St Petersburg полностью

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.”122

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!”).123

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.)124 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.