There survive just two letters, one of trifling content—congratulations and best wishes on a Name Day—and the other substantive. They were both written, in elegant prose and in an elegant hand, near the end of her life, when she and her sister Alexandra, by then also retired from the stage, were living in the house they had purchased in the village of Vsekhsvyatskoye, now part of north-central Moscow. Sankovskaya had the letters hand-delivered by coachman to the dancer Mariya Manokhina, the daughter of one of her onstage partners, at the time of Manokhina’s debut at the Bolshoi in the ballet Satanilla. The substantive one, containing an exceedingly precise lesson in pantomime, offers insight into how Sankovskaya perceived her art and how things had changed since the days of her greatest triumphs.
Satanilla dates from 1840. It was choreographed in Paris by Joseph Mazilier before being revived by Marius Petipa and his father Jean-Antoine Petipa. The score came from two Frenchmen, Napoléon Henri Reber and François Benoist, as overhauled by a Russian conductor, Alexander Lyadov. Sankovskaya performed a version in 1848 at the Bolshoi, and remembered the role in sufficient detail to coach Manokhina through the essential moments in the plot, a tale of love, hell, and mortgaged souls. A female sprite, Satanilla, is entrusted by Beelzebub with the undoing of a count in his old, haunted castle but instead loses herself to love. She burns the bond that had condemned his soul to damnation, despite the fact that he will never love her back, his heart belonging to a mortal, whom Satanilla, in an act of selflessness, allows him to wed. She earns in exchange for her sacrifice the blessing of heaven and liberation from the powers of darkness.
Sankovskaya insists that Manokhina listen for her cues, and that she not crumple her crimson gown by accident or step onto the trapdoor leading to hell too soon. That would spoil everything. If a final rehearsal has not been scheduled, Manokhina should at least walk through her part backstage with her partner, Dmitri Kuznetsov. He and other dancers did not know their music, Sankovskaya recalled from the rehearsal she had seen, and rushed their dances. Since Manokhina was in the lead role, she would bear the blame if the stage action ended too soon. About the bond-burning scene, and the heartbreak that Satanilla suffers when she realizes that the count loves another, Sankovskaya was meticulous:
Begin to weep when you hear the cue, not before, and after four measures let go of his hands. Go to light the paper the second time not with your back to the table. Just turn your head to Kuznetsov. Toss the paper at the tremolo. Point to it at the cue and say that you are going to die, but do so quietly, weakly. Yesterday the paper burned properly. If it burns too slowly in your hand, wave it down, and if too quickly, raise it.50
Sankovskaya tells Manokhina at the start of the letter that she feels too weak to take a coach to the Bolshoi for the performance and, in her compromised physical condition, could no longer demonstrate the steps in Satanilla as she remembered them. She passed the torch to Manokhina in the same manner that, back in 1836, Félicité Hullen had passed the torch to her—professionally, dispassionately. “I don’t know if you’ll understand what I’ve written to you, but try to remember that you are not performing as a schoolgirl, have more confidence in yourself, and, mainly, listen to your music, then all will be well. The dances are all very good, but don’t be upset if they don’t come out as you intend. I suggest that you congratulate Gerber at the end, since he’ll still be conducting even if he’s not very good. God be with you.”
To the extent that most ballets tend to be about ballet to some degree, Satanilla might be seen as a parable about the devil’s bargains and sacrifices that dancers have to make. To succeed in the art, Sankovskaya advised Manokhina, she needed to “forget everything,” losing herself in the depiction of a character that desires to escape the bonds of the underworld and ascend, by means of the clasp in the back of her corset, into brightness.
SANKOVSKAYA DIED A few months after writing the letter and was buried near the church that gave her village its name, All Saints. The graveyard no longer exists; the church grounds were eliminated by the Soviets in favor of apartment buildings. The embers of Satanilla include her performance notes, published plot summaries, and, in the music archive of the Bolshoi Theater, the violin rehearsal score and a complete set of parts from the 1890s.
