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ALEXEI VERSTOVSKY LEFT behind a long paper trail as first the inspector and then director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. The performers under his control did not. Neither did their performances. What survives from the first half of the nineteenth century are music scores, scenarios, the recollections of eyewitnesses, and the images collected, over time, by devotees such as Vasiliy Fyodorov, an art historian and director of the Malïy Theater Museum under Stalin. But even these collections are selective affairs, labors of love with huge chronological gaps that no scouring of archives, kiosks, and libraries could fill. The first half of the nineteenth century, the era of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, is even less well represented than the Maddox era—but for the case of the Moscow-born dancer Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Sankovskaya (1816–1878), whose career extended from October 1836 to November 1854. A diva before the phenomenon of the diva existed, Sankovskaya rivaled her illustrious European contemporaries Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler in both lightness and precision.

Yet her name, unlike theirs, has faded from the annals of ballet history, to the extent that the details of Taglioni’s performances in St. Petersburg from 1837 to 1842, and Elssler’s in St. Petersburg and Moscow from 1848 and 1851, are better known, even though Sankovskaya’s career was no less illustrious—and no less controversial—than theirs. Russian critics fawned with great ardor over Taglioni; one of them, Pyotr Yurkevich, even claimed her as St. Petersburg’s own: “Our incomparable sylphide, with one wave of her little foot, rends asunder all the heavy theories of encyclopedic construction,” he enthused, further waxing that she was “beautiful and unattainable, like a dream!”¹ Knickknacks bearing her likeness appeared on the streets of the imperial capital, and a patisserie conceived an elaborate tartlet in her honor. The most famous, or notorious, piece of lore surrounding Taglioni’s guest appearances in St. Petersburg has her fans purchasing her dance shoes at auction for 200 silver rubles and then sautéing them for a feast.² The behavior was odd, but it was not without precedent, as Sankovskaya herself would have known.

From her European role models, Sankovskaya adopted the distinctive features of Romantic ballet: the all-white, unadorned costume, including the tutu, and dancing with heels off the ground. For choreographic exotica, she donned pantaloons and Turkish-style slippers. Before her time, moving sur les pointes, or on the knuckles of the toes, had been an acrobatic feat, invented by Italian gymnasts and then adopted, for expressive purposes, by such French dancers as Fanny Bias and Geneviève Gosselin.³ Excluding the winsome oil portrait that hangs in the Bakhrushin Museum in Moscow, the extant images of Sankovskaya are fanciful, showing her floating, hovering. The lithograph that Fyodorov preserved of her comes from a staging of Le corsaire in 1841, when she was at the height of her powers. She is either landing from a jump with toes extended, or in piquée arabesque. She looks “as fleet as lightning” in the ballet—radiant for an instant, then gone forever.⁴

Little is known about her life, besides mention of her mother and sister, also a dancer, and the quarrels she had with rivals in their looking-glass world. Born in Moscow in 1816, Sankovskaya entered the Moscow Imperial Theater College when she was nine, on the petition of her mother. She boarded at the school as a kazennaya vospitannitsa, a nonpaying, state-supported pupil. Before learning character dances, she studied the mazurka, the quadrille, and other social dances considered indispensable for the perfection of bearing and posture. The most important initial instruction came from Mikhaíl Shchepkin. He was the dominant presence at the Malïy Theater, devising a method of acting that privileged emotion and sensation over thought. He rejected two-dimensional representations and stock characterizations, instead encouraging his students to connect as intimately as possible with their subjects. Although Shchepkin at first had doubts about Sankovskaya’s potential as a performer in his idiom, labeling her “talented, but capricious” in one of his notebooks, he became her mentor, instilling in her a commitment to naturalness of expression that she maintained throughout her career.⁵

Sankovskaya first danced small roles in ballets on historical and mythological themes, including Charles Didelot’s The Hungarian Hut (Vengerskaya khizhina), in which she appeared disguised as a boy, nerves setting her arms and legs atremble. Sankovskaya’s first solo appearance was at the Malïy Theater in 1831, at age fifteen, in the role of a smitten milkmaid. The ballet, one of Didelot’s more trifling concoctions, pits the milkmaid and the peasant lad she loves against her grandmother. In the role, Sankovskaya impressed the litterateur Sergey Aksakov. Despite grumbling about the corps de ballet coming too close to the front of the stage in the concluding village wedding dances and the lack of soulfulness in the pantomime, Aksakov noted a tremendous improvement in the teaching at the Theater College. Sankovskaya and her onstage partner “were sweet and captivating,” he wrote. “They will mature, and their gifts will bear brilliant fruit.”⁶

In 1836, Sankovskaya’s teacher, Félicité Hullen, decided to take her to Paris for the summer, “for the betterment of her talent.”⁷ The Imperial Theaters granted permission for the trip but did not fund it, so Hullen footed the bill. Little is known about the adventure. In Paris, Sankovskaya seems to have been brought into direct contact with Fanny Elssler, who saw in her less a performer in her own style—earthbound, tacquetée, defined by intricate footwork—than the likeness of Taglioni, capable of creating the illusion of supernatural lightness in her jumps, as befitted her slight build. According to a writer for the ephemeral arts and politics journal Moskovskiy nablyudatel’ (Moscow observer), “the spirit of the Parisian sylph [Taglioni] enlivened that of the petite Muscovite.”⁸ Sankovskaya absorbed the impressions gained from her time abroad into her own style, one that assimilated each step, each combination, into a single image. She returned to Moscow a professional, a Bolshoi ballerina.

