Their most prominent representative was Yuri Grigorovich. As we have seen, Grigorovich came of age during the war. Kirov-trained, he was a demi-character dancer who excelled in folk styles and was deeply influenced by Lopukhov, who became his mentor and guide. In 1957 Grigorovich created The Stone Flower at the Kirov. It was a notable event, not because it was a great ballet but because of what it attempted to achieve, and the particular ways in which it failed. The Stone Flower had been originally conceived some ten years earlier in 1948 as a dram-balet by Lavrovsky and Prokofiev, in the wake of the Zhdanov decrees. The story was deliberately drawn from a “safe,” officially approved collection of folklore-inspired tales by the Soviet writer Pavel Bazhov, and the libretto was written by Lavrovsky in conjunction with Prokofiev’s second wife, Mira Mendelson-Prokofieva. Once again, however, Lavrovsky had proved a difficult and nervous collaborator: he blustered and demanded changes and additions to the music, which frustrated Prokofiev—and provided political fodder to the composer’s critics. An early recital of a portion of the score for Party and theater officials in 1949 did not go well: the music was sharply criticized, and Prokofiev fell into depression. By the time the ballet finally premiered in 1954, with Galina Ulanova in the lead role, it had been stripped of whatever musical or choreographic interest it might once have had. Prokofiev missed the opening: he had died the year before, while still making modifications to the score.
Grigorovich’s new ballet, then, was not just any ballet. It was a revision and remake of Lavrovsky’s original and widely understood as a bold challenge to the dram-balet. Following Lopukhov and others, Grigorovich wanted to put pure abstract dance back into ballet. It was an old idea, but the fact that such a “formalist” notion might gain the ideological upper hand filled Grigorovich and his dancers with genuine excitement and newfound purpose. The idea was not to overthrow the dram-balet but to make it more expressive and up-to-date. Indeed, everything about the ballet seemed fresh: Grigorovich deliberately passed over the company’s established and senior ballerinas and chose instead to work with younger artists such as Kolpakova and Alla Osipenko (b. 1932), both of whom were known for their steely technique. Rehearsals for Stone Flower had a heady, almost conspiratorial air, and its artists (dancers, designers, writers) often met after hours in each other’s homes to continue rehearsals.
Their reformist zeal notwithstanding, and in keeping with the ballet’s Zhdanov-era origins, the plot was boilerplate socialist realism. It concerned a “good” worker—a stonecutter from the Urals—beloved by a beautiful and innocent girl. Their happiness is threatened by a “bad” hunched and stomping black-booted landowner, but in the end, through a series of trials, their love and the stonecutter’s art prevail. Rather than having his dancers enact this story in the old 1930s manner, however, Grigorovich structured the choreography as a suite of dances: he deliberately avoided the gestures and mime typical of dram-balet and tried instead to tell a story through dance numbers juxtaposed one after another, montage-style.
The result, however, was blunt and awkward: a dram-balet self-consciously backloaded with dances. Grigorovich lumped ballet numbers one on top of another and strung them along the plotline, but he failed to create a formal dance architecture or overall design. There were lots of steps, but that is all there were: a series of smoothly executed but rote classroom exercises fixed to a predictable, ideologically driven plot. Worse, although many of his steps appeared classical, they were in fact strangely flat and inexpressive. They had no breathing room, no inner chambers, and the small, seemingly insignificant transitional movements that join larger steps and give the dancer time to think—and to show his thinking—were almost entirely missing. Hence the ballet’s glossy sheen and hardened exterior: it is all surface with no layers of meaning, no inside. The music did not help. Stone Flower has none of the poignancy and dramatic panache of Romeo and Juliet or even Cinderella: instead it is relentlessly blaring and bombastic, as if Prokofiev had finally given up his struggle to infuse an officially acceptable musical style with a genuine or sophisticated sound.
The Stone Flower, then, was far from a new beginning. Instead it was evidence of the diminished state of dance after two decades of dram-balet and socialist realism. Grigorovich and his dancers wanted to return pure dance to the stage, and steps—blank steps—seemed to promise a way forward and out of the tired and (to their minds) out-moded formulas of the dram-balet. It was an understandable impulse, but they had very little insight into what those steps might mean. Lavrovsky and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet had grown from far richer cultural soil. Its roots reached back to Gorsky, Stanislavsky, and a pre-Stalinist cultural world, and Ulanova’s dancing fed from an undercurrent of genuine idealism. Grigorovich, by contrast, had fallen headlong into the very ideological categories he hoped to oppose and uncritically reproduced them as art. The dances in Stone Flower were the ballet equivalent of dogma: a stiff and wooden formalism. Socialist realism had taken its toll. Grigorovich was working inside its categories and could not see past them. The Stone Flower may have been perceived as turning the corner on Stalin’s ballet, but it was in fact its most representative example.
This was not, however, how it was understood at the time. To the contrary, at its Kirov premiere in 1957 The Stone Flower met with considerable success. Context was everything. Audiences and Party officials were eager for signs of balletic reform, and Grigorovich’s blank-verse dances seemed to many a welcome new direction. Indeed, Stone Flower earned its author coveted marks of official recognition: the ballet was mounted at the Bolshoi in Moscow in 1959, and Grigorovich went on to make another highly acclaimed ballet, The Legend of Love, for the Kirov. In 1964 Grigorovich was appointed artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, replacing Lavrovsky.
The creative fission that had brought Yakobson, Grigorovich, and others to the fore thus produced much excitement but little of lasting value. The thaw may have opened culture, but it could not create it. What had seemed at the time a promising new beginning quickly faded, and the Kirov lapsed into old patterns. In 1963, to take but one example among many, Sergeyev created Distant Planet, a dram-balet about the Soviet space program featuring a Yuri Gagarin look-alike leaping weightlessly about the stage in a cumbersome spacesuit. In years to come, as we shall see, the Kirov would sink into a long and lasting decline.
Classical ballet was at a crossroads: for the first time ever in the history of Russian ballet, the creative center and source was about to relocate away from the Kirov and toward the Bolshoi in Moscow. The shift, however, was not only due to internal factors or the cumulative effects of the ongoing “brain drain” to the east. It owed at least as much to another aspect of the thaw that was also shaping the post-Stalinist cultural landscape: the West.
In the fall of 1956, as part of a rapprochement between Britain and the USSR, the Bolshoi Ballet visited London. (Britain’s Royal Ballet was scheduled to reciprocate later that year, but the trip was abruptly canceled due to the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Suez crisis.) The Bolshoi’s appearance in London was a momentous occasion: the first time in its nearly two-hundred-year history that the company had ever performed in the West. The anticipation was intense: at Covent Garden ticket queues formed three days before the box office opened and extended over half a mile from the theater. The press had a field day covering the lead-up to the event: one cartoon slyly showed an earnest fan begging for a ticket and the box office clerk gleefully reporting, “And what’s more, as a special gesture of Anglo-Soviet solidarity they’re bringing Guy Burgess to dance the Lilac Fairy!” The reference was to the notoriously homosexual British spy who defected east, but also to The Sleeping Beauty, the Russian ballet that had reopened Covent Garden at the end of the Second World War, performed by British dancers. When the Bolshoi company finally arrived at the theater for the opening night, Margot Fonteyn—Britain’s reigning ballerina who had herself been trained by émigré Russians—rushed to greet Ulanova and was so overcome with emotion that she spo
ntaneously threw her arms around the shy and startled dancer.25
When the curtain went up on Romeo and Juliet on October 3, 1956, Cold War hostilities momentarily ceased. The British were overwhelmed by the scale and magnitude of the production and by the emotional depth of Ulanova’s dancing. Ulanova was forty-six years old but had no trouble conveying the youth and tragedy of Juliet. The British dancer Antoinette Sibley, who had seen Ulanova in a stage rehearsal for the ballet, later described her astonishment: “She was a mess. Like an old lady … she looked a hundred.…And then she just suddenly started dreaming. And in front of our very eyes—no make-up, no costume—she became fourteen … And our hearts! We couldn’t even breathe. And then she did that run across the stage after the poison scene: well—we were all screaming and yelling, like at a football match.” Things were no different on opening night: Ulanova received thirteen ovations and ecstatic reviews. A few critics grumbled that Lavrovsky’s choreography was old-fashioned and heavy (“a lumbering three-decker pageant” full of “violent, histrionic episodes”). But audiences didn’t care: they adored Ulanova (a BBC broadcast that year of the ballerina performing Swan Lake drew some fourteen million viewers), and the power of the Bolshoi’s art would be remembered for decades to come.26
