, had a completely different effect. As the perceptive Shklovsky commented, “The Twelve is an ironic work. It is written not even in ditties but in the ‘criminal argot’ style. The style of the street couplet a la Savoyarov.”^{452}

Shklovsky meant Mikhail Savoyarov, a chansonnier popular in Petrograd then, who worked in the “ragged genre”: he appeared on stage in the costume and makeup of a clochard. Balanchine never forgot Savoyarov singing the famous satirical ditty “Alyosha, sha, take it a half-tone lower.” He often recalled other variety stars of Petrograd—Vassily Gushchinsky, Leonid Utesov, and Alexei Matov, and he could sing large chunks of the street argot songs. Balanchine particularly liked “Bubliki” (“Bagels”: “And on this lousy night,/take pity on miserable me,/a private vendor”) and “The Apple” (“Hey, apple,/where are you rolling?/If you end up at the Cheka,/you’ll never comeback!”).^{453}

Balanchine absorbed this repertoire and the music of innumerable fox trots, shimmies, and two-steps, dancing with his wife, Tamara, in numbers he created for such golden spots of NEP-time Petrograd as the Casino gambling club, the rooftop restaurant at the Evropeiskaya Hotel, or the small stage at Maxim’s. His need for such performances kept increasing, since his miserly salary at the Maryinsky could not keep up with the inflationary spiral of the NEP. (Lunacharsky later admitted, “In the early years of the revolution the real earnings of our artists equalled 18 percent of what we gave them officially, and what we gave them was approximately 1/4 of what they got before the war,” meaning, of course, World War I.)^{454} The infrequent concerts of the Young Ballet were not especially profitable, either. Still, the concerts gained popularity for Balanchine in avantgarde circles, and the young choreographer began getting work from the city’s established theaters.

He was asked to stage oriental, exotic dances for Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. Radlov, a family friend of the Zheverzheyevs, was hired by the former Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater to carry out a rejuvenating operation there, so he brought in Balanchine for his debut on that venerable stage, remembering him from the Iron Hall at the People’s House.

Radlov had a subtle sense of the ballet. Later, in the early 1930s, he became the artistic director of the former Maryinsky Theater, and in 1935, with his old friend Sergei Prokofiev, wrote the scenario for Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet. Radlov also was stage director of its famous production of 1940, with Galina Ulanova as Juliet.

Radlov’s career was interrupted during the war years, when he was arrested and exiled. It was only in 1953, after Stalin’s death, that Radlov was allowed to return to directing—in Daugavpils, a provincial Latvian town. The theater came to Riga to perform when I was living there. Still a child, I saw Radlov at one of the performances in the mid-fifties, when he came to take a bow after the show. It had been a flashy review in the style, as I later learned, of Radlov’s early Petrograd productions, and the gray-haired director, despite his trials and tribulations, took pleasure in the delighted ovations of the Riga audience. Radlov died soon afterward.

Radlov adored Dmitriev. In 1923, together with Balanchine, this trio produced on the stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater the new expressionist play by the German revolutionary Ernst Toller, Miserable Eugen (Hinkenmann). The play became the sensation of the season, and the connoisseurs particularly noted the sophisticated cubist scenery by Dmitriev and the vivid dances that Balanchine presented as silhouettes in the brightly lit windows of the “restaurants” onstage. The production re-created the exciting atmosphere of postwar Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic. And while the Petrograd critics rattled on about how Radlov and his friends “have exposed the sociopolitical contradictions of contemporary Germany” and were “reflecting the sunset of Europe,” the audiences rushed to the show to get a glimpse if not of Western life for real, then at least its theatrical version: chic hair styles and fashionable costumes, and the latest dances to the music of Kuzmin, with their contemporary Western rhythms.

It could be presumed that Balanchine was already dreaming of being there as he worked on this nostalgic show about Berlin. In 1981, I asked him why he had emigrated to the West, and he replied,

It was impossible to live in Russia, it was terrible—there was nothing to eat, people here can’t understand what that means. We were hungry all the time. We dreamed of moving anywhere at all, just to get away. To go or not to go—I never had the slightest doubts about it. None! I never doubted, I always knew: if there were ever an opportunity—I’d leave!^{455}

The opportunity arrived when an aspiring manager got permission from the authorities for a small group of performers to tour the West for “cultural propaganda.” The group included Balanchine and his wife, as well as three other stars of the Young Ballet: Danilova, Lydia Ivanova, and Nikolai Efimov. The same pretext was used the following year by two other émigrés—the pianist Vladimir Horowitz and his friend the violinist Nathan Milstein.

The unexpected and sudden departure, which was kept secret from the other members of the Young Ballet, was darkened by tragedy: during a boat ride on the Gulf of Finland Lydia (“Lida”) Ivanova drowned. A rumor spread through Petrograd that this was no accident; in the obituaries Ivanova was openly compared to Adrienne Lecouvreur, the celebrated French actress of the eighteenth century who was the victim of court intrigues. Ballet circles were convinced the secret police had had a hand in Lida’s death. Balanchine insisted to me: “I think it was a put-up job. I had heard that Lida knew some big secret and they did not want her to go to the West.”^{456}

Akhmatova was a great admirer of Ivanova, whom she watched at the Maryinsky Theater in the twenties. Akhmatova kept Ivanova’s picture for many years and referred to her as “the biggest wonder of the Petrograd ballet.” This opinion was shared by many. Kuzmin wrote that Ivanova’s name was dear to all who were interested in the future of Russian art and described her gifts as “childlike purity, occasional humor, attentiveness, piercing seriousness, restrained emotion and strongly expressed feelings.”^{457}

This characterizes the Petersburg type of performance. Ivanova loved Tchaikovsky, and not long before her death she wrote in her diary a touching comment that many later talked about in Petrograd: “I would like to be one of the tones created by Tchaikovsky, so that I could sound gently and sorrowfully and then dissolve in the evening mists.^{458}

With her death, the Petrograd balletomanes recalled one of her most popular numbers, which now seemed prophetic, “Valse triste” to Balanchine’s choreography, in which the dancer was pursued and finally caught by Death. This story had a strange and unsettling parallel in 1956, when Balanchine’s new wife, his fourth, Tanaquil LeClerq, was stricken with polio. Many people recalled that a decade earlier the choreographer had composed a short ballet in which he danced the symbolic figure of Polio and touched LeClerq, who fell paralyzed.

