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THE CHARRED REMAINS of the Petrovsky Theater moldered in the bog under its former foundation, home again on summer nights to “birds of prey,” “lots of frogs,” and their music.¹ Maddox’s free-enterprise experiment in dance and song had failed; the tsar stepped in, and ballet and opera in Moscow became, with the exception of the serf theaters, a government operation. The Moscow Imperial Theaters administration was established under the control of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters and the aegis of the court, which oversaw artistic, educational, and financial matters.

The children were the first order of business. Their training in dance and music had taken place in the Foundling Home before being absorbed into Maddox’s operation. The orphanage remained proudly perched on a bend in the Moscow River, but it no longer privileged training in the arts. The Enlightenment educational principles of Catherine the Great and her personal assistant Ivan Betskoy were pursued instead in a separate building. Its name, the Moscow Imperial Theater College, was cumbersome, but it stuck. Throughout the nineteenth century the college expanded, its curriculum encompassing not only the arts but also the sciences, and enrollment increased. In the twentieth century, the prestigious dance division was renamed the Bolshoi Ballet Academy.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Moscow Imperial Theater College moved around as it grew: from a building in the market district near the old Maddox theater, to a series of stone manor houses. Three of the manor houses belonged to generals of long and distinguished service, one to a lieutenant colonel, another to a court chamberlain. The residence of the court chamberlain, an elegant structure of yellow pastel that still stands on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, housed first the college and then, after 1865, the business office, or kontora, of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. Toward the end of the century, a larger space was found in a building on Neglinnaya Street that had once been a canton school, an institution that readied the sons of conscripts for military service with lessons in everything from fortification to penmanship to shoemaking.

When the Imperial Theater College first opened, in 1806, it enrolled fifteen girls and fifteen boys. Far fewer students completed the course of studies in the first years than began it, because many chose to pursue other vocations. Tuberculosis also took its toll, as did personal problems. When the college could not fill the rosters of ballet performances, itinerant performers from the provinces and serf actors from Moscow’s manor houses stepped in. The reputation of the art improved, as did the training, and by 1817, the number of students had doubled. Five years later, eighty-six students were in attendance: forty-one girls and thirty-four boys in the dance program, three concentrating in drama, and eight in music. By the end of the 1820s, when the college moved to the manor house on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, enrollment exceeded two hundred.

Students entered the college between ages nine and twelve and graduated between eighteen and twenty. Those living in residence included orphaned wards of the state and children of people working for the Imperial Theaters. The college limited the number of boarders to fifty students of each gender; by an odd quirk, those living at home could train in dance but not drama or music. The curriculum for the beginning students included, besides dance, classes in holy law, Russian grammar, arithmetic, handwriting, geography, history, drawing, gymnastics, piano, and violin. Later, mythology, fencing, and mime were added. Once it was codified, the routine in the college was invariant: rise at eight, common prayer, breakfast, dance classes until noon or one, lunch, academic subjects, dinner, carriage to the theater for those performing, permission to visit home on major holidays. Dance rehearsals were often held off site; on Saturdays, the classes were inspected. Those students who did not, in the end, exhibit talent were given training in costume- and prop-making and the science of set changes. Those with some promise were assigned to theaters in Moscow and St. Petersburg as needed, with an obligation to perform for ten years.

Tales of life in the college are scarce but suggest a no-frills yet nurturing environment. One early graduate described being dressed “disgracefully, ridiculously, in trousers and coats of putrid light green fabric, patched here and there.”² But the college was not Bleak House. Mikhaíl Shchepkin (1788–1841), a serf actor destined for greatness, taught at the college in the decades after Napoleon. He described his hard work there in a kindly cant: “Having taken on these responsibilities and accustomed myself to performing them conscientiously I seldom missed a day at the school. I soon became acquainted with all of the children, and we lived as friends, studying a little, but seriously.”³

The next concern was rebuilding the theater itself. For the first two years after the fire, Moscow’s entertainers performed on estates and in summer gardens around the city. Theatrical life once more ended up in the homes of noblemen, many of whom maintained private serf theaters within their sprawling compounds. The largest exploited the talents of hundreds of performers, and hosted operas, ballets, and divertissements of foreign (Italian) visual design. With the Petrovsky gone, public theater suffered, and many of the professionals that Maddox had employed lived hand-to-mouth. Only in the spring of 1808 did the actors and dancers of Moscow find a new home in a wooden theater on Arbat Square, designed on imperial commission by Carlo Rossi, the immigrant son of a ballerina.

