Dead cats and battery acid A compelling biography of Russian ballet company life Lee Christofis BOLSHOI CONFIDENTIAL: SECRETS OF THE RUSSIAN BALLET FROM THE RULE OF THE TSARS TO TODAY by Simon Morrison Fourth Estate, $34.99 pb, 530 pp, 9780007576616

n November 2016, former principal his intellectual energy and perspicacity. present public entertainments. While dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko entered Furthermore, he had paved his way into nobles and merchants who ran serf the Bolshoi Ballet studios in Mos- Bolshoi culture while researching Rus- theatres on their estates looked on with Icow to begin retraining for the stage. He sian Opera and the Symbolist Movement concern, Maddox indulged his grandi- had recently been released from prison (2002), The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s ose plans. Today his enterprise would for instigating an attack on his artistic Soviet years (2010), and the reputedly be regarded as a salad of vaudeville, director, Sergey Filin, in January 2013. harrowing Lina and Serge: Lina Prokof- opera, folk, and fairy ballets danced Dmitrichenko’s plan went awry when iev’s loves and wars (2013). by Italian, French, and German art- his henchman, Yuri Zarutsky, decided The story begins with the circui- ists, and a corps de ballet of serfs and to throw battery acid in Filin’s face, tous history of the Petrovsky Theatre, children from the Imperial Foundling virtually blinding him. This act horri- precursor of the Bolshoi Theatre – mis- Home. He created so many disasters fied the international ballet world and managed, bombed by Napoleon, and that Urusov pulled out broke, leaving the public, and shed a new light on this burned to the ground. The man who Maddox to his own devices until the famous but often troubled institution. built the theatre’s audience, Morrison’s Imperial Theatre directors in St Peters- After many operations, Filin recovered ‘Swindling Magician’, was Michael burg chose to corral the Bolshoi under his sight in one eye, but lost his direc- Maddox, an English actor, acrobat, its administration. torship. He now runs a choreographic and clockmaker. A brief encounter The Bolshoi ensemble that devel- workshop at the Bolshoi. as tutor to Empress Catherine’s son, oped was barely Russian in content The irony that Dmitrichenko ex- Pavel, proved helpful when Maddox or aesthetic, but after Napoleon’s de- celled as the murderous tsar in Ivan joined forces with Prince Pyotr Uru- structive raid on the theatre, it, along the Terrible is not lost on American sov, whom Catherine had licensed to with ballet, became something of a na- musicologist Simon Morrison in Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian ballet from the rule of the tsars to today (coinci- dentally released in November). Mor- rison sees Dmitrichenko and Zarutsky’s crimes not as rarities, but consistent with the rivalries, politics, and vexatious bu- reaucracies that have riven the Bolshoi Theatre since Catherine the Great fostered ballet in Moscow in 1806. Bolshoi Confidential is a compelling biography of Russian ballet company life and of an imperial theatre; an album of Russian ballet’s myriad players, and a catalogue of the love–hate relationship the Soviet regime had with choreogra- phers and their artistic associates. It is also a story of rival clans and claques, a dead cat thrown at the feet of one bal- lerina, a flock of chickens released on stage at another’s. The density and scope President Vladimir Putin and dancer Maya Plisetskaya, 2000 of Morrison’s research is indicative of (www.kremlin.ru.via Wikimedia Commons)

DANCE 35 tional fetish. After the 1917 Revolution, harrowing events. At times he makes Lenin wanted to destroy the theatre as some crisp, colloquial remarks that do he returned the seat of government to not sit well in the text, although one Moscow, the ‘real’, ancient Russia, or, as may well share his pleasure at taking pot Morrison puts it, ‘Russia before Russia’. shots at belligerent theatre bureaucrats, Fortunately, People’s Commissar for who could make life miserable, even Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky dangerous, for artists who stood up for persuaded Lenin otherwise. By the end themselves. The final chapter examines of World War II, the Bolshoi had be- the battle between Maya Plisetskaya, come a place of ‘Russian exceptionalism’ the Bolshoi’s most gifted and glamor- (code for supremacy), an unconvincing ous international star from 1945 to concept that would flourish in the pro- 1990, and her nemesis, Yuri Grigoriev, cess of Cold War cultural diplomacy. artistic director and chief choreographer Behind the glittering theatre lights, for thirty years. He was a pathological other, sorrier scenarios ran unfettered controller of independent spirits, and by propriety. While Imperial favour- one of the least inspired choreographers ites, such as prima ballerina Mathilde in Russian history. His ballets, fraught Kchessinska, mistress of Tsarevich with posturing and declamatory ges- Nikolai (soon to be tsar) and two of tures, were ridiculed in the West. Ulti- his cousins, lived in luxury and was mately, Plisetskaya undid his iron grip regularly given fabulous diamonds, by seeking and receiving permission to lesser dancers were exposed to chronic create her own ballets with her husband, sexual exploitation. Many were orphans, composer Rodion Shchedrin. But did some teenagers, many living in poverty, her freedom, her victory, appease her as did Avdotya Arshinina, an emerging lifelong hatred of a country that assas- talent. Arshinina’s poverty-stricken fa- sinated her father, enslaved her mother ther sold her for ten thousand rubles to in a labour camp, then exiled her to Prince Boris Cherkassky, who drugged Kazakhstan? Morrison thinks not – and raped her, then abandoned her to only her death, before her ninetieth others who abused her too. She was birthday in 2015, could do that. severely beaten, her genitals described Finally, a word of gratitude to Simon as ‘blackened’ by the hospital staff that Morrison for revealing, after two nursed her to her death, while the cul- hundred and forty years, the author of prits escaped censure through connec- the original scenario for Tchaikovsky’s tions, mendacity, and victim blaming. Swan Lake – Vladimir Begichev, a Arshinina’s father, however, was briefly repertoire inspector and scenarist at imprisoned. Moscow Imperial Theatres. g Of a completely different tenor is Morrison’s account of routine censor- Lee Christofis writes on dance, music, ship of new works in the making, or days and design. In the 1960s he danced in after a première, imposed by pedantic, the Queensland Ballet. often ignorant bureaucrats on creative minds of the day. Shostakovich’s serious This year’s “good read” but playful experimental ballets, for instance – The Golden Age, The Bolt, The Bright Stream – were criticised in Prav- da and at Communist Party meetings, and led to excoriating denunciations commanded by Josef Stalin. These were artist who tried to put a human face on Soviet ideologies, while Prokofiev, trying to create a new, muscular music for Romeo and Juliet, watched the de- SCOTCHMANS.COM.AU racination of his intentions, line by line, instrument by instrument, page by page. It is fortunate that Morrison is http://www.lady-ruth-bromfield.com resilient and ironic in the face of such

36 JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW