In the years that followed, the Russian court became an isolated and rigidly ritualized arena. Nicolas even treated court quadrilles as disciplinary maneuvers: the baton was raised and the dancers stood poised in ready position, and when the dance ended they returned to their places and stood in alert readiness. In this restrictive context, ballet reverted to mindless imitation of the French example, and contact with wider literary and artistic movements was curtailed. Foreigners returned to prominence and Parisian Romantic ballet arrived in full force: Marie Taglioni spent five years in St. Petersburg, from 1837 to 1842, and danced countless performances of La Sylphide. Giselle entered the repertory too, and when Jules Perrot arrived he staged the ballet with Théophile Gautier’s muse, Carlotta Grisi.
To many observers, however, there was something stale and humiliating about this return to imitation-French dances: one critic lamented that ballet was “no longer ours,” and Alphonse de Custine, who recoiled at Nicholas’s repressive “empire of fear,” saw very clearly that Taglioni, who was not at her best (“Alas! For Mademoiselle Taglioni!…What a fall for La Sylphide!”), was being paraded around the city like a French poodle. He was disgusted at the way that the Russians slavishly followed her with “footmen in handsome cockades and gold lace,” showering her with “the most preposterous praises I have ever seen.” It was, he reported incredulously, “like a journey to olden times: I could imagine myself at Versailles a century ago.”13
In 1836 the writer Peter Chaadaev, who had served in the 1812 war and was sympathetic to the Decembrists, published his First Philosophical Letter, which, in the words of Herzen, was like a “shot that rang out in the dark night … one had to wake up.” Russia, Chaadaev wrote (echoing Griboyedov), had no viable tradition or ideas of her own, only barbarism, superstition, and foreign domination. The official reaction was swift: Chaadaev was placed under house arrest, declared insane, and carefully watched by doctors in Nicholas’s employ. His work was nonetheless widely distributed underground and set off a complicated and anguished debate between Slavophiles, who insisted that the country must return to “the people” and an idealized pre-Petrine past, and Westernizers, resigned to the fact that Russia must absorb and build on the cultural heritage of the West—as Herzen put it, “We have nothing to go back to. The political life of Russia before Peter was ugly, poor and savage.”14
But ballet, like the court itself, did not “wake up” and after 1848 its slumber only deepened. As west Europe erupted in revolution and its monarchies weakened to the point of collapse, Nicholas appeared vindicated. The West, as his supporters saw it, had turned away from the path of stability and absolute rule: only Russia seemed to have the strength and will to resist revolution and uphold Europe’s aristocratic and monarchical traditions—including classical ballet. That year the director of the Imperial Theaters wrote to the Russian consul general in Paris: “The present situation in Europe means artists can only be thinking of our theatres.…consequently their demands must be less excessive than in the past.” He was not wrong. Paris was unstable: in the wake of the violence of 1848, audiences stayed home, and an outbreak of cholera made matters worse. The Paris Opera, as we have seen, was increasingly entrenched. It had barely deigned to offer a position to Jules Perrot, among the most talented ballet masters of his generation, and when the offer did finally come Perrot turned it down and took a position at Nicholas’s court instead. He married a Russian woman and stayed in St. Petersburg for the next eleven years, producing lavish and spectacular ballets in a grand and melodramatic French Romantic style.15
This façade of stability, however, was about to crack. In 1856 Russia was humiliatingly defeated by France and Britain in the Crimean War, which finally unhinged Nicholas I and deeply undermined the country’s confidence. “On the surface,” as one critic put it, “there is glitter, beneath rot.” Part of the rot, it was widely perceived, was the result of serfdom, which was thought to be weakening the country from within. When Nicholas died a few years later, the more reform-minded Alexander II assumed the throne, and in 1861 he made a dramatic concession: he emancipated the serfs. This would take years to fully achieve and many serfs were left destitute in the process, but it was nonetheless a momentous change that inspired flights of optimism and unleashed a storm of debate and––when the reforms fell short—bitter recrimination. The foundation of autocratic rule had weakened from within and the opposition was galvanized. This was the “era of proclamations,” when relaxed censorship allowed radical political groups to speak out brazenly on the peasant question and printed pamphlets were jammed into mailboxes and stuffed into theater programs. In 1862 a rash of mysterious fires rumored to have been started by groups hoping to bring down the Imperial system burned in St. Petersburg, and four years later Alexander narrowly escaped the first of several assassination attempts.16
In this tense political environment even classical ballet was forced out of its gilded cage. In 1863 the writer M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–1889) launched a scathing attack on the art, which seemed to him to exemplify what he called, in another context, the “bovine indifference” of the Russian elite:
I love ballet for its constancy. New Governments rise up; new people appear on the scene; new facts arise; whole ways of life change; science and art follow these occurrences anxiously, adding to or sometimes changing their very compositions—only the ballet knows and hears nothing.…Ballet is fundamentally conservative, conservative to the point of self-oblivion.
