St Petersburg

Vaganova did not waste words. Other teachers might give general orders: “Jump! Higher! More grace!” Vaganova’s comments were always concrete: “Lift your right side,” “take hold of your right hip and bring it back harder,” and so on. Vaganova selected specific exercises for each student to strengthen the leg muscles, effecting thereby a painless transition to the most difficult dance combinations. But she never let her students forget that every virtuoso step had to make emotional sense.

Vaganova’s counterpart in male dancing was Alexander I. Pushkin, whose method of teaching, like Vaganova’s, developed his pupil’s best qualities through carefully chosen individual exercises. The unruly and temperamental Rudolf Nureyev was on the brink of being expelled when Pushkin took him into his class; in three years (instead of the customary nine) Pushkin shaped the young rebel into a dancer who stunned the graduation concert audience in 1958 with his animal energy and grace.

Nureyev, who much of the time lived at Pushkin’s house, described him as a second father.69 Pushkin steadfastly supported Nureyev’s attempts to expand the expressive boundaries of men’s dancing and nursed his young charge after Nureyev tore a ligament in his right leg and feared he would never dance again.

Pushkin defended Nureyev in his conflicts with the ballet authorities. These conflicts grew ever more serious. The Kirov ballet, though detached from the routine of Leningrad life, was still a microcosm of the Soviet state. The spirit of hierarchical obedience was deepened by traditional Russian bureaucratism and Soviet ideology. Indoctrination was pervasive, discipline and conformity were valued above all else, and manifestations of independence were regarded with suspicion.

The explosive Nureyev, who resembled the heroes of his beloved Dostoyevsky (he would later dance the role of Prince Myshkin in the Valery Panov ballet The Idiot), was shrilly lectured on how he, despite his phenomenal success, was “poisoning the atmosphere” and “corrupting the collective.”70 Nureyev felt that he could no longer breathe.

The chance to escape the Soviet system came to Nureyev in 1961 in Paris, while the Kirov Ballet was performing there. He made his leap to freedom at Le Bourget Airport, fighting off his two husky “bodyguards.” This was a story in the Cold War period, and repercussions of that event were felt in Leningrad. As the flight of a major artist from the Soviet Union, Nureyev’s departure was discussed endlessly not only in ballet circles but among Leningrad intellectuals, despite the extraordinary measures taken by the authorities to hush up the incident and to force Nureyev’s fans to forget their idol.

Soon a new jolt struck the city’s cultural elite. In the fall of 1962, on the heels of Stravinsky’s triumphant visit to Leningrad, came fifty-eight-year-old George Balanchine with his New York City Ballet. Balanchine, though he had left thirty-eight years earlier, was in no hurry to go back. For him, a staunch anti-Communist, the name Leningrad was deeply offensive. Besides which, he feared being interned by the Soviet authorities.71

Under pressure from the Department of State, Balanchine did go to Russia, where the tour seemed tiring and rather depressing. He thought that he was being followed and that his hotel rooms were bugged; he was annoyed by the meaningless “aesthetic” discussions with officials from the Ministry of Culture; and he was deeply saddened by the fact that the authorities had turned Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospect into the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism.72 (It was restored as a place of worship in 1991.)

But for Leningrad’s artistic youth, the visits of Balanchine and Stravinsky were determining events. One memorable moment was a performance of Balanchine’s ballet to Stravinsky’s Agon at the Kirov Theater. Many older dance lovers mockingly called it “Agony,” complaining that the Americans did not so much dance as “solve algebra equations with their feet.” The dancing and the music seemed abstract and cold; conversations buzzed with the ubiquitous charge of formalism.

But for Leningrad’s young musicians and dancers, Agon was a breath of fresh air. Even the stage looked different, as if a gigantic sponge had washed off the dusty scenery. Agon’s frank physicality (irritating to the old) seemed natural to us, suggesting a society with fewer restrictions than our own. On top of that, we heard jazz rhythms in Agon; this too was sexy, like the jazz broadcasts over Voice of America or the glossy pin-up covers of America, the propaganda magazine of the U.S. government.