This scenario was repeated three years later in New York. The queue for standing room started thirty-nine hours before opening night at the old Metropolitan Opera House, and when the curtain went up on April 16, 1959, the theater was packed, with more than two hundred people crowded around the sides and in the aisles. The American and Soviet flags were draped like banners from the boxes, and the orchestra performed the national anthems of both countries before the ballet began. As in London, the audience’s enthusiasm could hardly be contained, and once again Ulanova emerged a star. John Martin, writing about Romeo and Juliet for The New York Times, summed up the experience: “Hammy? Absolutely! Un-chic? And how! Men built like cart-horses? Definitely! Old-fashioned? Yes—and no (just what is ‘old-fashioned’?) What could matter less in a work of art of this caliber?”27
Khrushchev was delighted. “Now, I have a question for you,” he cooed at American reporters during a visit in 1959, “which country has the best ballet? Yours? You do not even have a permanent opera and ballet theater. Your theater thrives on what is given them by rich people. In our country it is the state that gives it money. And the best ballet is in the Soviet Union. It is our pride. […] You can see yourselves which art is on the upsurge and which is on the downgrade.” Even as he spoke, however, there were disturbing signs that things might not be quite so simple or certain. To begin with, not all of the Bolshoi’s reviews were raves. It was Ulanova and Romeo and Juliet that made the Bolshoi’s reputation in the West: Grigorovich and Yakobson’s new “upsurge” ballets were poorly received. New York critics largely dismissed The Stone Flower (“gets by on splashiness and flashiness”), and when the company returned with Jacobson’s Spartacus in 1962, they were scathing: “It is huge, it is tasteless, it is grim.… The work is a great audience favorite at home; what Moscow can see in its abstract tribute to ‘freedom,’ its vast physicality, its paralyzed imagination totally without content says a lot about Moscow.” The thaw-era ballets did not translate well: it was the old warhorse dram-balets that bridged the cultural divide.28
Then the Americans arrived in the USSR. In 1960 American Ballet Theatre became the first American company to dance on Russian soil. They performed a series of programs featuring excerpts from Petipa’s classics—to prove Americans could do them too—along with a carefully chosen repertory of “native” works, including Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free and Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo. The Soviets vetoed Billy the Kid on ideological grounds (immoral to make a hero of an outlaw) and also declined Fall River Legend, about the ax-wielding Lizzie Borden, which was deemed “too violent and macabre for Russian taste.”29
If the repertory was a source of tension, however, the performances of the company’s lead male dancer, Erik Bruhn, sent audiences into “raptures,” as a prominent Soviet critic wrote to an American colleague. Trained in Denmark and an expert in the Bournonville style, Bruhn had also worked closely with one of Vaganova’s disciples, Vera Volkova, who had emigrated to the West and settled in Copenhagen. Bruhn’s dancing thus traced a distinguished lineage back from Vaganova to Petipa and Johansson. He had a spectacular technique, but it was never overtly bravura or heroic in the Soviet mold. He was above all a danseur noble, known for his restraint and refinement. For the Soviets, who had all but erased ballet’s aristocratic origins—and especially for dancers at the Kirov, who saw themselves as the guardians of Russian classicism—Bruhn was a riveting and disorienting experience: a glimpse at their own lost past and stark evidence that the West had classical dancers at least as good as their own, and perhaps better.30
But nothing upset the Soviets—and the Kirov—more than Rudolf Nureyev’s dramatic defection to the West in Paris on June 16, 1961. Nureyev was a product of the Soviet system. Born in 1938, his parents were peasants of Muslim Tatar descent (his mother spoke Tatar and read Arabic) who joined the Party in its early years and became avid Communists. His father fought in the war, and Nureyev was raised in poverty as his mother struggled to feed and shelter her young family. He studied ballet and folk dance locally at Communist youth organizations and with old former Maryinsky dancers before finally making his way to the Kirov, where he was taken in by his teacher, Alexander Pushkin (1907–1970). Pushkin had worked with Vaganova in the 1930s and ’40s and was just as rigorous a classicist; he drove Nureyev to perfect and refine his wild, folk-inflected style. Outside the dance studio, however, Nureyev clashed constantly with the authorities. Intellectually curious and naturally rebellious, he pored over foreign books and pirated ballet tapes (he had dissected Bruhn’s technique long before he ever saw and fell in love with the dancer in the West), took English lessons, and refused to join Komsomol. Nureyev had been desperate to see Bruhn perform in 1960, but instead he had been shipped off on a long and punishing bus tour to East Germany. When the Kirov was invited to perform in Paris he was similarly slated to stay home. The French presenters, however, insisted: they had seen him perform in Leningrad and knew he would be a sensation.