Shchedrin worked closely with the poet Nikolai Nekrasov (who published his own verse on the contemptible state of ballet three years later) and with the writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), whose novel What Is to Be Done?—written from prison in 1863—became a seminal text for political radicalism. These men were angered and disappointed by the limited scope of Alexander’s reforms and sympathetic to the “new men” of their time—men the novelist Ivan Turgenev branded as “nihilists” for their dark cynicism and eagerness to break violently with the past. In search of other paths and a new morality, they invested their political fervor in the people: not Gallicized and balletic country folk but what they liked to think of as real, gritty Russian peasants.17
Painters, writers, dramatists, and musicians were also turning “back to the people” and attempting, in a variety of ways, to break with Russia’s Imperial and aristocratic heritage. In 1862 a group of Russian musicians including Mussorgsky, Cui, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Balakirev (a friend and follower of Chernyshevsky) established the Free Music School, which eschewed the rigor and rules of the European tradition and openly incorporated (and invented) Russian folk forms. As one of its leading supporters put it, the “hoopskirts and tailcoats” of the past would finally have to face the “long Russian coats” of the new school. So it was with art: students at the Imperial Academy became increasingly dissatisfied with what they perceived as stodgy European training and an outmoded emphasis on antiquity and the old masters. In 1870 a group of self-described “Wanderers” broke away and dedicated themselves to a new realist art, socially and politically relevant. That year the painter Ilya Repin embarked on his trip down the Volga River, which resulted in The Volga Barge Haulers, a grim and starkly rendered depiction of the lives of the men he had met and come to know there. It was a momentous time: literature had Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, and theater was galvanized by Alexander Ostrovsky, a Muscovite who pioneered a sharply satirical and self-consciously realist and Russian dramatic art.18
In a halfhearted effort to acknowledge the new directions in politics and art, the French ballet master Saint-Léon created The Little Humpbacked Horse in 1864, loosely based on a Russian fairy tale with music by Cesare Pugni (an Italian) and starring the Russian ballerina Marfa Muravieva. Costumed, we learn from the Russian critic André Levinson, in an “imitation Russian style” with tutu, satin shoes, and a Muscovite diadem, Muravieva danced a kamarinskaya on toe, accompanied by the bravura violinist Henryk Wieniawski with long black hair flying.
Building to a crescendo, she ended (an admirer recalled) with “a broad sweep of one arm and a low bow from the waist, Russian style.” To fill out this going-to-the-people picture, Saint-Léon added numerous folk dances with plenty of knee squatting, and the ballet ended with a spectacular parade featuring Cossacks, Karelians, Tartars, and Samoyeds. Audiences were thrilled; building on his success, Saint-Léon created The Golden Fish (1867), inspired by Pushkin’s poem.19
Not everyone, however, was impressed. The Russian ballerina Ekaterina Vazem called The Little Humpbacked Horse a “propaganda weapon,” sardonically noting that it was made by a French choreographer to music by an Italian composer played by German musicians. The critic Sergei Nikolaevich Khudekov snidely dismissed Saint-Léon’s Russian dances as the manipulations of a “clever foreigner.” Shchedrin had the last word: he lashed out at Saint-Leon’s Golden Fish for its misty-eyed depiction of “a fairy-like population of peasants.” “Why do they dance? Because their fishing is going well, because their boat is ready; they dance because they are peasants, and that is what peasants in ballets must do.”20
Shchedrin was only partly right. What he—like Saint-Léon and Didelot before him—did not realize was that ballet would not finally “wake up” or become Russian by going back to “the people” or by shaping itself to Russian folk tales or musical forms. Indeed, it was precisely ballet’s immobility and artifice, its foreignness and fundamental inability ever to be “real,” that would eventually make it a preeminently Russian classical art. Paradoxically, what Saltykov-Shchedrin saw as “self-oblivion” turned out to be ballet’s greatest asset: it was stuck, but that also meant that it marked a historical place and fiercely guarded the aristocratic principle that was its guiding force. Shchedrin wanted to throw ballet aside because it offended his desire for social and political justice, and we can understand the sentiment, but ballet in Russia would not be saved from “self-oblivion” by its critics—or Russia’s. To the contrary: the man who would pull ballet out of its complacency was an insider, a dancer and ballet master who had worn ballet’s movements and found beauty in them. He was not a Russian but a Frenchman and consummate courtier who spent his life in the enclave of the Imperial Theaters, an artist who would change ballet by making it more, not less, Imperial: Marius Petipa.