The fire that consumed the physical records of her career in the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater began on March 11, 1853. During a rehearsal at nine thirty that morning, according to a breathless article published in London Illustrated News,
a dense cloud of smoke was observed from one of the fire-station towers of Moscow, issuing from the roof of the large Imperial Theatre … It was soon found that the immense building was burning inside and that the fire had already spread itself with an amazing velocity in all directions of the interior. The flames burst forth from the fallen roof and from the windows: black smoke rose high in the air, and, sweeping over the northern vicinity of the theatre, obscured the light to such a degree that people could not well see what they were about. Innumerable firebrands flying in the air, threatened to set fire to the whole neighborhood. Had there been more wind at the time, and had there not been snow lying deep on the ground and the roofs of the houses, the catastrophe would have been inevitable.51
The mechanic who discovered the fire was “scorched.” The newspaper added that “from the number of employés permanently living with their families in the house, many lives were lost.” Firefighters battled the flames for two days, but the effort was futile, and the theater surrendered to the “greedy element.” There was an act of courage from a typical Russian man of the people: an unemployed roofer and boilermaker named Vasiliy Marin. The tale of his exploits was repeated in Russian publications far and wide, from Moscow to Yaroslavl, and soon immortalized in folklore in the form of a colored woodcut, or lubok. In the gloss published in London Illustrated News, the “peasant” Marin “nobly distinguished himself” by scaling the frozen rain-gutter with a rope and hook in his waist in order to rescue a man trapped near the roof. Three of his friends in the crowd of onlookers had tried to hold him back, but he broke free and ran toward the inferno nonetheless, claiming that he could not “bear the sight of a Christian soul thus perishing.” For his good deed, he supposedly received a medal, 150 rubles, and an embrace from the tsar.
The theater collapsed; six carpenters died, among them serfs belonging to the notorious Prince Cherkassky. Eighteenth-century costumes were lost, along with decorations, an archive of financial and personnel documents, music scores, and rare instruments. The intricate official reports (including Verstovsky’s) chronicle the burning of floors, ceilings, lamps, and sofas; the collapse of the roof; even the denting of the boiler-room pumps. They also pinpoint the exact locations of the employees of the theater from seven in the morning until noon, and include the testimonies of the seventeen boys and twenty-three girls who had been taking dance and music classes inside. The cause of the fire was never determined; none of the eyewitness accounts indicated arson. It apparently began in a tool room located on the right side of the stage beneath the staircase leading to the women’s restrooms. A technician with a key reported that he used it to store stage materials and warm clothes. The actors on the stage first saw sparks and smoke and then felt a massive explosion that shook the ground like an earthquake. Neither fuel nor gunpowder nor explosives had been stored in the theater. Flames overwhelmed the water tanks; the boiling water released huge plumes of scalding steam. The police noted the rescue of three bags of copper coins from a safe by the treasurer; a girl who’d lost two teeth falling down a staircase; a boy who’d left to buy a bagel just minutes before the inferno would have engulfed him; a man who’d leapt from a window in fright but then ran back into the theater to save a woman; a custodian who unrepentantly acknowledged failing to report the smell of smoke before finishing his shift and heading home; and an administrator who’d forgotten to take his mother with him when he fled their apartment in the theater.
The smoke cleared after three days, exposing the f
oundations and subterranean corridors underneath the part of the theater that had been destroyed. A feeling of desolation overtook Moscow, the loss affecting even those who interpreted the flames as the divine retribution of Holy Rus against the corrupting evil of ballet and opera—even though the small vaudeville house across the way survived. The part of the Bolshoi that still stood could not be saved. Vegetation encased the remains over the summer as the pagan force of nature worked to reclaim the temple of culture. The birds and frogs moved back in.