Undoubtedly, the flight of Balanchine to the West caused him psychological trauma whose effect grew with the years rather than diminishing. Moving to the West from Soviet Russia had taken on threatening political overtones. The revolution had caused mass emigration. Exact figures are still lacking, but some one and a half to two million people must have fled. They were primarily well-educated, ideologically motivated foes of bolshevism, many of whom had taken up arms against Soviet power. A great number of them considered their emigration temporary, particularly in Germany, France, the Baltics, and the Balkan countries.

For the Soviet regime this “white” emigration, as it was then called, presented a definite threat. The Communists attacked the emigration politically, mocked it, infiltrated it, and tried to divide, tame, and disarm it. Relations with the emigres were an important aspect of Soviet foreign and domestic policy; each departure for the West was perceived as a hostile act and, later, as unpardonable treachery.

The problem of emigration was particularly acute for ballet dancers. Their regular trips abroad had begun before the revolution, with Diaghilev’s company, the first alternative to the state (then still imperial) Russian ballet. After the revolution, the cultural emigration increased. In 1922 the press revealed that thirty-four ballet artists from Petrograd had left for the West. It was “almost all the top dancers of the former Maryinsky Theater,” Lopukhov admitted. Some of the new émigrés wrote to Petrograd from the West, and their letters were widely read and discussed in ballet circles.

The attitude of the artistic world toward the émigrés was complex; they were both envied and despised. A later statement by Lopukhov is typical. He declared that the ballet émigrés, “afraid of deprivation, thought about nothing but a sated existence and ‘security.’ They thought that they had no obligations to their own theater, to their people, that they were free to dispose of their talent as they saw fit and sell it to whomever they wanted.”^{459}

These bitter, unjust words seem to be addressed to Balanchine. We know that the members of the Young Ballet who remained in Petrograd viewed his unexpected departure as a betrayal. Balanchine’s flight was an irreparable blow to the Young Ballet, which fell apart soon afterward, the members going their own ways. Dmitriev’s career was the most brilliant. Disavowing the avant-garde enthusiasms of his youth, he moved to Moscow, where he became Stalin’s favorite theater designer and received four Stalin Prizes—more than any other Soviet stage designer—while the best friend of his youth, Boris Erbstein, was arrested, then exiled, and faded out of the picture.

Dmitriev died wealthy and famous in 1948 at the age of forty-seven, having designed no fewer than five hundred productions. Even in his lifetime, the official press flattered him with the term “classic,” for his realistic scenery for Chekhov’s plays and Tchaikovsky’s operas remain unparalleled in their own way. Until the end of his life, Dmitriev—despite all his successes a privately embittered and frightened man—was obsessed with Petersburg landscapes and returned to them over and over in his theater work and easel paintings.

Leaving behind Dmitriev, Erbstein, Slonimsky (who later became a leading historian and theoretician of Soviet ballet as well as a successful ballet librettist), and the other Young Ballet members must have been hard for Balanchine. But here his characteristic fatalism—which grew in later years and was undoubtedly rooted in religion—played a part. Everything had been decided for Balanchine: the idea of leaving, its plan, even the composition of the touring troupe. He merely had to join in.

Balanchine was superstitious, as were Diaghilev and Stravinsky. He considered it providential that the manager and organizer of the troupe had the same name as Balanchine’s best friend, Vladimir Dmitriev, even though this man was not related to the young artist. The two Dmitrievs were not even acquainted. (However, they are still being confused in the Western literature on Balanchine.)

When Balanchine and his small group left Petrograd on July 4, 1924, on a ship bound for Germany, the young dancer and choreographer’s material belongings were minimal, but his spiritual and artistic baggage was huge. He had attended the world’s best ballet school and worked in the troupe of the Maryinsky Theater, at the time the center of world ballet, with a classical repertoire of over two dozen works that had been preserved for the most part in their original form. No other ballet company could match that. Moreover, Balanchine’s musical education had been at the country’s finest conservatory, where his schoolmate had been Shostakovich.

Balanchine appeared on the Maryinsky stage in Petipa’s classic masterpieces and in Lopukhov’s neoclassical experiment. He had appreciated both the charm of Fokin’s plotless Chopiniana and the exoticism of Goleizovsky’s erotic miniatures and Foregger’s Americanized “dances of machines.” Balanchine was among the first participants in the Factory of the Eccentric Actor and the bold post-Meyerhold attempts to “circusize” the theater, undertaken by Sergei Radlov. He had recited by heart Blok’s The Twelve and Mayakovsky’s A Cloud in Trousers, read Akhmatova and Shklovsky, fought with Volynsky, admired and discussed Malevich’s designs and Tatlin’s constructions, and taken in the music of Scriabin, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky. At the apartments of Zheverzheyev and Slonimsky he had plunged into the whirlpool of the latest theories of modern art. And he had headed his own experimental ballet ensemble, working with some of the most talented young artists of his generation.

