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!”40
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.”41
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:
In a country like yours, where major modern industry is grafted to primitive peasant communes and at the same time all the intermediate stages of civilization are represented, in a country which in the intellectual sense is surrounded by a more or less effective Wall of China, erected by despotism, there is nothing surprising about the appearance of the most incredible and bizarre combinations of ideas.42
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.”
