St Petersburg полностью

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.94

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.95

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.96

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.”97 Balanchine was furious. Danilova told me that he had said scornfully of Duncan, “She dances like a pig.”98

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.”99

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.”