That is why the meeting of Balanchine and Diaghilev in Paris in November 1924 was only to be expected. Diaghilev’s troupe had been in the West for fifteen years, going through dizzying ups and downs. World War I and then the revolution greatly complicated Diaghilev’s ties with Russian culture in general and with the Maryinsky Ballet in particular; he desperately needed fresh, new talent. Otherwise his innovative company was in danger of going stale, which meant certain death. That is why Diaghilev did not delay in inviting Balanchine’s group to audition.

The first thing Diaghilev asked Balanchine after his dancers had shown the veteran impresario a few of the numbers they had brought from Russia was this: could the young choreographer quickly stage dances for opera? Balanchine replied without hesitation in the affirmative. And so Diaghilev established easy working relations with Balanchine based not on favoritism but mutual trust. The source of the trust was the Petersburg culture both men shared, which overcame differences in age, status, and sexual orientation.

Boris Kochno, in those years one of Diaghilev’s closest aides, recalled his impression that Balanchine had appeared before the skeptical impresario pretty much formed as an artist, with his own understanding of music and its choreographic potential. Diaghilev’s early misapprehension disappeared quickly. A particularly pleasant surprise for him was Balanchine’s firm grasp of Stravinsky’s music. Balanchine’s choreographic debut in the Diaghilev seasons was the ballet Nightingale’s Song, to music by Stravinsky, which he knew well; in Petrograd Balanchine had participated in Meyerhold’s rehearsals for Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale, from which the music for the ballet came.

Balanchine’s early understanding of Stravinsky’s music was the result of many influences. Balanchine was familiar with Stravinsky’s ballets Firebird and Petrouchka from the Maryinsky. But the composer’s symphonic and chamber works were often played in Petrograd in the early twenties; Stravinsky’s emigre status at that time was not yet enough to remove his works from the repertoire.

Stravinsky’s ardent admirers were Balanchine’s friends. Watching Vsevolodsky’s experiments in Russian folklore prepared Balanchine for an innovative, “defamiliarized” interpretation of that same folklore by Stravinsky in his Les Noces and Renard. Finally, in the early twenties Balanchine had choreographed a number to Stravinsky’s Ragtime, and just before leaving Petrograd he had started working on his Pulcinella. Thus, his involvement in Stravinsky’s music of various periods and genres was a professional one, from the inside.

Balanchine’s background, aesthetic inclinations, and temperament prepared him well for becoming Stravinsky’s ideal collaborator. Their first important joint effort was the ballet Apollon Musagète for Diaghilev in Paris in 1928. This ballet, with its mythological story of three muses, Calliope, Polyhymnia, and Terpsichore, competing for the attention of their leader, the young god Apollo, was used as a pretext for the music and choreography that corresponded to it ideally—outwardly restrained but dramatic in its peculiarly linear way; with hindsight it seems like an ideal manifesto of the neoclassical movement between the two world wars. Neoclassicism flourished then in Germany, Italy, France, and the United States, but the émigrés from Petrograd played a special role in its development.

Paul Valery and T. S. Eliot had expressed important ideas for classicism, and by 1915 Picasso was drawing in the style of Ingres. For Picasso, however, this was only temporary, as were many of his enthusiasms. Stravinsky’s neoclassical period lasted no fewer than thirty years, from the early twenties to the early fifties. And the most loyal ally of Stravinsky for that entire period was Balanchine, whom the composer esteemed highly as a refined musician and unique interpreter of his compositions.

Many historians link the appearance of neoclassicism with the aftershocks of World War I, when people tried to find a haven from the dislocation in an art that was clear, balanced, and majestic. Russian refugees from the Bolsheviks in Europe reacted acutely to the perceived triumph of barbarism and the collapse of the world order.

Petrograd culture tended toward neoclassicism even before the revolution; for example, there was a strong classicist tendency inside Mir iskusstva. The manifestoes of the acmeists in the years before World War I called for simplicity, clarity, precision, and economy in the selection of words; many of the poems of Kuzmin, Gumilyov, and Mandelstam were quintessentially classical. Before the revolution this orientation was presumed to be primarily aesthetic, with reference to Petersburg traditions. After the Bolshevik seizure of power the political underpinnings of neoclassicism suddenly became much clearer.

Some of the major Petersburg neoclassicists emigrated and lived in Paris in the early twenties. The leader of Mir iskusstva and the main theoretician of Russian artistic neoclassicism, Alexander Benois, settled in Paris with his niece, Zinaida Serebryakova, who while in Petrograd had painted neoclassical portraits of the dancers Lydia Ivanova and Alexandra Danilova. Dobuzhinsky and Somov, members of the older generation of the Mir iskusstva crowd, also lived in Paris. The neoclassicists Alexander Yakovlev and Vassily Shukhaev, graduates of the Petersburg Academy of Arts, worked there, too; Shukhaev produced a splendid portrait of Stravinsky in 1933.

The émigré ballet critic and translator Andre Levinson, who in Petersburg had won a reputation as a fierce defender of the heritage of Marius Petipa, became in Paris an influential interpreter of the aesthetics of classicism in dance. The former Petersburger D. S. Mirsky, a critic of postsymbolist poetry, leading specialist in modern Russian literature, and author of still the best history of Russian literature (first published in English in 1926-1927), often visited Paris from England, where he had settled. Stravinsky later made special notice of his friendship with Mirsky, who returned to Soviet Russia from emigration only to be arrested and die in the camps.