Its completion had been slow. Ivan Valberg (Val’berkh), the first famous native Russian ballet master, was told that it would be finished at the start of 1808, but work didn’t even begin until almost Easter. As he grumbled to his wife, “The theater is not done and the pettiness of the intrigues endless. There are no costumes, no sets; the conditions, in a word, are those of a fairground booth.” Valberg found the “squabbling between the sub-directors, actors, dancers, dressmakers, and assorted riff-raff” tiresome and came to regret coming to Moscow from St. Petersburg, where he had held a comfortable position at court.⁴

Most of what is known about the Imperial Arbat Theater is filtered through fictional novels and stories. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace includes a scene in which seventeen-year-old heroine Natasha Rostova, having just been humiliated by her fiancé’s father and sister, goes to the opera; she is joined by the socially ambitious and sexually alluring Hélène. At first the fakery of the opera seems all too apparent and fails to impress. But Natasha, needing to lose herself in fantasy, falls under its spell. “She did not remember who she was or where she was or what was happening before her. She looked and thought, and the strangest thoughts flashed through her head unexpectedly, without connection. Now the thought came to her of jumping up to the footlights and singing the aria the actress was singing, then she wanted to touch a little old man who was sitting not far away with her fan, then to lean over to Hélène and tickle her.”⁵ The opera itself goes unnamed but is generally assumed to be an anachronistic combination of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable and Gounod’s Faust.

The references to ballet in War and Peace are also indistinct (Tolstoy disapproved of twirling naked legs as much as he did stout prima-donna singers). Natasha refers to the dancer and ballet master Louis Duport, who performed in St. Petersburg and Moscow between 1808 and 1812, adhering, with majestic bearing, to the strictures of the French classical style. In the novel, Duport symbolizes the French influence on Russian aristocratic life, soon to be shattered by the Napoleonic Wars. It was an accurate depiction of the historical reality: War destroyed the Imperial Arbat Theater, razing it four years after it opened. The last event, on August 30, 1812, was a masquerade ball augmented by a mazurka quadrille performed by students.

War would also transform Valberg’s career. “When Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée marched into Russia,” he “became the choreographer of the hour.”⁶ Valberg’s transformation can be traced through his portraits. One likeness presents him as a curious man of letters: hair tousled, eyebrow cocked, a hint of St. Petersburg’s spires in the background. Another has him looking remote and austere, with bleached skin, pale eyes, and a thin wig pulling back his scalp. The latter is the appearance he cultivated in Moscow as a mature artist, a Russian cultural patriot.

Valberg had begun his career in St. Petersburg, teaching in the theater school there from 1794 to 1801. For a brief period within that span, by capricious decree of Tsar Paul I, men could teach ballets but were not allowed to perform in them. Shoelaces and social dances were likewise banned. The tsar loved rigid drill and martinet discipline and believed that dancers, female dancers, should be more like soldiers—that is, less delicate and more violent in their movements. Ironically, he met his end at the hands of violent soldiers. A cabal of drunken officers confronted him in his residence, pulling him out from behind a curtain and demanding his abdication. When he refused, he was strangled. Few tears were shed in the Imperial Theaters after Paul’s assassination. Men returned to the ballet, and the waltz returned to the court.

In 1801, following the ascension of Tsar Alexander I, Valberg traveled to Paris to improve his technique. Charles-Louis Didelot replaced him as pedagogue, raising standards in the corps de ballet and working to make Russian-born talent into “stars.”⁷ Didelot’s officially sanctioned reforms included creating a middle tier of character dancers, or coryphées, between the corps de ballet and the first dancers. He eliminated the “steeplechasers” from the roster of the imperial ballet and replaced them with performers who possessed supple limbs and expressive faces.⁸ Ballet historian Yuriy Bakhrushin credited Didelot with putting dancers in flexible, heelless slippers and sandals suggesting “Ancient Greece.”⁹ Out went the buckle shoes of the past, along with the wigs and rigid frocks that had limited the dancers’ movements. Didelot established a strict training regimen and was known as a zealous taskmaster, albeit one with a kind heart and a gentle touch. Both men and women were taught entrechats and battements, and proper posture was enforced in the classroom through taps to the legs and backs with the baton used to count time. Bruises and loving pats on the head were the measure of a dancer’s promise.