The unknown author of the think piece in Moskovskiy nablyudatel’ noted that, owing to inexperience, Sankovskaya “sometimes sacrificed herself and her art by indulging an ungracious tour de force,” but that, nonetheless, each movement, each lift and fall of her torso, “was sheer delight.”⁹ Officialdom cleared her path to greatness; two months after her return from Paris, Sankovskaya received word of the successful completion of her studies at the Theater College and her appointment to the Moscow Imperial Theaters as a “dancer of the first rank,” “première danseuse.”¹⁰ The official who signed the papers pointed to her performance in Fenella as justification for the appointment, “Mademoiselle Sankovskaya performed with exceptional distinction in the ballet Fenella and, on two other occasions, in divertissements. After the last of these performances Madame Hullen was called to the stage; the public of Moscow wanted to express gratitude to her for nurturing such a wonderful dancer.”¹¹

Fenella uses an abbreviated arrangement of the music of a grand opera, La muette de Portici (The mute girl of Portici), by composer Daniel Auber and librettist Eugène Scribe. Set in Naples in 1657, the plot concerns a love triangle during a period of rebellion and volcanic eruption. Alphonse, the son of the Spanish viceroy of Naples, is betrothed to a princess, Elvire, but has seduced the fishermaid Fenella. The death of Fenella’s brother prompts her, at the end, to throw herself into burning lava. Neither the composer nor the librettist of the original 1828 opera intended for the heroine to be silent, performing only in mime, but the atypical absence in Paris of a suitable soprano for the role, and the presence of an alluring ballerina, Lise Noblet, led to the switch. Reviewing the score, Hullen decided that La muette de Portici should have been a ballet in the first place and so enlisted an arranger (Erkolani) to help her choreograph it for the Bolshoi. Fenella mimes rather than sings in the original five-act version for the Paris Opéra; in Hullen’s four-act version, she dances rather than mimes. Gesture is the domain of the other characters, those who tell the story; Fenella becomes an idealized conception. She feels and expresses her feelings in movement, but also reaches for higher spiritual values. Hullen gave the part of Fenella to another dancer for the April 15, 1836, premiere, with Sankovskaya, listed as a student on the playbill, in supporting parts. Soon thereafter, the starring role was hers.

Sankovskaya was contracted to dance in ballets, operas, and divertissements as instructed by the Imperial Theaters and as her strength and stamina permitted. Her first solo dance at the Bolshoi was a pas du fandango. Announcements in Moskovskiye vedomosti have her partnering in a new Parisian pas de châle on November 27 and December 28, 1836, and appearing in the lead role in the one-act ballet La servante justifiée (The serving girl justified) on December 11. Eleven announcements for Sankovskaya’s performances appear in 1837 and encompass everything from benefits to appearances in masquerades. Her talent and popular appeal convinced the directorate of the Moscow Imperial Theaters to make her promotion retroactive; it was moved back from the opening of the 1836–37 season to the opening of the 1835–36 season. She earned 800 rubles per year in the first three years of her professional career, along with 200 rubles in housing allowance. She was also granted a shoe budget, but it was rescinded in 1845, when she was told that she would have to pay for her footwear herself, and also absorb the growing costs of her dresses, gloves, tights, and hats. An impressive stack of documents from 1845 finds her urging the release from customs of the twelve pairs of “white silk shoes” she had ordered from Paris, but the specifics of the design of the footwear, essential to the understanding of Sankovskaya’s technique, are not listed.¹² The assumption is that she skimmed the stage, like Taglioni, on some combination of half-, three-quarter, and full pointe, but the sources are vague. As a student, the dancer Anna Natarova recalled seeing Sankovskaya in La sylphide. “She astonished everybody by running around the stage and going through her pas, all on pointe,” Natarova claimed. “This was new at that time.”¹³

Tsar Nicholas I took a special interest in Sankovskaya, as did many nobles with Moscow ballerinas, the imperial ballet being during his reign a harem of sorts for the court. Upon signing her first contract, Sankovskaya received an oversized diamond from the tsar and a lump-sum bonus of 150 rubles. Sexual affairs with dancers were a rite of passage for an adolescent nobleman, and it was not uncommon for older nobles to rely on the ballet school for lovers, plucking them from classes like fruit from hothouse gardens. Nicholas’s son, the future Tsar Alexander II, inherited his father’s tastes, and there is evidence to suggest that he took one of Sankovskaya’s rivals as a mistress. Besides personal pleasure, however, Nicholas found within the corps de ballet a model for obedient troop behavior. And vice versa: For a performance of the ballet The Revolt of the Harem (Vosstaniye v serale) in 1836, he assumed the duties of a ballet master by assigning the dancers weapons training.¹⁴ He broke down their initial resistance to the idea by making them rehearse outside in the snow.

The extent to which the Bolshoi Theater became a seraglio, and whether Sankovskaya was abducted by infatuated noblemen, will never be known. It is clear, however, that she existed above and apart from the lesser, poorer dancers whose futures lay in the laundries or on the streets as licensed prostitutes, dressed in yellow, carrying medical checkup forms of the same color. The term “ballerina” and the Table of Ranks for dancers (first dancer, second dancer, coryphée, corps de ballet) had not yet been codified by the Imperial Theaters, but there is no doubt Sankovskaya rose to the top, and stayed there. She far surpassed her teacher to become the finest Russian dancer of the first half of the nineteenth century. The administration of the Moscow Imperial Theaters recognized her talent early, increasing her bonus to 500 rubles and then 1,000 rubles upon the signing of contracts in 1838 and 1839. Later, she earned bonuses based on the number of times she starred in a ballet, seven rubles per outing in 1845, rising to ten, fifteen, eighteen, and finally twenty-five in 1851. Her contracts also guaranteed her an annual benefit or half-benefit performance, a lucrative perk, and for one of them she tried her hand at choreography, restaging the 1845 ballet Le diable à quatre (The devil to pay), which Joseph Mazilier had originally choreographed to music by Adolphe Adam, for presentation at the Bolshoi at the end of 1846. The subject of class conflict (a hot-tempered marquise magically trades lives with the good-hearted spouse of a cobbler) might have explained its appeal to Sankovskaya, but it was also chockablock with madcap caprice, including an episode in which a hurdy-gurdy player has his instrument broken over his head. Sankovskaya also performed in St. Petersburg and in 1846 toured abroad to Hamburg and Paris, among other cities—a first for a Moscow-trained dancer.