Bolshevik Russia watched the successes of emigres with poorly disguised hostility. Mayakovsky’s articles published in Moscow in 1923 on the subject of his visit to western Europe were filled with scorn for “Parisian” Russians. Mayakovsky was angered even by the fact that a portrait by Yakovlev, exhibited at the Autumn Salon in Paris, depicted a woman holding a book of Akhmatova’s poetry. The predictable but even then dubious conclusion Mayakovsky reached was: “We, workers in the arts of Soviet Russia, are the leaders of world art, the bearers of avant-garde ideas.”^{460}

Prokofiev, who while living in Paris continued nevertheless to flirt with the Bolsheviks, described in a letter to Moscow in 1928 the production of Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète, without even deigning to mention the choreographer:

I saw and heard that thing in Diaghilev’s production and am completely disappointed in it. The material is absolutely pathetic and stolen out of the most shameful sources: Gounod, and Delibes, and Wagner, and even Minkus. It’s all served up with extreme cleverness and mastery, which would be all right if it were not for the fact that Stravinsky missed the most important thing: it’s terribly boring ^{461}

(Prokofiev, of course, knew Mayakovsky’s reaction to Stravinsky’s music, after Stravinsky had shown his works to the poet in 1922: “It makes no impression on me. He is considered an innovator and a reviver of the baroque at the same time! Prokofiev is more what I like.”)

The Russian pro-Bolshevik “left” readily equated neoclassicism with counterrevolution. For them the “restoration” of classical forms evidenced the desire to restore old Russia, so the neoclassicists were perceived as enemies. Gumilyov was shot on charges of counterrevolutionary conspiracy. Akhmatova and Mandelstam were under suspicion as being “internal émigrés.” The Bolsheviks and their fellow travelers tried to persuade themselves and others that the neo-classicists were aesthetic and political corpses.

Now it is hard to determine the actual political views (or lack thereof) of young Balanchine in Russia. There is evidence that allows us to assume he was very devout, even though his enthusiasm for Mayakovsky’s often sacrilegious poetry seems paradoxical in that light. The politics of Diaghilev and Stravinsky before the revolution could be described as rather liberal. But the hostile attitude of the Bolsheviks toward émigrés in general and their political attacks on neoclassicism in particular inevitably pushed Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and Balanchine into the conservative camp.

The three shared a cult of Pushkin, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, classical ballet, and its genius, Petipa. Diaghilev began propagandizing Tchaikovsky in Europe in 1921, presenting his Sleeping Beauty (partially reorchestrated by Stravinsky) in London. In connection with the premiere, Stravinsky published an open letter to Diaghilev in the London Times in which he glorified Tchaikovsky, whose talent Stravinsky considered “the greatest of any Russian musician”: “The fact is that he was a creator of melody, which is an extremely rare and precious gift.”^{462}

In his production Diaghilev restored Petipa’s choreography, which Stravinsky remembered from his childhood. The first performance little Igor ever saw at the Maryinsky Theater was Sleeping Beauty. The ballet delighted the boy, and his devotion to classical dance, in which the mature Stravinsky saw “the triumph of studied conception over vagueness, of the rule over the arbitrary, of order over the haphazard,” never left him.^{463} (It was this production that also converted Benois, Levinson and Balanchine to the “ballet faith.”) Neoclassical Stravinsky openly proclaimed his “profound admiration for classical ballet, which in its very essence, by the beauty of its ordonnance and the aristocratic austerity of its forms, so closely corresponds with my conception of art.”^{464}

Inspired in part by his work on Sleeping Beauty, Stravinsky wrote his own “Petersburg” one-act opera bouffe, Mavra, in 1921, based on Pushkin’s comic narrative poem “The Little House in Kolomna” and dedicated to “the memory of Pushkin, Glinka, and Tchaikovsky.” It was a demonstrative act in relation to the West and the East. In Europe none of the three dedicatees were in especially high esteem. In Communist Russia their names were in fact surrounded by a negative aura just then. Pushkin and Glinka were considered monarchists, and Tchaikovsky was dubbed a pessimist and mystic, hostile to proletarian audiences.

Stravinsky, who a few years later would be called by Moscow a “mystic who moved to bestial fascism,” knew all that, of course. But Pushkin, Glinka, and Tchaikovsky symbolized Petersburg culture to him, and as he strongly felt aesthetic and ethical ties to that culture, he intended to promote it in western Europe. However, his attempts were not overly successful with the Western intellectual elite. The classically oriented art of his Petersburg idols was considered by many in the European capitals as being too traditional. The efforts of Diaghilev did not help, either. His production of Sleeping Beauty in London and its next version, shown in Paris, were both commercial failures.

Purely aesthetic reasons aside, an important role was played by the general political and intellectual climate of the times. The Bolsheviks had won the civil war decisively, and the pragmatic Western politicians began to see Communist Russia as an inevitable and formidable reality. As a result Russian émigrés in Europe began to seem a nuisance. And the avant-garde elite of London and Paris, disillusioned by capitalism, were attracted by Communist ideas. In these conditions all attempts to inculcate Petersburg aesthetics and values on European soil seemed doomed to failure, since they appeared hopelessly obsolete.

Vladimir Nabokov, born in Petersburg in 1899 when it was still the capital of the Russian Empire, exemplifies the cultural hardships of surviving emigration. His father, a prominent Cadet political figure, was expected by some to become minister of culture, after the tsar was deposed. Instead, Nabokov Senior died in Berlin in 1922, shielding the provisional government’s former minister of foreign affairs, his political mentor, from the bullets of right-wing assassins. Young Vladimir made his debut as a poet in Petrograd, but his real literary career developed after he emigrated, in 1919.

Nabokov’s poetic attempts, although not without their admirers, were not up to the level of Tsvetayeva or Khodasevich, who also emigrated, or even of such minor masters as Georgy Adamovich and Georgy Ivanov, who had belonged to the acmeists in Petersburg and went on to create the so-called “Paris note” school. But Nabokov’s Russian prose immediately put him in the front ranks, right next to the acknowledged master of émigré literature, Bunin.

