St Petersburg полностью

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.”74

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.”75 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.”76

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.”77

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

If you want—

I’ll be irreproachably tender,

not a man, but a cloud in trousers!

and that sometimes made the needed impression.78

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:

I flee, without looking back, I will seek

A place in the world for injured feeling!

My carriage, my carriage!

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.