Bohemian students idolized her for reasons both religious and philosophical, as did the prominent theatrical observers Sergey Aksakov, Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, and Mikhaíl Saltïkov-Shchedrin. Appraisals and descriptions of her performances in the press are nonetheless few and far between, since the theatrical review had only just been legalized in 1828 for the semiofficial culture and politics newspaper Severnaya pchela (The northern bee), and strict rules were put in place, by the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Moscow police, about who could write reviews and how it was to be done: nothing anonymous, nothing unsolicited, and so nothing troublemaking. The gaps in critical thought were filled by periodicals like Moskovskiy nablyudatel’, diaries, and memoirs. Sankovskaya’s devotees saw spiritual liberation in her movement and found it difficult to believe that she was merely human, prone to injuries. Injuries excited alarm but also, like Taglioni’s and Elssler’s infirmities, increased Sankovskaya’s allure.

She had rivals, both early in her career and later on, and gossip raged, as it tends to, about her efforts to damage their careers. The first in the long list of competitors was Tatyana Karpakova, who had also trained with Hullen and had also been taken to Paris for exposure to the more rigorous lexicon of the Parisian repertoire. Karpakova danced from childhood and had sufficient nuance and timing to earn parts in theatrical comedies, though a critic of the time lamented her refusal to surrender cliché, the crass jumps that dancers recycled from ballet to ballet. Two years after graduating from the Moscow Imperial Theater College, Karpakova married a classmate, Konstantin Bogdanov. She had children whom she did not raise, ceding their upbringing, in keeping with the habit among artists, to the Theater College. As Karpakova slowed down, her name faded from the repertoire, and, after Sankovskaya’s ascension, the theatergoing public forgot about her altogether. In 1842, tuberculosis sentenced Karpakova to a premature death around age thirty.

KARPAKOVA HAD A DIFFICULT time escaping the strictures of academic classicism: her pantomime was considered cold, impersonal. Sankovskaya, in contrast, performed with passion, exhilaration, the seeming naturalness of her filigreed movement disguising a brutal training regimen. Her health suffered the strain even in her twenties, and she found herself unable to do all that was expected of her, which brought her into conflict with the administration of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. For all her fame, she remained a servant of the state, forced to do as she was told and obliged to explain every bruise, sniffle, or absence to her employers. Requests for time off needed to be submitted long in advance, likewise appeals for long-term medical treatment. As director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters, Verstovsky grew tired of her complaints, suspecting that she was exaggerating or inventing her health problems. He accused her of reveling in the attention generated by her absences from the stage and noted that she quickly returned to form whenever another dancer challenged her position.

In March of 1843, her doctor recommended that Sankovskaya be permitted to travel to Bad Ems, Germany, the preferred summer retreat of the European and Russian nobility, to take the thermal mineral waters and sea salts. She was suffering from myriad ailments: frail nerves, gastrointestinal disorder, irritation of the liver, persistent low-grade fever, and constant back pain. The request was rejected because Sankovskaya had not herself discussed her situation when she was in the offices of the Moscow Imperial Theaters to arrange a benefit performance, and because the doctor’s report did not explain how the facilities in Bad Ems could help. She filed the same request in March of 1844, by which time the back pain had increased and Sankovskaya had developed a cyst on the inside of her left thigh above the knee. In addition, she had a hernia, the result of a pulled groin. Her doctor also noted abdominal pain and the discoloration of the skin characteristic of jaundice. On April 10, Sankovskaya was given leave to travel abroad and issued a foreign passport for four months of treatment in Bad Ems, her pay suspended for the duration, from May to August. Before leaving, she had to prostrate herself before the intendant (director-in-chief) of the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, Alexander Gedeonov, pledging, once she had recovered, to dedicate herself to justifying his benevolence. She perhaps did not need to go so far, since Gedeonov was, as the ballet master Marius Petipa recalled, a “very kind” man. Though he seemed harsh, earning the nickname “grumbler benefactor,” he generally forgave bad behavior. (Petipa relates the case of a “bit player” who turned up drunk for a performance and threw up onstage. Gedeonov admonished the “disgusting creature” but allowed him to keep his pension, even after the actor pulled a pair of pistols on him.)¹⁵

The thermal mineral springs, despite their reputation as a fountain of youth, did little to alleviate the abuse Sankovskaya’s body had suffered through the years. Her health continued to decline. In August of 1848, she was fined 259 rubles and 54 kopecks for failing to perform; she had been out sick for three months. When she finally returned to the Bolshoi, she was upstaged by a visiting dancer from St. Petersburg.