In the first twenty-odd years of his European émigré life, Nabokov published some important works, and his experimental novels—Luzhin’s Defense (1930), Despair (1936), Invitation to a Beheading (1938), and The Gift (1938), in which one finds similarities to Proust, Joyce, and Kafka—marked the appearance on the international scene of a Petersburg brand of literary modernism.

Bely’s Petersburg is mentioned most frequently as a precursor to Nabokov, but his work also owes much to the prose of Pushkin and Gogol and the poetry of Blok and the acmeists. The world of exaggerated Petersburg theatricality triumphs in Nabokov’s novels; their refined style, playful inventiveness, and existential significance were evidence of the birth of a great talent. Still, the establishment of London and Paris were in no hurry to recognize Nabokov. Often they refused to translate and publish him simply because he was a refugee from the Bolsheviks, and therefore—in the eyes of the leftist Western intelligentsia—a reactionary.

When Nabokov’s novels did break through to European readers, the critics were sometimes outright hostile. Sartre’s review of Despair may be taken as an example. Anticipating the arguments of Stalinist critics of the late forties, Sartre accused Nabokov of lacking national roots and compared him unfavorably with Soviet writers, who, in Sartre’s opinion, were useful members of socialist society.

The position in prewar European culture of another émigré, Igor Stravinsky, was somewhat different. Nabokov was still a little-known writer, while Stravinsky was a recognized master of the European musical avant-garde. But even Stravinsky had difficulties in those years in France. After 1925 most of the commissions for new works, including two ballets (Apollon Musagète and Jeu des Cartes) and the Symphony of Psalms, came from America. When Stravinsky was a candidate for the French Academy in 1935, he lost the vote: four in favor, twenty-eight against. That humiliating rejection was gleefully bandied about in the French press, which reflected the attitude of French audiences in general, who were mostly unsympathetic to Stravinsky.

That is why the composer gratefully accepted an invitation from Harvard University and moved to the United States. Nabokov, who could not get permission to work in France, arrived in America in 1940. The war in Europe also influenced his decision. And Balanchine had moved to the United States even earlier, in 1933, at the invitation of a recent Harvard graduate, the young American aesthete and ballet connoisseur Lincoln Kirstein.

Neoclassical ideas had a powerful influence on Kirstein. In the twenties T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” became “code and guide” for him. In the late twenties and early thirties Kirstein also read the works of Andre Levinson, a Russian ballet reviewer in Paris, and later called him “the most erudite, perhaps the only contemporary critic of dancing.”^{465} Kirstein and his friends were thus prepared intellectually and aesthetically to transplant classical ballet to America in its most severe traditional form. Balanchine had no more illusions about his career in Europe; according to Kirstein, who met Balanchine in London, he was “intense, convinced, not desperate but without hope.”^{466} America held out that glimmer of hope.

In hindsight, we could suppose that the emigration from Russia of Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine, for all the differences in their backgrounds and ambitions, was no accident. Stravinsky left his homeland before the revolution, and it seems likely Nabokov and Balanchine would have chosen that same path even if the Bolsheviks had not come to power.

All three had been born in Petersburg and developed, independently of one another, a cosmopolitan aesthetics based on classical principles, but they gave those principles a modern twist. All three felt constrained within traditional Russian culture, which proclaimed the supremacy of content over form and demanded that art be actively involved in the social and civic ferment of the times.

To realize at least some of their creative concepts in an international setting was for all three a natural desire. The Russian Revolution had created new realities that made the emigration of Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine irreversible. As a result these three artists, along with others less prominent, created what I call the Petersburg branch of modernism abroad. These three were stifled in the nationalistic atmosphere of Europe between the wars. They imagined the United States as a safe refuge, free of European political labels and prejudices.

Stravinsky spent over thirty years and Balanchine almost fifty in America, and died in New York City; Nabokov’s “American period” lasted close to twenty. In those years Balanchine created a tradition of classical ballet that has become an American national possession; and Stravinsky and Nabokov powerfully influenced their American colleagues with their distinctive skills; the adjectives “Stravinskian” and “Nabokovian” became commonplace. All three became loyal American citizens, and, in fact, American artists. Nabokov even made the ultimate conversion: he stopped writing in Russian. Thus, their presence in America turned this branch of Petersburg modernism abroad into a specifically American version.

At the same time, the three planted a version of the Petersburg mythos in America in works oriented for American audiences that then traveled the world and, against all odds, returned to their native city, where their creators could not venture.

Teaching Russian literature in American universities, Nabokov tirelessly promoted Gogol, stressing the formal perfection and existential vision of his Petersburg works and pointing out the glaring deficiencies of the existing English translations. In the forties, Nabokov wrote a brilliant book about Gogol that remains the single best introduction to the genius of Petersburg for foreign readers.

Nabokov’s accurate translation and meticulous commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin remains unsurpassed; after Shakespeare, Nabokov considered Pushkin the greatest poet and once said that steady reading of Pushkin would increase the readers’ lung size. Published in four volumes in 1964, this controversial work kindled a new wave of interest in Pushkin in the English-speaking world. It demonstrated, among other things, Pushkin’s close connections with European culture, an important point for the cosmopolitan Nabokov, and his compatriot Stravinsky.

But Nabokov’s greatest contribution to the creation of the American image of St. Petersburg is his Speak, Memory, which many consider among the best autobiographies ever written. Serialized in The New Yorker and other American magazines in the last years of the forties and published as a book in 1951 (with the title Conclusive Evidence, which was later changed; in 1954 the Russian version appeared as Drugie Berega), Nabokov’s autobiography was enthusiastically received by critics both then and in 1967, when the author revised and expanded what was probably his most personal book.