And so he was. Acclaimed as the new Nijinsky, Nureyev was the undisputed star of the Kirov’s Paris season. But he also misbehaved. Soviet dancers on tour to the West were routinely guarded by the KGB and their movements strictly restricted. Ferried about in company buses, they were not allowed to mix with foreigners or depart from their scheduled activities; spies and informers helped to enforce the rules, and the consequences of deviating from the set path could be severe. Nureyev did not care: he evaded his KGB escorts, broke from the official group, made friends with French dancers and artists, and routinely stayed out all night. Impatient to take in every possible new experience, he banked on his tremendous public acclaim: to sideline him would have unleashed a damaging international outcry. They wouldn’t dare.
But they did dare. When the Kirov company arrived at the airport in Paris en route to their next stop in London, Nureyev was pulled aside and held back. Khrushchev, he was told, had personally ordered his return to Moscow for a “special performance.” Besides, his mother was sick. At this point, Nureyev knew he had lost: upon return to the Soviet Union he could expect (at best) banishment to some remote province, no future travel, a life of artistic and financial penury, and constant hounding by the KGB. There was precedent: his contemporary, the dancer Valery Panov, had been sent home from a foreign tour on a similar pretext and harshly punished. Nureyev was disconsolate; he banged his head against the wall, cried, and refused to be separated from his French friends. As luck would have it, one of the friends he made in Paris was Clara Saint, a Chilean heiress and fiancée to the son of André Malraux, the minister of culture in de Gaulle’s government. Friends telephoned her: she rushed to the airport and secured the help of the French authorities (one of whom, it later transpired, was a White Russian émigr
é). Overwhelmed and desperate, Nureyev managed to break from the KGB and thrust himself into the hands of the French authorities: he asked for asylum, and the French police immediately took him into protective custody.
Nureyev’s defection was front-page news around the world and a serious blow to Soviet prestige. The Kirov never quite recovered. Its dancers were stunned and demoralized, and many of those involved with Nureyev were punished for their association. His partner, Alla Osipenko, was pulled from the tour and sent back to Leningrad; Sergeyev, the company’s director, was cross-examined and reprimanded. As one dancer put it, “What shocked us was not that he was gone, but that he could have acted in the way he did. How could someone with our training and our background do such a thing? This was not something we could understand.” Nureyev’s image, so coveted by Leningrad audiences, was meticulously erased from public life. To take but one example among many: on the cover of a small book about Yakobson, Nureyev’s name could be made out in dim letters, barely legible and buried in a collage of other names and dancers. But before the book could be released—several thousand copies had been printed—someone had to sit with a pin and painstakingly erase from each one this faint reference to the dancer who had defected. In 1962 Nureyev was tried in absentia and sentenced; he would not be officially rehabilitated until 1997. But this did not mean that he was forgotten: to the contrary, he became a mythic figure with a prominent place in the city’s collective memory.31
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