THE THEATER WOULD be rebuilt again in 1856, assuming its present-day appearance; Sankovskaya’s protégée danced in Satanilla on the new stage. Verstovsky remained in his post, cantankerous as ever, and continued to treat his dancers like serfs. But he could count on them to make his productions sensational—so much so that, before retiring, he would proudly confront the first documented instance at the Moscow Imperial Theaters of ticket scalping. The Bolshoi had cultivated a repertoire, partly imported, partly homegrown, but entirely for Russian performers. Ballet attracted large audiences drawn from Moscow’s middle and upper classes, and dancers appeared before adoring audiences. After 1856 nothing—not fire, slashed budgets, scandal, not even war—could erase its achievements.
. 4 .
IMPERIALISM
THE BOLSHOI PETROVSKY THEATER was gone, but Alexei Verstovsky did not much miss it. Nor did he see the point in rebuilding it.
The decision was not his to make. The Imperial Court in St. Petersburg approved and oversaw the reconstruction, leaving the cantankerous bureaucrat running the Moscow Imperial Theaters powerless. Verstovsky heard about the project from one of the architects involved in the planning. “Five million bricks” and “three million in silver rubles” had been budgeted, Verstovsky learned. “Doubtless it would be more cost-effective in the present circumstances for Moscow to resist building such a massive playhouse,” he argued, “which, even in its best years, had been filled no more than a dozen times.” The three million rubles would be better allocated to the railroad, he confided to a colleague, “and that is the indisputable truth!”1 Yet Verstovsky no longer had the stamina to fight for the truth; his “eyes were refusing to serve” and his handwriting “getting worse and worse.”2 In 1861 he surrendered his post to Leonid Lvov, brother of the composer of “God Save the Tsar,” the Russian national anthem for most of the nineteenth century. Less than a year after retiring, Verstovsky died of a heart attack.
The Bolshoi was rebuilt in time for the 1856 coronation of Tsar Alexander II in Cathedral Square at the Kremlin. Its opening was integral to the festivities. The budget and design of the Bolshoi bore the imprint of political and cultural aspirations to restore national esteem. The Crimean War, waged between 1853 and 1856, had proved a devastating and humiliating defeat for the Russian Empire. Disputes in Bethlehem and Jerusalem had prompted Russia to march into present-day Romania and threaten the Ottoman Empire. With France and Britain aligned against Russia, a bloody front opened on the Crimean Peninsula near Sevastopol. The city fell to European and Ottoman allies, forcing Russia to sue for peace. (In 2014, as part of a campaign by President Vladimir Putin to right perceived historical wrongs, Russia retook the Crimea from Ukraine. Sevastopol remains in dispute today.)
After the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and more than a billion rubles in the Crimean War, Alexander II grasped the orb and scepter in 1856 with a fresh start in mind and a new stage for the celebrations. There had been no unrest before his ascension, no regicide, no coup, and no evil omens—although the crown did slip from the empress’s head during the ceremony. Rumors that the previous tsar, Nicholas I, had committed suicide proved false (he died of pneumonia), and the throng at the Kremlin greeted the new sovereign without excessive cowering. Worries about his youth and inexperience were tempered by the sense, from liberals, that Russia needed reform. Reason, it was hoped, had been placed on the throne.
The Bolshoi Theater of 1856 lies at the heart of the Bolshoi of today. Some tsarist swank was added in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the heating and lighting were also upgraded. In 1917, the Bolsheviks smashed windows, swiped fixtures, and shut off the heat. The theater became a space for political functions—serious events, no fun at all, full of jabbering about everything but ballet and opera. The Soviet Union itself came into official existence at the Bolshoi. The workers of the world were commanded to “unite!” as children rushed across the stage in agitprop spectaculars. During World War II, a German bomb damaged the façade; repairs did nothing to improve the acoustics. Upkeep lagged, then ceased as the Soviet Union went bankrupt. The scuffed parquet floors sagged, the outer walls cracked and peeled. But the Bolshoi did not burn down, and its performers continued to be venerated by the public. Five hundred meters away, the occupants of the Kremlin regarded the theater as a potent weapon in the Soviet diplomatic arsenal. Fidel Castro attended the ballet, as did Ronald Reagan. The Bolshoi at present remains an elaborated version of what the St. Petersburg architect Alberto Cavos had imagined in a fevered dream.
