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.”89
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.90
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.”91 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.
