In its principles the ballet is the most aristocratic and the oldest of all Russian arts of the stage. The unwritten history of the enchanting Russian dance would make a thrilling record of more than two centuries. The romances, tragedies, mysteries, and intrigues connected with this sealed drama have often played a decisive rôle in the affairs of the country. As the result of a romance with pretty Teleshova Griboyedoff, a famous Russian dramatist was killed in Teheran. For having dedicated his ‘Eugene Onyegin’ to the fascinating Istomina, prima ballerina of the Imperial Opera, Poushkin, the poet, lost the love of his wife and was subsequently shot in a duel. The Czar Paul fell in love with Eugeny Kolossova and in consequence was strangled at his palace in Petrograd. Before the present Czar ascended the throne he was said to have been so much in love with Mathilda Kshesinskaya that he made plans to renounce his throne and marry her.
The ballet was introduced in Russia as early as 1672. Czar Alexis Mihailowitch ordered his aid-de-camp, Colonel Van Staden, to have a troupe of Dutch comedians brought to Moscow. Van Staden made a contract with a ballet manager in Brussels, but the foreigner was frightened into giving up the venture because of a rumor that he and his troupe might eventually land in Siberia. After this a German pastor, the Rev. Johann Gregory, undertook the management of the troupe, hiring sixty-four German and Italian dancers and producing in 1673 the first ballet, ‘Orpheus and Euridice,’ with great success. Peter the Great was so fascinated with the ballet that he himself took part and for this purpose received lessons from the ballet-master.
The ballet of this time was, of course, Italian-French in conception and music. But the early foreign masters soon produced a school of native instructors who gradually made use of the peculiarities of national dances. Many Russian ballets were already at this time of national color, one of them, Baba Yaga, having been written by the Czar himself. Baba Yaga is a Russian fairy tale. Like the English ‘Witch on a Broomstick,’ Baba Yaga rides through the sky on a huge mortar, propelling herself with a pestle, while her great tongue licks up the clouds as she passes. The dancers were trained in various military or municipal schools and the teaching was unsystematic in every respect.
The first impetus to a national dancing academy was given by Empress Anna Ivanovna, the sister of Peter the Great, who felt that the education of the dancers was not systematic enough, and regretted that the best dancers had to be hired from abroad. In 1735, she asked Christian Wellmann, a teacher of gymnastics in the Cadet Corps, to found a dramatic dancing school in which girls and boys could be educated for the ballet. The Italian composer Francesca Areja was employed to take care of the music, while Lande, a pupil of Noverre, was to act as ballet director. As the newly formed school could not get children of the nobility to learn dancing, Lande trained a number of poor city boys and girls free of any charge, and with them gave a performance at the palace. The Empress was so pleased with their dance that she instructed that the pupils be educated in the Imperial Dramatic Dancing School free of charge.
III
The most conspicuous figures in the development of the early Russian ballet were Locatelli, Hilferding and Lessogoroff. To the latter’s efforts are due the reforms that made the Russian school independent from French-Italian influences. But to Charles Louis Didelot is due the thorough and many sided system of training that makes the School a unique institution in Europe. He may be considered the real father of all the pedagogic technical perfection, for it was he who emphasized the importance of a systematic training in a true dramatic spirit, contending that a good ballet dancer should also be a good actress and an artist and a poet at heart. Up to his time lessons had consisted mostly of physical training, fencing and gymnastics, but he insisted that the ballet be put on the same basis as drama. Whereas the dance had been merely a spectacular part of opera he intended that it should become an independent production. This brought upon him a storm of indignation on the part of the clergy and their supporters, the quarrel becoming so intense that in 1801, as one of its effects, the Czar Paul was acclaimed a heretic and was combatted by the ecclesiastic powers until he was strangled in his palace and his son, Alexander I, ascended the throne. The young Czar was religious, but so much an admirer of the ballet that he did not interfere with the plans of Didelot and gave him a still greater authority.