Cavos, the son of an Italian opera singer and grandson of an Italian dancer, unreservedly pursued his passions for beautiful women, the cities of Italy, Renaissance painting, antique furniture, mirrors, crystal, and bronze. The fineries he desired informed his architectural choices, and vice versa. When his first wife died of tuberculosis after the birth of their fourth child, he remarried, taking as his spouse a seventeen-year-old. Together they had three children and nine or more grandchildren, but Cavos routinely cheated on her and the marriage collapsed. He retired to the Grand Canal in Venice with a mistress, leaving his wife nearly destitute and eldest daughter without a dowry. The commissions that had made him so rich (and, at his death, his mistress) included the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and the Equestrian Circus Theater in St. Petersburg. The latter indeed hosted the circus as well as opera. In 1860, it was rebuilt and renamed the Mariyinsky, after the wife of Tsar Alexander II, Mariya Aleksandrovna.
For all his fame, the commission to rebuild the Bolshoi did not magically fall into his hands. Cavos competed in 1853 with three other architects, his chief rival being the Moscow neoclassicist Alexander Nikitin. Cavos triumphed by correcting the most glaring flaw in the design of the old theater: the potentially dangerous pileup created by the stairs blocking the doorways to the lower-floor stalls and seats. Nikitin had proposed keeping the interior of the old theater intact, but, in hopes of preventing another inferno, suggested replacing everything once made of wood with iron and cast iron (excluding the floor and ceiling of the auditorium) at a cost of some 175,000 rubles.
Cavos also sought to improve the Bolshoi’s acoustics, which the intendant of the Imperial Theaters, Alexander Gedeonov, lamented. Cavos wanted the inside of the new theater to be like the body of a string instrument, a Stradivarius violin. He proposed removing the curved brick walls behind the loges and replacing them with panels that projected rather than absorbed sound. Iron trusses in the ceiling would suspend, from the seams, a resonant pinewood plafond decorated with a painting of Apollo and the Muses. Gedeonov discussed Cavos’s proposals with the minister of the court, Count Alexander Adlerberg, taking into account, of course, the opinion of the tsar: “His Majesty had no wish to demolish the present stone wall of the corridor; but since the wall is not entirely trustworthy Cavos accommodated a new one in his plan.” The architect also sought to ensure that the fireproofing had no “communication” with the auditorium—no effect, in other words, on its acoustics. Cavos won the contest, and construction began.3
Cavos made the Bolshoi the most sumptuous theater in the world, and in record time. Construction began with the sinking of bundled beams into the mire in May 1855. When the exterior was completed at the end of 1855, Cavos presented the estimates for the cost of the fittings, draperies, and velvets, likewise the price of the lamps and chandeliers, including the astonishing three-tiered chandelier of crystal pendants suspended in the auditorium. The chandelier was more than eight meters in height and
had more than 20,000 parts. But since it dripped wax and oil, only the poorest sods ended up sitting (or standing) beneath its splendor.
The tsar’s coronation was the spur in the builders’ sides. On its eve, just fifteen months after groundbreaking, only a hill of trash remained to be cleared. Cavos’s achievement, everyone recognized, was miraculous, unparalleled in theater design. Yet there was a problem, one that would haunt the Bolshoi into the twenty-first century. The foundation still sat on the bog below. Water, the bane of wood and masonry alike, seeped into the oak pilings, rotting them away and leaving the theater, a century later, standing on crumbling brick.
On June 16, 1856, two months before the opening, a serious problem arose. Cavos received an unsubtle warning from the minister of the court about an unstable wall behind the front gable: “It behooves M. Cavos to ensure that what he has allowed to transpire through his lack of care does not cause him to be held accountable.”4 The wall was repaired. Installing the heating and lighting left little time to gild the foyer and pad the seats, much less hire polite or literate ushers. But the Bolshoi was complete.
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