St Petersburg полностью

The attitude of the artistic world toward the émigrés was complex; they were both envied and despised. A later statement by Lopukhov is typical. He declared that the ballet émigrés, “afraid of deprivation, thought about nothing but a sated existence and ‘security.’ They thought that they had no obligations to their own theater, to their people, that they were free to dispose of their talent as they saw fit and sell it to whomever they wanted.”129

These bitter, unjust words seem to be addressed to Balanchine. We know that the members of the Young Ballet who remained in Petrograd viewed his unexpected departure as a betrayal. Balanchine’s flight was an irreparable blow to the Young Ballet, which fell apart soon afterward, the members going their own ways. Dmitriev’s career was the most brilliant. Disavowing the avant-garde enthusiasms of his youth, he moved to Moscow, where he became Stalin’s favorite theater designer and received four Stalin Prizes—more than any other Soviet stage designer—while the best friend of his youth, Boris Erbstein, was arrested, then exiled, and faded out of the picture.

Dmitriev died wealthy and famous in 1948 at the age of forty-seven, having designed no fewer than five hundred productions. Even in his lifetime, the official press flattered him with the term “classic,” for his realistic scenery for Chekhov’s plays and Tchaikovsky’s operas remain unparalleled in their own way. Until the end of his life, Dmitriev—despite all his successes a privately embittered and frightened man—was obsessed with Petersburg landscapes and returned to them over and over in his theater work and easel paintings.

Leaving behind Dmitriev, Erbstein, Slonimsky (who later became a leading historian and theoretician of Soviet ballet as well as a successful ballet librettist), and the other Young Ballet members must have been hard for Balanchine. But here his characteristic fatalism—which grew in later years and was undoubtedly rooted in religion—played a part. Everything had been decided for Balanchine: the idea of leaving, its plan, even the composition of the touring troupe. He merely had to join in.

Balanchine was superstitious, as were Diaghilev and Stravinsky. He considered it providential that the manager and organizer of the troupe had the same name as Balanchine’s best friend, Vladimir Dmitriev, even though this man was not related to the young artist. The two Dmitrievs were not even acquainted. (However, they are still being confused in the Western literature on Balanchine.)

When Balanchine and his small group left Petrograd on July 4, 1924, on a ship bound for Germany, the young dancer and choreographer’s material belongings were minimal, but his spiritual and artistic baggage was huge. He had attended the world’s best ballet school and worked in the troupe of the Maryinsky Theater, at the time the center of world ballet, with a classical repertoire of over two dozen works that had been preserved for the most part in their original form. No other ballet company could match that. Moreover, Balanchine’s musical education had been at the country’s finest conservatory, where his schoolmate had been Shostakovich.

Balanchine appeared on the Maryinsky stage in Petipa’s classic masterpieces and in Lopukhov’s neoclassical experiment. He had appreciated both the charm of Fokin’s plotless Chopiniana and the exoticism of Goleizovsky’s erotic miniatures and Foregger’s Americanized “dances of machines.” Balanchine was among the first participants in the Factory of the Eccentric Actor and the bold post-Meyerhold attempts to “circusize” the theater, undertaken by Sergei Radlov. He had recited by heart Blok’s The Twelve and Mayakovsky’s A Cloud in Trousers, read Akhmatova and Shklovsky, fought with Volynsky, admired and discussed Malevich’s designs and Tatlin’s constructions, and taken in the music of Scriabin, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky. At the apartments of Zheverzheyev and Slonimsky he had plunged into the whirlpool of the latest theories of modern art. And he had headed his own experimental ballet ensemble, working with some of the most talented young artists of his generation.

That is why the meeting of Balanchine and Diaghilev in Paris in November 1924 was only to be expected. Diaghilev’s troupe had been in the West for fifteen years, going through dizzying ups and downs. World War I and then the revolution greatly complicated Diaghilev’s ties with Russian culture in general and with the Maryinsky Ballet in particular; he desperately needed fresh, new talent. Otherwise his innovative company was in danger of going stale, which meant certain death. That is why Diaghilev did not delay in inviting Balanchine’s group to audition.