Petersburg was a leading theme in Nabokov’s poetry. The émigré existence added nostalgic overtones: Nabokov tirelessly returned in his poems to his native city, lovingly going over the fading images of “my light, my airy Petrograd.” (I had a unique opportunity to examine the notebook in which the young Nabokov wrote his poetry; its title page had a drawing of a Petersburg landscape.) In his verse Nabokov responded to the death of his beloved Blok and the execution of Gumilyov. One of Nabokov’s best poems of his Berlin period (“Memory, sharp ray, transform my exile …”) paints a fantastic picture of Petersburg in the style of Dobuzhinsky and is dedicated to the artist, a fellow émigré who in Petersburg gave the teenaged Nabokov drawing lessons, which the writer applied gratefully, as he put it, “to certain camera-lucida needs of literary composition.”

In Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s tour de force, the writer emphasizes the role of the artists of Mir iskusstva, Dobuzhinsky and Benois, in the creation of that stylized image of “modernist” Petersburg, which Nabokov in turn wanted to engrave in the consciousness of the American reader. The main themes of that autobiography are memory, fate, freedom, and the possibility/impossibility of choice; the main mystery is the nature and essence of time. At almost every turn in the narrative Nabokov somehow touches on Petersburg, which becomes the leitmotif of the book.

The portrait of the city, first purely descriptive, then social and political, forms kaleidoscopically as if from a multitude of pieces of colored glass, a favorite method of Nabokov’s. The writer teases the reader, distracting his attention and then, like the experienced professor he was, suddenly gives a brief but stern lecture. The sharp homilies attempted to dispel the prejudices and doubts of American intellectuals about the existence of a liberal and cosmopolitan culture in prerevolutionary Petersburg, of which Nabokov proudly considered himself a rightful member and heir.

It was not an easy task. In 1949, The New Yorker refused to print the chapter of Speak, Memory in which Nabokov insisted that there was more freedom in tsarist Russia than under Lenin—a thesis at odds with the grim picture of tsarist Petersburg created by Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment and still current in the popular imagination. Nabokov’s firm political convictions, supported by his literary mastery, did, however, have their effect. Gradually, as his literary reputation grew, he worked his vision of Petersburg into the intellectual center of the American elite. By the time Nabokov’s autobiography appeared in print, it was greeted as a masterpiece. And his Petersburg took its place next to that of Dostoyevsky—a pioneering achievement of historical and cultural importance, opening the door for other practitioners of the American branch of Petersburg modernism.

As modernists with Petersburg roots, Nabokov and Stravinsky had much in common. They were related by the theatricality of their works, the paradoxicality of their creative thought, the love of playing with art “models” (literary ones for Nabokov, musical for Stravinsky), as well as an incorrigible tendency toward irony and the grotesque.

Nabokov’s novels are full of literary mystifications and allusions; often the “literary scenery” and point of view shift suddenly to reveal the presence of the omnipotent author. Alfred Schnittke, in his essay concerning paradoxicality as a trait of Stravinsky’s musical logic, analyzed the similar methods in the work of the composer (in particular Apollon Musagete):

This is not simply “in the old style,” but “in the old style through the eyes of Tchaikovsky” (the seventeenth century via the Serenade for Strings), that is, mystification with a triple bottom: the first impression is that of Lully’s ballet theater with a classical plot and typical orchestral score (“Les Vingt-quatre Violins du roi”), a closer look reveals the swanny Maryinsky ballet with its elegant pastoral air, and finally we see above the stage the shadow of the Magician controlling everyone; and here we notice that the ballet is for puppets and is really staged today.^{467}

In contrast to Nabokov, Stravinsky did not need “to conquer” America; his reputation had preceded him. Even before moving permanently to the United States, Stravinsky was the subject of a special New York festival in 1937, and as part of it the Metropolitan Opera staged two of his most Petersburgian works—the ballets Apollon Musagète and Le Baiser de la fée. Both ballets (and also Jeu de cartes) were choreographed by Balanchine; this was his first work with Stravinsky’s music in America.

Le Baiser de la fée, composed in 1928, after Alexander Benois’s idea, was Stravinsky’s “Tchaikovskiana.” The composer included in it numerous themes from Tchaikovsky’s piano pieces and songs. The plot, from a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, was an allegory: the Muse, “choosing” a newborn with a kiss, subsequently takes him away at his wedding. This theme Stravinsky and Balanchine shared, the primacy of art over life, an echo of the old argument between the Russian “realists” and “idealists.” Stravinsky and Balanchine considered Tchaikovsky an ally in that argument, and the ballet was dedicated to him.

Moving to America, Stravinsky periodically included Tchaikovsky’s Second and Third Symphonies and his Serenade for Strings in programs when he conducted, but Le Baiser de la fée became his final homage to Tchaikovsky. Nabokov, Stravinsky, and Balanchine all tried to enter the mainstream of American life and to become as Americanized as possible. Still, Petersburg never let go completely.

With Speak, Memory, Nabokov was the first to present the theme of Petersburg in the new American context. Stravinsky followed with his autobiographical dialogue books with Robert Craft. The impetus for those books was the numerous requests for interviews in connection with the composer’s seventy-fifth birthday. Stravinsky always wanted to control his interviews, another trait he shared with Nabokov, who responded only in writing to questions presented in advance and always demanded that resulting texts be reproduced without any cuts. Like Nabokov, Stravinsky discovered that the interview genre could also be profitable.

An important similarity of Nabokov’s and Stravinsky’s memoirs is that they attempt to impose an artistic order on the vision of their Petersburg childhood. They both guarded their past, and for both, this childhood was an inexhaustible reservoir of creative impulses.