Her health problems obliged her to work, for a period, without a contract. She took her last bow near the end of 1854, having established the benchmark for subsequent generations. Official papers exchanged between the Moscow and St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters indicate that, to Verstovsky’s consternation, she received special treatment in her final years onstage. Sankovskaya retired past her peak but not conspicuously so, beloved by the Moscow public as “the soul of our ballet,” a hometown girl made good.¹⁶ A farewell benefit was arranged at the Malïy Theater but canceled, due again to her health, but also to a decline in the size of her audiences. Verstovsky thereafter started to promote her protégés, especially the bright young Praskovya Lebedeva—the one dancer, in all his years of correspondence, to earn his genuine praise. Sankovskaya received another diamond and a pension equivalent to her salary in the late 1840s. After leaving the stage she taught social dances to girls and boys in gymnasia and manor houses. One tale has her setting a “sailor’s dance” on the future great method actor Konstantin Stanislavsky.¹⁷ His technique owed much to Sankovskaya’s childhood instructor Mikhaíl Shchepkin. Before her death on August 16, 1878, her career had come full circle.

FIVE YEARS AFTER Sankovskaya’s retirement from the stage, a tribute of sorts was published in the journal Otechestvennïye zapiski (Notes from the Fatherland) under the title “Recollections of a Moscow University Student.”¹⁸ The text is autobiographical, but it is drenched in mystical perfume and meanders from what is known about Sankovskaya’s career. The student in question, Nikolay Dmitriyev, exhausts superlatives in describing the effect on him of Sankovskaya’s dancing during a glum time in his life. He recalls her performance in 1837 of the lead role in La sylphide, an early staple of the repertoire first choreographed by Filippo Taglioni in Paris in 1832 for his daughter, Marie, who overcame serious physical challenges to serve as her father’s muse. La sylphide was profoundly influential, providing the archetype for, as an obvious example, the act 1 madness scene and act 2 dance-love-nexus of Giselle. At its most basic level, La sylphide concerns striving for the ideal, but it ends in grief and leaves open the question as to whether the eff ort merited the sacrifice. Marie Taglioni was in St. Petersburg performing the part of the ethereal heroine on the exact same night that Sankovskaya danced the ballet in Moscow. This was neither a scheduling coincidence nor a conflict but what Sankovskaya’s teacher, Hullen, had conceived as a duel in satin slippers.

Sankovskaya triumphed—at least according to Dmitriyev. In his recollections, he arrives at the Bolshoi in a foul mood, burdened, like Goethe’s Werther, by suicidal thoughts caused by boredom, loneliness, and the harsh autumn frost. He seeks distraction, but there is no Academy of the Arts in Moscow for entertaining edification, no Hermitage. For “aesthetic feeling,” he has recourse to the theater alone. His spirits sink further when he realizes that the program for the evening is neither a play nor an opera but a benefit for a ballerina. There is no point in returning to the “dreariness,” “grief,” his neighbor’s “stupid mug,” and the “inescapable samovar” of his room, so he surrenders the seven rubles in his pocket, a colossal sum, for a ticket. The crowds in the side rooms of the theater beam obtuse happiness, and he grinds himself into his seat thinking that they have all been duped. The orchestra interrupts his recollection of Lermontov’s verses on the torments of ignorance.

And then he sees her. The curtain rises to reveal a house in a mythical elsewhere (Scotland) and a man flopped in an armchair, napping, or in Dmitriyev’s description, tugged to sleep by forces beyond his control. Sankovskaya comes into view in a window above the stage and then glides down over the railing of a ladder to the floor, her skin and tulle white as the moonlight. She kneels before the armchair and then, again in Dmitriyev’s description, rises to dance for the man, expressing her unreserved willingness to submit to his desire. Then she disappears, as ungraspable as “air’s pure translucence.”

The man in the chair, James, is soon to be wed, but he is dissatisfied with his intended bride, Effie, a conservative, salt-of-the-earth type. He seeks the escape symbolized by the sylph, the enchanting other, and falls in love with her. Dmitriyev too became smitten with Sankovskaya, waiting for her to return to the stage with his heart stopped and then, when she did, watching her skim across the floor, rapt. He grew aware of the interloping temporalities, the places where the music ends but the dancer continues her delicate runs, and appreciated the special visual effects: the sylph’s ascent into the ether with her partner at the end of the first act, and her disappearance through a trapdoor in the second. Nothing is said of the tragic ending of the ballet, when James, desperate to possess the sylph, flees his bride for the forest (the realm, in the Moscow staging, of benign witches illuminated by street lamps). There in the woods James grasps the sylph, trapping her in his cloak. She loses her wings, the source of her power, and dies. A writer for the fashion journal Galatea provides the detail Dmitriyev excluded: “The expression on her face as she battled death was uncommonly aff ecting.”¹⁹

Beyond noting the perspiration that accumulated on Sankovskaya’s body like “spring dew,” Dmitriyev revealed little about the specifics of her dancing: how high Sankovskaya jumped, how often she rose up en pointe, whether or not she soared above the stage with wire supports, the thickness of the leather on the heels of her slippers. The details were apparently incidental to the spell that she cast on him and his fellow students and professors.

La sylphide was the centerpiece of Sankovskaya’s career, but Dmitriyev believed that her dancing was most true to herself in the Ballet of the Nuns scene from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s supernatural opera, Robert le diable (1831). The scene was made famous in Paris by Marie Taglioni, who on at least three occasions took the lead role in a shocking spectacle: The ghost of the abbess Helena (Taglioni) leads her sisters, also risen from the grave, in a morbid seduction ritual. The abbess comes not from some benign spiritual beyond but from the lower depths of hell. She and her sisters have been condemned to the underworld for succumbing to unclean thoughts and are forced forever to do the bidding of the Evil One. The opera’s protagonist, Robert, is lured into their lair in search of the magic branch that will allow him to reclaim his true love. He resists the necrophilic temptations and, through the intervention of his angelic half-sister, survives Taglioni’s—and Sankovskaya’s—balletic night of horrors.