Marius Petipa arrived in St. Petersburg from Paris in 1847. He did not come as a foreign star. In fact, his early career in the West had been undistinguished. Born in 1818 in Marseilles to a large family of itinerant performers (his father was a ballet master), he learned to dance and play the violin and spent his childhood touring Europe. The family performed in Belgium and in Bordeaux and Nantes, and in 1839 Petipa and his father embarked on an ambitious but financially disastrous theatrical stint in America. Subsequently he studied with Auguste Vestris in Paris, danced at the Comédie-Française, and spent several years in Madrid, where he mounted ballets on Spanish themes and became embroiled in a love tangle that eventually forced him to flee the country. By 1847 he was back in Paris, where his more successful brother, the dancer Lucien Petipa (who had danced the lead role in the premiere of Giselle), helped arrange positions for him and their father at the Russian Imperial Theaters.
Petipa thus came with a low profile: he was paid considerably less than most foreign dancers and had to work his way up the Imperial hierarchy. He lived in the shadow of Jules Perrot, his older and more illustrious compatriot and then chief ballet master. In Russia, Perrot took his craft and enlarged its frame, expanding the Romantic ballet to a scale befitting the Imperial capital. Esmeralda (inspired by Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and first performed in London) grew from its original skimpy five scenes to a full-evening work in three acts, sumptuously staged; Eoline, ou la Dryade (1858) was four acts and five hours in length, unheard of in Paris or Milan, where ballets generally shared a program with opera and were more modest in length. Perrot’s fantastical ballets, which included lavish spectacular effects (ships sinking, fireworks exploding) and comic scenes, were supported by an enormous company of dancers and vast resources. A report commissioned by the tsar in the 1850s noted that the St. Petersburg troupe had 261 more dancers than the Paris Opera, and that ballet (not opera) was the theater’s single most costly item. Perrot’s productions were also of a piece with the fairy-tale aesthetic established at the Imperial court, where comic opera and vaudeville were especially in demand, and balls were sumptuous affairs featuring men in gold spangled uniforms and (as Théophile Gautier reported) “Byzantine madonnas” draped in robes of gold and silver brocade with bare shoulders and glittering jewels. Halls were illuminated with thousands of candles producing “constellations of fire,” and amid this splendor, courtiers danced.21
It was an ironic situation: in western Europe ballet was already in decline, but inside the protected walls of the Russian Imperial Theaters Perrot quietly handed Petipa the French Romantic tradition, however grandiose and enlarged. Petipa inherited the Danish tradition too, via the Swedish-born dancer and teacher Johansson, who, as we have seen, was a student of Bournonville. Johansson was one of Russia’s most exacting and skilled dance teachers, known for his intricate, difficult combinations (he liked to lay his fiddle across his knee and pluck pizzicato to emphasize precision). There were others to learn from too, among them Felix Kschessinsky, a Pole famous for his Polish, Hungarian, and Gypsy dances. Russia thus acted as a cultural incubator, and the Imperial Theaters gave Petipa the time and resources to fully absorb the teachings of these dancers and ballet masters. For over a decade before he produced anything significant of his own, he dutifully applied himself to learning his craft: dancing, teaching, mounting ballets, conducting rehearsals, and learning to make his way through the labyrinthine Imperial bureaucracy. He would draw on Perrot’s work in particular for years to come, restaging many of the ballet master’s dances and carefully preserving and building on this very French past.