During 1959-1968, six books of dialogues between Stravinsky and Craft were published in the United States. The tone of the first is comparatively impersonal, especially when it comes to memories of Stravinsky’s youth. The watershed comes in the third book, Expositions and Developments. Here the approach becomes positively Nabokovian. Many episodes resemble Speak, Memory; and if it is accidental, it is all the more impressive, underscoring the common cultural and emotional basis of the creative development of both men.

In Expositions and Developments, Stravinsky first found the strength to confess that “St. Petersburg is so much a part of my life that I am almost afraid to look further into myself, lest I discover how much of me is still joined to it …. it is dearer to my heart than any other city in the world.”^{468} The composer begins a journey to the realm of his childhood, evoking—in Nabokov’s style—the memory of the light of a street lamp that came through the parted curtains into the room of little Igor in the Stravinsky’s Petersburg apartment. That light led him to a world “of safety and enclosure,” with reminiscences of the nurse, cook, butler, the priest at the gymnasium, which Stravinsky begins with a typically Nabokovian passage that “memories themselves are ‘safeties,’ of course, far safer than the ‘originals,’ and growing more so all the time.”^{469}

Stravinsky takes pleasure in bringing to life the sounds, smells, and colors of Petersburg of the late nineteenth century, insisting on their connection with his later musical work (Petrouchka, Nightingale, Le Baiser de la fée). With special tenderness, “consumed with Petersburger pride,” Stravinsky recollects his visit to the Maryinsky Theater: “To enter the blue-and-gold interior of that heavily perfumed hall was, for me, like entering the most sacred of temples.”^{470}

The books of Stravinsky’s conversations with Craft became perhaps the most influential of their kind in the intellectual life of America in the sixties. They were avidly read in Europe, too, by the cultural elite. At the same time, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory was made part of the curriculum of modern American literature at universities throughout the country. It was then that Nabokov was proclaimed (in a book review in the New York Times) to be the world’s greatest living writer. Stravinsky’s reputation as arguably the greatest modern composer was established by then. It could be said that the American branch of Petersburg modernism had flowered gloriously. That is why the image of prerevolutionary Petersburg created by Nabokov and Stravinsky had such an impact.

The American cultural climate of the 1960s was especially receptive to that flowering. The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, observed in 1967, drew much interest in Russian history and focused the attention of large audiences on “the remote, almost legendary, almost Sumerian mirages of St. Petersburg,” in the words of Nabokov. The mystery of the city, its historical fate, its rulers and inhabitants were analyzed and described on various levels and from different points of view in such disparate works as The Icon and the Axe by James H. Billington (1966) and Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie (1967). The movie industry, after a long hiatus, returned to the theme of Rasputin (Rasputin the Mad Monk with Christopher Lee in 1966, and I Killed Rasputin with Gert Frobe in 1968); somewhat later Nicholas and Alexandra was brought to the screen.

Against the background of this heightened interest in Petersburg in the “high” and “low” spheres of American culture, Balanchine’s role and influence became very prominent. He succeeded in combining disparate aspects of the Petersburg mythos into a single enduring iconic image that had an enormous impact on the perception of Petersburg traditions by the American, and ultimately, the world audience.

When Kirstein invited Balanchine in 1933 to come to the United States to head a ballet company, the choreographer set one important condition: “But first a school.” Kirstein’s agreement determined in great part the future of American ballet, because for Balanchine schooling was never merely a question of technique. Kirstein recalled how the mother of one of the first potential students asked Balanchine, “Will my daughter dance?” Balanchine’s answer, in French, was neither simple prognosis nor polite avoidance: “La Danse, Madame, c’est une question morale.”^{471} Treating dance as a moral consideration was something Balanchine had inherited from the Petersburg masters, especially Petipa.

The school, according to Balanchine, had to lay the foundation both of the craft and of morality; they were not mutually exclusive. The attitude toward ballet as an entertainment did not hinder a serious opinion of its possibilities within the framework of high culture. Petipa saw himself simultaneously as court confectioner and enlightener. This Petersburg dualism unmistakably colored Balanchine’s activity in America.

And it was in New York City that Balanchine felt he was continuing Petipa’s work. It was only there that he could see himself as a sophisticated European, who had arrived—as Petipa had come from France to Petersburg—in a country of unlimited opportunity with a mission of converting the natives to the classical ballet. And like his illustrious forebear, Balanchine almost completely integrated himself into the culture of the country that had taken him in, in the process, as Petipa had done in Russia, molding from a traditional, highly stylized and constricted endeavor a vital, contemporary, and unquestionably national form of artistic expression.

In the United States, Balanchine’s neoclassicism, whose roots went back to the aesthetics of Petipa, took on unheard-of modern traits to become the “American style.” In Petersburg Petipa used the extraordinary Russian human material in building up the grandeur and lyricism of his ballets; in New York Balanchine was able to choose from that great American pool “bee-like little girls”—big thighs, nipped-in waists, pin-heads—who seem to be bred to the eminent choreographer’s specifications.”^{472}

This observant comment of Stravinsky’s is inaccurate on only one point: “Balanchine’s ballerinas,” as they were soon to be called, were not little but as a rule tall women. They moved with incredible speed, accuracy, and musicality. They had that specifically American combination of athleticism, unbounded physiological joy in doing their turns and leaps, and a natural feel for complex, syncopated rhythms.

This made American dancers the ideal performers for Balanchine’s ballets set to Stravinsky’s music. Two émigrés from Petersburg formed a unique duo in the United States. In his lifetime, Balanchine choreographed almost thirty works by Stravinsky, from Ragtime in Petrograd in 1922 to Perséphone in New York in 1982. The great majority of these productions occurred in the American period. Balanchine felt much more the missionary about Stravinsky’s music than Petipa did about Tchaikovsky’s. Many people considered Stravinsky a father figure to Balanchine.