In Paris in 1831, the ballet was cast in an eerie green light produced by a long row of gas jets lit one by one by an attendant. The garments worn by the dancers, catching the light, made strange shapes. The effect was dangerous (Taglioni’s pupil Emma Livry died in horrible fashion when her skirt brushed up against a gas jet on the stage) but alluring, transforming the Ballet of the Nuns into an etheric bacchanale. On the ghost abbess Helena’s cue, the ghost nuns remove their habits to reveal, in the ethereal moonlight, translucent tulle and the pale skin beneath it. Edgar Degas immortalized the scene in 1876 in an impressionistic painting. The ghost nuns are seen processing to the front of the stage, swooning and flopping onto their knees in supplication. A reviewer for the Parisian Journal des débats described the wraiths dropping “their veils and their long habits, revealing only their light ballet tunics. Each of them drinks deeply of Cyprus wine or Val de Pegnas to refresh her mouth in which spiders have perhaps been spinning their webs; this gives them the courage to dance, and here they are spinning like tops, dancing rounds and the farandole, and dispensing themselves like women possessed.”²⁰ The spectacle also possessed Dmitriyev, though his description does not come from an actual gaslit performance of the Ballet of the Nuns in Moscow; at the time of his writing, in 1859, the technology had not yet been installed in the Bolshoi. The nuns he saw would have moved in dimness. Dmitriyev insists, against the historical record, that Sankovskaya surpassed Taglioni in the role of the ghost abbess and that she calibrated it perfectly, exposing the dangers of her art, its seductive Satanism.

Dmitriyev was sufficiently captivated by Sankovskaya to turn up night after night at the theater hoping to see her perform again, but she never did. That led him to conclude she had left for Paris, again, or London, or had perhaps even suffered the bittersweet fate of the sylph. His account is emblematic of the love she received from liberal Moscow students, who crowned her their own personal tsarina, while also attesting to the reverence with which critics of the period described each step and gesture in her embodiments of Esmeralda, Giselle, and Paquita. Certain sensational details are omitted from his tribute, including the evening when the police were called to the Bolshoi to restore order after the ovation from the fawning students threatened to exceed acceptable decibel levels—the theater being no place for mass demonstrations. The noise ordinance came directly from Tsar Nicholas I, who had quashed the uprising that followed his ascension to the throne, in December of 1825, and thereafter maintained order in the empire through callous means. His was a rule of censorship, intolerance, and the persecution of the foreign, the nonconforming outsider. Sankovskaya, the made-in-Russia emblem of spiritual freedom, was, for the social class most ground down, a light in the dark.

The adoration of youthful audiences, both for Sankovskaya the great artist and Sankovskaya the perspiring human being behind the pirouettes, brought the French phenomenon of the claque (taken from the French word for clapping) to Moscow. Her devotees—her claque—could be counted on to applaud, cheer, and stomp their feet at the end of intricate sequences, giving her a moment to regain her balance and sneak in a breath. The rest of the audience sometimes followed their example, making the success of the evening so resounding that no critic could quibble. In Paris, the claque could support or sabotage a performance, by talking or hacking or clapping off-beat, if the dancer fell out of favor with the claque or refused to provide free passes to the performance. There is no evidence to suggest that Sankovskaya ever offended her fans; their adoration lasted from 1836, when she made her debut, to 1854, when she left the stage.

INDEED HER FANS remained so overcommitted to her as to make the Bolshoi stage perilous for actual or potential rivals, and Sankovskaya was spared the indignities suffered by lesser lights. One of them was her own sister, the lesser-known Alexandra, who had a modest career in Romantic roles, together with folk fare and masquerades. But during her years at the Imperial Theater College and on the Bolshoi Theater stage, Alexandra—billed as Sankovskaya II—was bullied for her imperfections at the barre and, once to great alarm, abused in front of the entire theater.

The villain was the thirty-four-year-old ballet master Théodore Guerinot, a native of rural France who had danced in St. Petersburg for four years before accepting a renewable three-year position in Moscow in the fall of 1838. He specialized in mime and was touted for superb acting, his facial mannerisms extolled as “polysyllabic.”²¹ His behavior behind the scenes, however, lacked such nuance. He was, frankly, a cad. Guerinot enjoyed betraying his lover, the French dancer Laura Peysar, sometimes feigning innocence when caught in the act and at other times placing the blame on whatever insidious seductress had forced herself upon him that evening. Peysar exorcised her personal anguish by literally throwing herself into her art. She took on dangerous roles requiring elaborate stunts and almost killed herself when a boom holding her above the stage collapsed. She broke her leg in the fall. Her career ended, and Guerinot left town.

His debut in Moscow included the saltarello from the second act of the popular comic opera Zampa, ou la fiancée de marbre (Zampa, or the marble bride). Though the saltarello has benign rustic Italian origins, Guerinot and his onstage partner, Alexandra Voronina-Ivanova, made the quick triple-meter steps seem like devil’s work. He was hailed by an anonymous reviewer in Moskovskiye vedomosti for performing as though each phrase was an on-the-spot, in-the-moment invention. Guerinot provided “excitement in the randomness” of the phrases, “giving the dance a new look each time … You begin to think, in truth, that he is dancing on impulse, that each rapid change in his movement is the product of a rush of imagination, rather than being a requirement of this inventive dance.”²² After making this memorable first impression, Guerinot was appointed “ballet master and first dancer of mime” at the Bolshoi Theater in October of 1838.²³