Indeed, in Russia Petipa became more French than the French. Although he lived in St. Petersburg for more than fifty years, until his death in 1910, and married twice, both times to Russian dancers (with whom he had nine children), he held tight to his Catholic faith and never learned the local language. His pidgin Russian was a source of embarrassment as he grew older, but for most of his career he lived hermetically at court and conducted all of his business in French. No fool, Petipa knew that his studied ignorance was also a mark of prestige, and he carefully preserved and cultivated his ties to the French capital: whenever possible he spent summers there, and he was in close touch with his brother Lucien, who rose to the position of ballet master at the Paris Opera in 1860, and who sent ballet scenarios and kept Marius abreast of the latest fashions.
Petipa’s early Russian ballets were self-consciously Parisian except that, following Perrot, they were bigger and more opulent. His first important success came in 1862 with The Pharaoh’s Daughter, to music by the theater’s resident ballet composer, Cesare Pugni. It had a libretto by Vernoy de Saint-Georges drawn from the novel Le roman de la Momie by Théophile Gautier, the very same team that twenty-one years earlier had produced the scenario for Giselle. The Pharaoh’s Daughter was a sprawling five-hour-long grand-opera-style ballet, packed with pageantry and special effects. There was a dance for eighteen couples with baskets of flowers balanced on their heads: on the final chord thirty-six children popped out of the flowers. There were camels, monkeys, and a lion, and water sprayed up from an onstage fountain (later productions featured a waterfall, electrically lit from the top and sides). The ballet had an exotic Egyptian setting, inspired perhaps by the building of the Suez Canal, and drew on a trove of Romantic themes. It included an opium dream, mummies come to life, a suicide, an underwater Nile ballet, plentiful balleticized national dances, and an apotheosis with a three-tiered display of Egyptian gods. It was a fantastically extravagant affair—everything Saltykov-Shchedrin (who wrote his invective the following year) hated about ballet. Petipa was rewarded with promotion to the coveted position of ballet maste
r to the Imperial Theaters, a position he shared with his rival Saint-Léon until 1869, when he took sole charge.
Marius Petipa decorated with Imperial insignia. The inscription, written in French, is to a prominent Russian industrialist and balletomane.
In the decades that followed, Petipa settled in and absorbed the feel and scale of St. Petersburg. He was an avid courtier (“December first,” he noted in the corner of a mise-en-scène he was working on, “is the fiftieth birthday of the prince. Must leave my visiting card or sign my name in the book”) and he “vigilantly” watched, as one Russian ballerina disapprovingly noted, “the impression his ballets made on the Imperial personages and court dignitaries.” His approach was eminently practical: he carefully plotted his choreography at home with figurines “like chess pawns” arranged on a large table and made elaborate notes of the most successful arrangements using X’s and O’s and other symbols to represent the movements of his dancers. Petipa also spent hours tracing pictures from books and magazines that might help him arrive at the right look for his ballets and he meticulously recorded instructions for the visual effects he hoped to achieve. In one ballet, for example, he noted four lines of twelve dancers, each in different colored skirts and underskirts that flipped and changed in a kaleidoscopic pattern as the dancers paraded forward in successive lines, switching places with military precision.22
None of this constituted great choreography, and what we know of Petipa’s early ballets shows a capable artist producing ballets according to a well-established formula. (These were the ballets that so upset Bournonville when he visited.) But as time passed, a change crept in. We can see it in La Bayadère (1877), a typically exotic (in this case Indian-themed) ballet about a beautiful Hindu temple dancer with a cumbersome plot derived from past Parisian operas and ballets to serviceable music by Ludwig Minkus.* It was a Franco-Russe mélange and starred the Russian dancers Ekaterina Vazem and Lev Ivanov, with old Nikolai Golts (of Didelot fame) in the role of the Great Brahmin. Johansson and Kschessinsky also took supporting roles. Yet this unwieldy Romantic extravaganza—in one sketch Petipa envisaged a procession with thirty-six entrances and more than two hundred dancers—also contained a pristine classical dance, “The Kingdom of the Shades,” which (later revised by Petipa and still performed today) has since become an emblem of Petipa’s emerging formal style.
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