St Petersburg

Discovering Agon in Leningrad, we appreciated for the first time the unrealized possibilities of the stifled Petersburgian avant-garde. Some said wistfully, “Balanchine brought us the future that was not allowed to flourish in Russia.” Balanchine and Stravinsky personified Petersburg culture at its apex, a cosmopolitan art that had achieved world success and recognition.

It turned out that the Petersburg mythos was being realized in the international arena and was not the property of our domestic underground alone. The figure of Akhmatova was suddenly plugged into a global cultural context for us, and this unexpected shift gave a new vitality to the Petersburg mythos. It was also becoming contemporary for us.

The effect of the personal “materialization” in Russia of the titans of the world avant-garde cannot be overestimated. Tales of what they saw and said became for many years the barometer of local good taste in intellectual circles. Even their eccentricities became the object of intense gossip. Brodsky recalled how he came to Akhmatova’s house and announced that he had just seen Stravinsky on the street. He began to describe him—small, hunched, with a fashionable hat. “And basically, all that’s left of Stravinsky is his nose.” “Yes,” added Akhmatova. “And his genius.”73

For a long time the Western branch of Petersburg modernism could not even be mentioned in Russia, at least not with praise. When its two leading representatives—Stravinsky and Balanchine—were allowed to return in triumph, even if only for a short time, to their hometown, the result was a rush of optimism in Leningrad’s creative circles and an impulse to accelerate their own artistic experiments.

For thirty-five-year-old Yuri Grigorovich, then a staff choreographer with the Kirov company, Balanchine’s work was confirmation of his own conviction that choreodramas were destructive of Russian ballet. In his recent success, Legend of Love, Grigorovich had tried complex ballet forms, bringing onto the Kirov stage dance combinations in the style of Fokine. Grigorovich insisted that Fokine and Lopukhov were masters of dance and that Russian ballet had to learn from them and drop all the nonsense about formalism.74

Another Kirov choreographer who used the American visit to serve his own creative battles was Leonid Yakobson, Balanchine’s contemporary. The resident modernist of the Kirov (he was called the Chagall of ballet, sarcastically by his enemies and delightedly by his fans), Yakobson was having trouble fighting off the attacks of conservative critics of his recent ballet based on Mayakovsky’s futurist comedy Bedbug. In it Yakobson had mixed elements of pantomime, free dance à la Isadora Duncan, Fokine-style impressionism, and near surrealism.

Yakobson was considered the enfant terrible of the Leningrad ballet. His escapades were overlooked, and his “madness” was a given. I witnessed Yakobson calling cultural bureaucrats idiots to their faces. They merely shrugged it off: the “crazy” Yakobson could get away with things that would cost others their heads.

The more adventurous dancers of the Kirov company were crazy about Yakobson; many got the opportunity of their lives through him. For the twenty-one-year-old Natalya Makarova, Yakobson created a lyric role in his satiric Bedbug: Zoya, a frail, naive worker who hangs herself over unrequited love. This was a character taken from life, an unhappy woman similar to characters in the contemporaneous Leningrad plays of Alexander Volodin. This role was a turning point for Makarova, exposing her to modern influences.

Yakobson gave a similar impulse seven years later to the career of the twenty-one-year-old Mikhail Baryshnikov with a cameo ballet, Vestris, for the international ballet competition in Moscow. Portraying Auguste Vestris, the French eighteenth-century dancer, Baryshnikov’s vivid performance of an amalgam of neoclassical steps and pantomime movements astonished the jury, which included Maya Plisetskaya, Ulanova, Grigorovich, and Chabukiani. Plisetskaya, herself a devotee of Yakobson’s talent, proclaimed Vestris the “ballet theater of my dreams” and gave Baryshnikov thirteen out of a possible twelve. He won the gold medal.

Like Nureyev, Baryshnikov had a classical training under Alexander I. Pushkin. Nureyev’s flight left Pushkin with an emotional vacuum, which Baryshnikov, ten years younger than Nureyev, with his curiosity, humor, and charm, managed to fill. Pushkin was the only one to believe that the short-statured Baryshnikov would ever be more than a character dancer.

Pushkin pushed his student to spend long hours over exhausting exercises. At his graduation performance in 1967, Baryshnikov, who had developed balance, musicality, and confidence of execution, proved no less a sensation than Nureyev had been in his day, and he soon took a leading position in the Kirov company.