In Moscow he worked alongside, and then replaced, the Napoleon-era ballet master and pedagogue Adam Glushkovsky, who chose to retire from his position at the same time as Sankovskaya’s mentor, Félicité Hullen. Guerinot brought French ballets from St. Petersburg to Moscow and, for 17,000 rubles a year, masculinized them, making the roles of the men as compelling as those of the women. His productions at the Bolshoi included La fille du Danube (The daughter of the Danube), which Filippo Taglioni had choreographed for his daughter, Marie, as well as the slave-girl drama Le corsaire and Le diable boiteux (The devil on two sticks), whose Paris premiere featured Fanny Elssler in a Spanish castanet dance called the cachucha. Guerinot partnered with Ekaterina Sankovskaya in several ballets, and both of them were lauded in the press for their performances, though the critics in question lamented the underbudgeted, dreadful-looking sets and costumes in the Moscow version of La sylphide, as opposed to the lavish Taglioni version in St. Petersburg. Guerinot was as expressive and evocative in his mime, demonstrating that “male dancing can be significant in its own right.” Sankovskaya was “gentle” and, despite the disappointing staging, the ideal of grace. She might not have “floated through the air” and “glided through the flowers” as captivatingly as Taglioni, and her white tunic and wreath might have been a bore, but in the end she received five curtain calls—the same as Taglioni.²⁴ And Sankovskaya was the better actress of the two dancers.

Trouble for Guerinot came in 1842 with a staging of Rossini’s opera William Tell, which has dancing in the third act. Since the opera concerns a rebellion against a repressive regime, in this case Austrian, the Censorship Committee of the Ministry of Education delayed approving it for production, having detected hints of revolution. To reach the stage, the opera had to be renamed Charles the Bold and the libretto reworked to enhance its patriotic as opposed to insurrectionist elements. The flash point, both onstage and off, was an aggressive pas de trois performed by Guerinot and the two Sankovskaya sisters. As soon as the dance ended, Alexandra ran off, her bladder full. She did not hear the call back to the stage and arrived late for her bow. She was supposed to enter the stage ahead of Guerinot and her sister, whose ranks exceeded hers, but since she was slow getting back, the order had to be reversed. Guerinot lost his temper. He went into the wings, grabbing Alexandra by the arm, and dragged her onto the stage. She stumbled and had to pull herself free to keep from falling. Backstage, he slapped and kicked her in front of the chorus. She fainted and took to bed for six days.

Alexandra’s account of the attack, which she turned into an official complaint against Guerinot, prompted an investigation and interviews with audience and staff members who had witnessed the incident or heard about it. The slap was described as but a flick in the comically muddled recollection of a certain Captain Lieutenant Mukhin, who recalled Guerinot “lifting his hand and flicking her on the left cheek right next to her eye.” Her “astonished and enraged visage” prompted him to conclude “that she had indeed been affected by the flicking.” But, he mused,

whether or not M. Guerinot kicked her in the shins, or she him, as M. Guerinot testifies, that I did not see, for I was looking above their legs. Yet, in all likelihood, and given that she was ahead of him, she would have had to direct her kick behind her to M. Guerinot. Still, I cannot say anything definitive about this. Upon returning backstage, I, as a person external to the proceedings and having no obligation to say anything, refrained from doing so until the Repertoire Inspector, Court Counselor Verstovsky, arrived, declaring: “M. Guerinot has quarreled with Mlle. Sankovskaya; she has called him a swine.” To which I, as an eyewitness to the event, deemed myself obliged to rejoin immediately: “And so is she justified, for M. Guerinot flicked her.”²⁵

The case went to St. Petersburg for a ruling. Guerinot was fined two weeks’ pay by the minister of the court for his behavior—an indication, perhaps, that such incidents were somewhat routine. He was also made to apologize to his victim, which he did to her satisfaction, and advised that further incidents might lead to the termination of his employment. That the Russian word for “kick” is spelled with a soft sign in the Moscow records of the assault but without a soft sign in the St. Petersburg records—pinka instead of pin’ka—might seem a trifling detail, but it proves telling. People spoke differently in the two cities. Muscovites retained a domestic dialect that the court had abandoned; the Russian language was spoken more gently in Moscow than in the capital. But the art had a harder edge.

GUERINOT’S REPUTATION DETERIORATED. He was disparaged by the director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters, Verstovsky, who joked in a letter to his supervisor in St. Petersburg that “no matter how much one tries to teach Guerinot—to behave himself—he never ceases being a scoundrel.”²⁶

His swan-song benefit was on October 29, 1845; next came the expiration of his contract and what decorum obliged those in the know to call “unpleasantness.” The unpleasantness, however, extended beyond Sankovskaya’s sister to another dancer, Luisa Weiss, whose beauty helped to compensate for her technical limitations. Weiss had begun her career in Darmstadt, Germany, dancing in the theater built by the grand duke of Hesse, and then relocated to London, where she performed, depending on the source, either to great acclaim or partial success. Prince Alexander Nikolayevich (the future Tsar Alexander II) had a strong connection to Darmstadt, having married Princess Marie of Hesse in St. Petersburg in 1841. He invited Weiss to Russia and showed an intense interest in her performances at the Bolshoi—so intense, in fact, as to suggest that the dancer from Darmstadt was his mistress. Gedeonov also expressed interest in her, editing the letters that she wrote to the Moscow Imperial Theaters in hopes of a more lucrative contract. Weiss’s ties to the court, and the special treatment she received, including imported footwear and payment in advance for her performances, made her a subject of gossip, as did her falling-out with Sankovskaya. The tattle within the theater was that Sankovskaya considered Weiss a threat and was conspiring with Guerinot to bring her down.

As part of the October 29, 1845, benefit for Guerinot, Weiss performed La sylphide, to constant, loud applause from most of the audience, the exception being Sankovskaya’s claque, who tried to drown out the clapping with catcalls. There were several curtain calls—ten according to one count, fifteen in another. During the last of them, an apple was thrown at Weiss from the loges, plopping unceremoniously down at her feet.