It was Balanchine’s achievement that Stravinsky’s late serial compositions—such as Movements for Piano and Orchestra—which initially met with resistance in the concert halls, were received rapturously when danced at the New York City Ballet. The 1957 production of Agon, the composer’s third ballet “on Greek themes” after Apollo and Orpheus, was a turning point. Agon’s tense and “alienated” eroticism and its modernist sparseness stunned American intellectuals.

The dance critic Arlene Croce recalled that “After one of the first performances of Agon a well-known New York writer said joyfully, ‘If they knew what was going on here, the police would close it down.’”^{473} Tickets were impossible to get for the “twelve-tone nights,” performances at Balanchine’s theater composed exclusively of ballets set to avant-garde music. Balanchine sensed the parallel between the discipline of classical dance and the discipline of twelvetone composition, a comparison that was gradually absorbed also by the intellectual audience of his modernist ballets. First drawn to Balanchine’s theater by the innovation of his repertoire, they began to accept classical dance in his interpretation as a truly modern phenomenon, worthy of the most serious attention. This was a cultural event of the greatest importance. As Nathan Milstein, a witness to this aesthetic revolution, commented to me later, “Balanchine saved ballet as an art form for the twenty-first century.”^{474}

In the early decades of the twentieth century the international appeal of ballet was the result of the proselytizing of Diaghilev, who considered himself the child of Petersburg aesthetics. With Diaghilev’s death in 1929, the Petersburg connection with classical dance weakened and perhaps would have come to naught if not for the efforts of Balanchine. Balanchine also revived the Petersburg aura of Tchaikovsky’s music, which had waned significantly by the middle of the century.

Balanchine’s love of Tchaikovsky did not fluctuate with fashion. Among the first ballets he choreographed in America were Mozartiana and Serenade, to Tchaikovsky’s music. Each ballet evolved in its own way into signature pieces of Balanchine’s theater. The melancholy Serenade, with its flowing lines and an allegorical subtext, became one of Balanchine’s most popular works. Mozartiana, after several revisions, turned into an enigmatic homage to Tchaikovsky.

Returning regularly to Tchaikovsky’s music and to the works of Glinka and Glazunov, Balanchine set these compositions and his choreographic interpretation of them in a Petersburg context. This tradition began with Ballet Imperial (later renamed as Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2), produced in 1941 with scenery by Mir iskusstva member Dobuzhinsky as a specific “tribute to St. Petersburg, Petipa, and Tchaikovsky.” Subsequently, the imperial and court associations were persistently used in Balanchine’s Petersburg works.

This is particularly interesting because there was nothing “imperial” or “courtier-like” in Balanchine’s character, habits, and tastes. Of course, he was a courteous Petersburg gentleman, but it would be hard to call his behavior overtly aristocratic. As Milstein noted, Balanchine “was a monarchist and a democrat, one does not preclude the other at all.”^{475} His monarchism was nostalgic and aesthetic. Though Balanchine loved hamburgers and cowboy movies, in the rehearsal hall he became an autocrat. In that sense his theater could be called a tiny monarchy, with the choreographer at its head.

Paradoxically, the monarchist idea refracted through Balanchine’s ballets gained sympathy among the American liberal elite. Audiences left the traditional American egalitarian values at the doorstep of Balanchine’s theater, where elegance, brilliance, and pomp andcircumstance reigned. Imperial Petersburg was rehabilitated there, and along with it, Tchaikovsky’s music. Its romantic impulses were no longer held in suspicion by ballet connoisseurs, for Tchaikovsky was being interpreted by the same company that had proven itsmodernist allegiance with its productions of Stravinsky’s most avantgarde works. So it might be said Stravinsky finally “rehabilitated” Tchaikovsky partly through the New York City Ballet by the coexistence of his works with those of Tchaikovsky on the stage of Balanchine’s theater.

Balanchine’s 1954 production of The Nutcracker was the decisive breakthrough in that direction. That ballet, which has turned into a Christmas season ritual of sorts, made Tchaikovsky practically a national American composer. The Nutcracker, imbued with Petersburg associations, made the fantastic city of Tchaikovsky-Balanchine seem homey and familiar to Americans. Majestic and mysterious Petersburg took on cozy and intimate traits that were first introduced to Western audiences by Nabokov and then elucidated by Stravinsky in his dialogues with Craft. Balanchine functioned here as a great synthesizer.

Zinaida Hippius is credited with a well-known phrase (which may also have originated with Nina Berberova) that the Russian émigré cultural elite in the twentieth century were in the West “not as exiles, but as emissaries.” This was a reference to the cultural and political “mission” of the group, which had a two-part goal: to preserve the Russian heritage that had come under attack by the new Communist masters of Russia, for world civilization; and to warn about the tragic consequences of the Communist experiment if it were to be attempted in the West.

The influence of Russian émigrés on the policies of Western governments was, of course, negligible. Their cultural message was much more effective, and it too divided into two parts: it was addressed to the modern Western public but also to a certain future “post-Communist” audience in Russia. The power of the signal to the future depended significantly on the success of the idea in the present, that is, on the talent, dynamism, and conviction of the Russian cultural figures in exile. Also exceptionally important was the environment, its receptiveness, lack of prejudice, and enthusiasm.

In that sense the Petersburg modernists and America were a happy match. Neither Stravinsky nor Balanchine nor Nabokov had planned to become American artists or citizens. But western Europe proved inhospitable to the Petersburger’s strain of refined, aristocratic modernism. It was only in the United States that the Petersburg modernists could formulate, then plant in the Western mind a legendary, mystical image of their native city in that tragic period, when the Petersburg mythos was being systematically uprooted in their homeland.