One of his most famous disciples, Yevgeniya Kolosova, had first been a student of Valberg’s. Her physical expression was considered more nuanced, more natural, than speech. The ballets Didelot conceived for her were lavish productions with elaborate scenarios drawn from a conflation of pseudohistorical sources. He found his ideas in books on history and mythology, which he took to the studio in the afternoons. More than one of his plots pivoted around the rescue of the hero or heroine from boulder-throwing, earthquake-generating brutes. Didelot was also fond of Cupid and virgin sacrifices, and dabbled, toward the end of his career, in Orientalism. He liked to assign himself the roles of powerful gods, in defiance of his skeletal frame and oversized nose.

To simulate great windstorms, Didelot made his dancers flap their arms until dizzy and faint. To suggest spiritual flight, he came up with the idea of suspending dancers from wires and had his technicians raise and lower them with blocks and ropes. Didelot scorned gravity in various other ways. For his 1809 ballet Psyché et l’amour, a demon flew up from the depths of the stage and sailed, torch in hand, over the heads of spectators. Venus was once carried into the clouds in a chariot pulled by fifty live doves. Biographer Mary Grace Swift happily ignores the likely carnage: “It is interesting to imagine the care that had to be taken to harness each dove with its little corselet, which was then attached to wires guiding each bird.”¹⁰

In 1811, Didelot was forced out, placed on a leave of absence for what the administration of the Imperial Theaters billed as ill health. In truth, a series of personal disputes resulted in the nonrenewal of his contract. Back from Paris, Valberg took over his overlapping responsibilities as imperial ballet master, choreographer, and pedagogue. The thirty-seven ballets that Valberg himself created combined the feet placements and body alignments associated with the French style and the technical displays of Italian entertainers. Val-berg also tapped into his humble origins (his father was a tailor) for creative material. One of his earlier ballets, from 1799, is set on the streets and in the salons of Moscow. A man from the lower ranks loves an aristocratic woman, and passion defeats reason with disastrous results. Although it deeply affected the audience, Valberg was rebuked by the cognoscenti for using modern-day costumes. “Oh! How the wise men and know-it-alls rose up against me! How, they asked, could a ballet be danced in tail-coats!” he remembered of the fracas.¹¹ He subsequently produced a series of fantastic ballets and several domestic dramas that served the cause of moral and ethical enlightenment. In one, a girl named Klara must be educated in the rewards of virtue; another ballet teaches an American heroine the price of betrayal.

Valberg came into his own, and distinguished himself from Didelot, with a folk-dance-based divertissement about a Cossack maiden who, disguised as a man, becomes a heroic chevalier. Following its successful performance in St. Petersburg, Valberg took it to Moscow. There followed a series of pieces that combined dances, songs, and dramatic dialogues expressing love for Russian peasants and the sacred soil on which they toiled and for which they would fight. Gone were the pixies, sprites, and chariots of the gods; in came peasants, soldiers, and peasants-turned-soldiers. The choreographic dimension was reduced, but the overall popular appeal increased. The most significant of these divertissements dates from the height of Napoleon’s invasion. Just four days after the pivotal Battle of Borodino, which left both the French and Russian armies depleted and out of position, Valberg staged Love for the Fatherland (Lyubov’ k Otechestvu, 1812) in Moscow. The music was written by Catterino Cavos, Didelot’s preferred composer. According to an “eyewitness,” Love for the Fatherland was so patriotic it convinced audience members to sign up for military duty.¹²

THE GRANDE ARMÉE entered Russia in the summer and fall of 1812. It has been estimated that 400,000 of its troops died for a cause that had lost meaning even before the crossing of the Niemen River of Belarus and Lithuania into Russia. Perhaps the same number of Russians lost their lives, perhaps more. The struggle was not, as it tends to be constructed, ideological, pitting the forces of revolution against monarchic rule. By 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte had declared himself emperor and exercised powers no less absolute than the Russian tsar. His relationship with Alexander I had at times been respectful; their emissaries had mooted the signing of the equivalent of a nonaggression pact. Even the possibility of a dynastic liaison through marriage loomed. But Alexander’s decision to move his troops to the western borders of the empire created the pretext for the French invasion. Napoleon interpreted the move as a provocation and used it to recruit Polish forces for the battles in Smolensk, Borodino, and Moscow.