The next day, Verstovsky reported the incident in lavish detail to Gedeonov, noting that the apple toss was unprecedented and that he had ordered an investigation above and beyond what the officer on duty in the theater reported. Weiss, he added, refused to dance again at the Bolshoi, and her mother and brother, who lived with her in Moscow, were very upset. Thus was compromised his attempt to “counterbalance public opinion in relation to Mlle. Sankovskaya, who is an obvious attraction for the ballet but cannot always be relied upon by the directorate due to poor health.”²⁷

Since Prince Alexander was Weiss’s benefactor and would hear about the incident from her, Gedeonov decided that he needed to get involved. He wrote a letter to the prince explaining what had happened in language suitable for a child, first mentioning that, in recent times, audiences had engaged in the commendable custom of gently lobbing bouquets of flowers onto the stage, and that, in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, audiences tended to behave themselves. Though the apple had caused no damage, he stressed the need to find the person who threw it. Prince Alexander took the matter seriously, appointing a special officer to investigate on his behalf.

Subsequently Gedeonov reported that Guerinot had distributed a large number of free tickets to students, including those of the fencing instructor in the theater. He also learned that, on the morning of October 30, a day after the apple toss, Guerinot was overheard asking one of the students whether the performance, including the final curtain call, had gone according to plan. The silliness of the drama escalated when Verstovsky decided to get involved. He interviewed everyone who might have had anything to do with the incident and then expressed frustration at the discrepancies in their accounts. One eyewitness claimed that Weiss had encountered the apple after her third curtain call, not her tenth, and that it was half eaten, chewed, in fact, right down to the core. Surviving chunks of apple served as evidence to prove that it had actually posed no threat to Weiss’s safety. Verstovsky dismissed this account as biased, coming from a dancer who “placed Mlle. Sankovskaya incomparably higher than Mlle. Weiss in all respects.”²⁸ His investigation revealed, even less helpfully, that the apple had been thrown from a loge registered under the alias Zolotov. “A person by that name does in fact exist,” Verstovsky explained to Gedeonov, but he was a deeply spiritual man, “an Old Believer from the other side of the Moscow River, and does not attend the theater.”²⁹ Someone else asserted that the apple had been thrown after most of the audience had departed, as the chandelier was being raised. But the chandelier, Verstovsky replied, was fixed in place.

Since Guerinot had a bad reputation (Verstovsky never forgot the flicking episode), he was blamed for disgracing Weiss, but Verstovsky also had extremely harsh words for Sankovskaya, whose alleged conspiracies against younger talents had exhausted his patience. “I am quite willing to accept that as long as she remains in the Moscow Theater she will constantly disrupt the order and disturb the peace with her tireless intrigues,” he fumed. “After several days discussing her benefit and all of her incessant whims all I wanted to do was collapse in bed!” The twilight of her career consisted of “making others feel sorry for her, as if she were some downtrodden waif or pig in the poke.” This was no way to treat his star dancer, Verstovsky knew, but he had had enough of Sankovskaya’s self-centeredness and the “little illnesses” that led her to petition for a reduced workload, performances of parts of ballets—a solo variation here, a pas de deux there—rather than entire works.³⁰ She lay in her bed all covered in bouquets, claiming to be at death’s door but refusing to see a doctor.

Verstovsky was no less disgusted with Guerinot, who had taken sick leave for—he claimed—a bad leg but found time to go to the ballet school each day to “whisper in Sankovskaya’s ear for an hour or two.”³¹ He wanted both of them removed, especially Guerinot, and rejoiced at the thought of a twenty-two-year-old dancer and ballet master from St. Petersburg, Irakliya Nikitin, replacing him at the Bolshoi. The news of Nikitin’s coming to Moscow “finally lets the stone roll from my heart,” he told his supervisor.³²

Weiss submitted a complaint of her own, accusing Sankovskaya of conspiring with Guerinot against her, just as she had conspired against two other dancers in fits of pique. Given that Weiss had not succeeded in mobilizing the public against her, Sankovskaya purportedly hatched a plan with her partner to humiliate her during the October 29 benefit. But the catcalls from the “450” students who had received free tickets failed to quell the enthusiasm of the general public, who called her to the stage fifteen (not ten) times after the performance of La sylphide. The apple was “huge,” Weiss recalled, “and it was thrown at me with such force that it broke into small pieces when it struck my breast, and certainly would have killed me had it hit my head.”³³

That was the end of Guerinot. Gedeonov refused to renew his contract. Sankovskaya, too, was removed from the Bolshoi, but just to give tension over the apple attack a chance to dissipate. Gedeonov dispatched her to St. Petersburg, where she performed La sylphide at the Great Stone Theater before touring abroad. She triumphed. Although Verstovsky engineered her departure, he regretted the significant loss to ticket sales and recognized that nothing could compensate for it. Sankovskaya’s Moscow fans remained feverishly committed to her while awaiting her return; they exacted revenge for her banishment by pulling pranks on those who presumed to take her place—pranks that were far more bizarre than the dancers themselves ever contrived.

Weiss recovered from the apple attack, performing two weeks later on a program that featured Zampa, ou la fiancée de marbre to sustained applause from the auditorium and the loges. “After my performance yesterday I was received very warmly,” she informed Gedeonov with gratitude; “1,000 rubles in bouquets were tossed to me by the local nobility.”³⁴ She remained in Moscow (there is reference to her performing in an 1846 vaudeville depicting “a day in the life” of a hapless theater prompter, Ein Tag aus dem Leben eines alten Souffleurs), and she must also have appeared in St. Petersburg. Toward the end of her run, she suffered the minor misfortune of having a scarf and gold bracelet stolen from her Moscow apartment, after a man posing as an administrator with the Imperial Theaters lured her and her mother to an official meeting. Another long investigation followed.