It is strange how Didelot, a rather small, insignificant, pock-marked and deformed Frenchman, who had been for some time a ballet teacher in Stockholm, could play a dominating rôle during the twenty-five years that he was director of the Imperial Ballet School. The best known dancers of his school were Istomina, Teleshova and the uncle of Taglioni, who later undertook the training of Maria Taglioni. Miss Novitzkaya was a celebrated pupil of Didelot, but her career was soon destroyed by an affair of the heart. Gedeonoff, the director who followed Didelot, fell madly in love with Novitzkaya and proposed to her, but the dancer, having given her heart to a poor composer, remained true to him and became his wife. This was the end of her art, though critics claimed her superior to Taglioni and Elssler.
By 1847 the Russian ballet had taken a leading place in Europe, but in a purely artistic sense it was still foreign in character, the librettos being built mainly on foreign themes or constructed to foreign music. With the advent of the composers Glinka, Dargomijsky, Seroff, Balakireff and Moussorgsky, it was evident that ballet faced a reform similar to that which music had undergone. The ballets of the old school had usually been divided into several acts and figures, each of which had entrées and strictly prescribed rules for using various gestures, steps, etc., in certain places. They, however, failed to define the relation of emotion and acting to the plot and made dancing a complicated artificial salon-plant. An uninitiated logic could hardly grasp the hieroglyphic meaning of all the queer gymnastic tricks. With the engagement of Marius Petipa, in 1849, there came a change. Although a Frenchman by birth Petipa was just such a reformer in the ballet as Michelangelo was in sculpture. More powerful than any other master, he entered the sphere of choreographic art, transforming it completely, and assigning it new limits. Petipa was the master of a new ballet, an idealist in the strictest sense of the word. He sought for a universally available expression, and often even ignored questions of racial beauty. He gave himself up for many years to an anatomical study of the dance and the human body. By him the human form in all its majesty was valued for its own sake. To exhibit it in all conceivable attitudes and poses, to display it freely and grandly after the principles of classic beauty, was the aim of his endeavor. The weak decadent movements and the forced forms of the Paris and Milan schools were irritable to his broad views of the art of dancing. Unfettered subjectivity prevailed in his efforts, which admitted no objective realism in their absolute sway. All his method betrays an eternal struggle to introduce into dancing the most sublime ideas, the sway of idea over form. Whether a figure was natural or not interested him little, if it only expressed what was floating before his mind. Petipa infused a new life into Russian ballet. Nevertheless he could not wholly free himself from the mannerism of the time, nor could he yet find the path to perfect purity and naïveté of conception.
Petipa surrounded himself with the best dance authorities of the time. Felix Kshesinsky, Leggatt, Schirjajeff and Bekeffy became his associates in the task he had undertaken. Coöperating in harmony and inspired by the new tendency of nationalism in music and drama, they made the ballet typically national by introducing a long repertoire of national themes in the dance. With pretty Kshesinskaya, Bogdanova, Breobrashenskaya, Sokolova, Pavlova, Karsavina, Lopokova and Fokina as the prima ballerinas many new ballets became thrilling novelties to the Russian audiences. The ballet in the eyes of the Petipa school became a mute drama with music, and at once took a high position artistically and poetically. People grew to find the ballet far more alluring than the pessimistic drama.
What Petipa did pedagogically for the uplifting of the Russian ballet, Vsevoloshky did scenically and industrially. Vsevoloshky made himself the spirit of the nationalistic movement by combining with the purely choreographic part the creations of the new school of painters and composers in a highly artistic manner. Rubinstein, Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Arensky and Glazounoff in music, Bilibin, Benois and Bakst in painting, contributed their best works to the ballet. On the other hand, while the West European ballets cared little for training the male dancers, the Russians laid a special stress on training an equal number of boys with the girls in all their ballet schools. The training of a boy is different from that of a girl in that it teaches chiefly those traits that lend virility and strength to expression. A weak masculine element deprives the ballet of its natural effect. A Pavlova, Karsavina or Fokina without a Nijinsky, Mordkin or Volinin, would be like an orchestra without the bass. How repulsive it is to see the ‘boy’ dancer of the English stage, who is always a girl!