The war was a catastrophe for both sides. Cossack and Russian peasant conscripts under the control of Field Marshal Barclay abandoned their positions over and over again, ceding the soil of Holy Rus to the French without a fight. The behavior was passive-aggressive: the Russians neither laid down their arms nor engaged in traditional warfare. Instead, Barclay ordered the Cossacks to burn everything left behind: food sources, houses, modes of transport, and communications equipment. Barclay’s aides, seeing the wasteland of overturned carts and dead or dying horses and men, challenged his judgment. The tsar sacked him, appointing Prince Mikhaíl Kutuzov in his place. Kutuzov was not a brilliant strategic thinker—by most accounts he was inert and rather clueless—but he benefited from being in the right place at the right time. He achieved victory after Napoleon essentially defeated himself by overextending his troops in hostile Russian territory. The scorched-earth practice deprived Napoleon of the spoils of his conquest. Supplies dwindled. Marauding Cossacks harassed the French encampments at night and captured and tortured to death those soldiers caught foraging for food on their own. Napoleon persisted, insisting upon the eight days’ march from Smolensk to Moscow. When Napoleon’s aides second-guessed his thinking, he fatefully declared, “The wine has been poured, it has to be drunk.”¹³ The horrendous battle of Borodino delayed, but did not stop, the French siege of the city. The cost in terms of lives and materiel on both sides was exorbitant.

Napoleon’s soldiers entered Moscow on September 14, 1812, after exchanging grapeshot and cannonballs with the surrounding Russian positions. The colorful cupolas and golden spires of the city had made a fairy tale–like impression on the French from afar. But the streets were quiet, save for scattered drunkards and assorted ne’er-do-wells. Napoleon established quarters in the Kremlin without fanfare the following morning; he assumed administrative control of the ancient capital without such control having been ceded to him. The tsar and Moscow’s ruling class ignored his arrival and refused to meet with him. Tolstoy imagined Napoleon’s disappointment in a single sentence: “The coup de théâtre had not come off.”¹⁴

Two-thirds of the population of just over a quarter million had evacuated. Before the invasion, the muddle-headed governor general of Moscow, Fyodor Rostopchin, had regaled the population with tales of French sadism. He acted surprised, however, when the terrified masses packed up and left. Rostopchin predicted Napoleon’s defeat in his proclamations, but also pledged to leave him nothing but ash. The noble class locked up their stone manor houses and headed to their rural homes. Their carriages clogged the road. They packed up their human goods (cooks, maids, nurses, footmen, and jesters) along with their dressing tables and portraits. The carriages mingled with carts containing merchants and tradesmen and their families, along with injured Russian soldiers and—according to anecdote—deserters disguised as women. “Moscow was shaken with horror,” a noblewoman recalled of her pampered exodus. She responded to Rostopchin’s exhortations to stay in the city and accusations of treason by planning her “flight” and the packing of her precious objects.¹⁵ The poor had no choice but to heed Rostopchin and take shelter in churches. Shopkeepers guarded their shelves against looting. The governor general ordered saboteurs, traitors, and spies for the French captured. Then he unlocked the prisons and madhouses. He ordered business papers destroyed and treasuries emptied. The looting began.

Rostopchin had been told by Kutuzov that Moscow would not be defended, so he fulfilled his promise to burn it down. The city had been tactically abandoned; sacrifice would be the price of its survival. Rostopchin ordered water tanks drained and charges placed in the granaries, tanneries, dram shops, and storehouses. Small fires illuminated the cart-jammed bridges, the shredded, discarded uniforms, and the human and animal waste on the streets. The flames spread easily in the late-summer breeze, ravaging block after block of wooden buildings, engulfing a hospital, and forcing the rabble onto the river’s edge. Voices of the doomed mingled with the echoes of prayer and discordant singing. The flames increased the strength of the wind and the wind the strength of the flames. When the fire threatened his quarters in the Kremlin, Napoleon gathered his precious articles de toilette and left. He and his commanders took in the spectacle of the city in self-immolation from a suburban palace.

One of Valberg’s (and Didelot’s) distinguished students, Adam Glushkovsky, would become the first great ballet master of the post-Napoleonic era; during the war, he served as a teacher and ballet master in Moscow, reporting firsthand from the front lines. Relying on his own memories and those of his peers, he compiled a harrowing true-life account of the Napoleonic invasion.