The claque dreamt up their worst prank, however, against another, much more gifted dancer, Elena Andreyanova, who had the double misfortune of rivaling Sankovskaya and partnering with Nikitin, the dancer who had replaced Guerinot.

Like Sankovskaya, Andreyanova performed in a manner evocative of Taglioni and Elssler and came into prominence at the time that those two ballerinas, the twin poles of the Romantic era in dance, visited St. Petersburg. She was nicknamed the “northern Giselle” when she toured in the role to Paris, but she suff ered terrible nerves and, according to a corpulent theater observer named Jules Janin, “trembled like a northern birch tree” when she made her first entry on the Paris stage.³⁵ The consensus among critics was that Andreyanova had tremendous power in her limbs and had committed herself to a heroic bearing. Her chiseled facial features, thick brows, and dark eyes added to her expressiveness. Comparisons between Andreyanova and Sankovskaya inevitably emphasized the former’s boldness, resolve, and strength, and the latter’s gentleness, lightness, and smoothness in transitions. The distinction was that of the real versus the ideal, with Andreyanova revealing the effort, making her triumph over hardship explicit. Sankovskaya, in contrast, concealed it.

In Moscow, Sankovskaya’s supporters found Andreyanova lacking in refined lyricism, the gift of being able to sing a phrase with her body. But she was celebrated in St. Petersburg and received special treatment from Gedeonov, who lavished food and wine on her. Once she became his mistress, she was protected from other officials and officers of the court and felt sure that she did not need to purchase support, as had Sankovskaya, from a claque. The old balletomanes of St. Petersburg fell hard for her, as they did for other dancers, seating her in her carriage after performances before retiring to oysters and Champagne in private dining rooms to luxuriate in unrequited love, but they were harmless compared to the zealots in Moscow.

Aware of Gedeonov’s intimate relationship with Andreyanova, Verstovsky made sure to praise her talent to the heavens when she performed Giselle at the Bolshoi Theater at the end of 1843. He also felt obliged to ridicule Sankovskaya—and her fans—after her appearance in a vaudeville by Jean-François Bayard, as part of a December 17 benefit performance for the actor Alexander Bantïshev:

Although M. Bantïshev’s benefit brought him only 2,000 rubles, the public, especially the upper ranks, shouted to their hearts’ content. No sooner had they caught sight of Mlle. Sankovskaya than they let out three hurrahs! If someone had been brought into the theater blindfolded and asked where he was, doubtless he would have said that he had been brought to the public square just as a high-ranking general had arrived, the hurrahing being of just such a distinction! Desiring to show that she had been moved to tears by the ovation, Mlle. Sankovskaya made of her body a pose so filthy that I would be embarrassed to name it. Then, upon making her typical coarse gestures, those that rope-climbers make as they climb up ropes, she began to dance in a manner so unseemly that I couldn’t bear to look at it, especially now that we have come to love Mlle. Andreyanova’s dances.³⁶

Verstovsky acknowledged that Sankovskaya was a skilled entertainer, amusing a broad swath of the public in the up-tempo, satiric grab bags of “music, singing, dancing, calembours [puns], marivaudage [affectation],” and ridiculous happenings that defined the French vaudeville and its Russian derivations.³⁷ But, he claimed, she had a disastrous outing on December 17. Trolling for laughs, she went too lowbrow, embarrassing herself before the merchants and audiences in the crowd. Verstovsky made it seem as though she had given the vaudeville a bad reputation by crossing the thin line in her performance between delicate ballerina and bawd. He would make the same invidious comparisons to Andreyanova—and repeat his tales of conflicts with Sankovskaya over dressing rooms and costumes—in 1845 and 1848, when Andreyanova returned to the Bolshoi Theater as part of extensive tours around the Russian Empire. He was unable, however, to change the minds or tame the behavior of the ballet-goers known as “Sankovistï.”

His decision, in February of 1845, to assign Sankovskaya additional vaudeville appearances at the Malïy Theater while Andreyanova starred at the Bolshoi backfired. There were no apples thrown or flicks administered, but Andreyanova was subject to jeering from the free-ticket-holders in the galleries. The noise threatened to drown out the legitimate applause from the gentlemen in the seats and dampened the enthusiasm of the ladies, who expressed their approval through the vigorous shaking of their kerchiefs. Meanwhile, at the Malïy Theater, bouquets covered Sankovskaya’s ankles as she took her last bow. Andreyanova rightly anticipated trouble for her subsequent engagement at the Bolshoi in November of 1848 and reserved even more seats than she had in the past for her fans from St. Petersburg.

According to the nineteenth-century journalist Mikhaíl Pïlyayev, the incident occurred during Andreyanova’s benefit performance of Paquita, a ballet best known for its Grand Pas classique, which exists in various versions in the present-day repertoire. The full-length version danced at the Bolshoi in 1848 was choreographed by Marius Petipa and Pierre-Frédéric Malavergne, tomusic by Édouard Deldevez and Ludwig Minkus. The three scenes and two acts told of the love of a Spanish gypsy for a French officer during the Napoleonic Wars. The gypsy discovers that she is of noble blood and, as the fates ordained, the cousin of the officer, which allows the two of them to get married. The pas de trois of the first act and grand classical pas of the second were created with Andreyanova’s skills in mind, sculpted, as it were, onto her body. She danced the 1847 premiere in St. Petersburg before bringing the ballet to Moscow.