Nine months before the Napoleonic invasion, in January of 1812, Glushkovsky arrived in Moscow. A mustachioed man with a wide-open face and the wardrobe of a musketeer, he was touted less for his leaps and jumps than for his acting. He danced at the Arbat Theater and taught at the Imperial Theater College, passing the lessons he had received from Didelot on to the children in his classes. He lived at the college but took his meals gratis in the home of the ballet master Jean Lamaral. When word came from the Moscow governor general that he would have to evacuate, he buried a trunk of his belongings in the woods. (The trunk stayed safe; he found it intact upon his return.) He spent his final wages, a bag of copper coins handed to him on the eve of the French attack, on boots and a coat for the road. Then he seated himself in a cart with his students, bound for the church towns northeast of Moscow known as the Golden Ring. The famished horses could barely lift their hooves, and the procession bogged down. He and the students settled for the night in a refugee camp before receiving word that the French would soon be upon them. The convoy lurched onward.

They moved through hamlets to the town of Vladimir, in hopes of taking shelter and refreshing their horses. The town was crammed with Russian soldiers, French captives, and assorted people of rank. The scene was repeated farther along the road, in the town of Kostroma. There the vagabond entertainers performed in the local wooden theater in exchange for food, a bath, and a bed. After just two days, however, the regional governor announced that he could not accommodate the theater school refugees in Kostroma, despite being directed to do so, on official paper, by the theater directorate in Moscow. Housing was instead found in the picturesque fishing village of Plyos. For three months, the students occupied merchant dwellings built into the hill above the Volga River. Glushkovsky and the other teachers who had evacuated (the instructors of holy law, diction, voice, and drawing) settled into buildings on the shore. To the horror of the eavesdropping local crones, Glushkovsky’s girls lifted their skirts above their ankles and hopped about while practicing their fandangos with the boys. Word spread of the “unclean spirit” that had taken hold, and of the “devil’s helper” teaching them their steps.¹⁶

Snow fell, and the students sledded down the hill to their classes. News of their presence spread to the aristocratic families residing in the area, and Glushkovsky became the featured entertainment as well as the instructor, in character dancing, of the darlings of the households. He took sick, however, after performing a solo from an Anacreontic Didelot ballet in a cold hall wearing only a light silk tunic. The fever threatened his life, but he declined the treatments offered by the village doctor—tea laced with vodka and bloodletting—in favor of hot wine and chest compresses soaked in vinegar. He convalesced back in Kostroma, where the governor finally found space for him and his students. The governor lived “like cheese in butter,” staging operas on birthdays and hosting dance events capped with fireworks displays over the Volga.¹⁷ The students of the Moscow Imperial Theater College continued their education in exile in the governor’s private theater. Glushkovsky boasts of having a contented French prisoner as a servant, touting the lad’s skills as a basket weaver and tooth puller.

He recorded what he heard from his friends still in Moscow about conditions in the city beset by the French. One of those left behind was a touring violinist, Andrey Polyakov, who told Glushkovsky about the filth and the smell of the invasion, how the fire flowed up and down and all around the boulevards of the city:

Buildings on both sides of Tverskoy Boulevard burned; the heat was so intense that it could barely be withstood; in places the ground cracked and buckled; hundreds of pigeons rose over the wall of flame, then fell, scorched, onto a bridge girder; the smoke corroded the eyes; the wind carried embers a great distance; sparks fell like rain onto people; the thunder of collapsing walls sent them into terror; the aged and women with babies at their breasts fled their homes moaning and wailing and beseeching God’s protection; others, the weak, died in the fire; charred dead dogs and horses littered the road in places; French soldiers fell to their deaths from roofs while trying to put out the fire.¹⁸

Polyakov’s description of wartime Moscow evokes the horrors of Dante’s Inferno and the divine last judgment. These points of comparison were made knowingly, as a best attempt to get across the inexplicable misery. He did not see everything that he describes, but his account is convincing and in keeping with other eyewitness descriptions of water boiling in wells from the heat of the flames and charred paper falling from the sky far outside Moscow. At the end of Tverskoy Boulevard, Polyakov saw two Russian soldiers hanging from a lamppost. It had been turned by the French into a gibbet. The signs in Russian stuck to their chests identified one as an arsonist, the other a defector to the French side who had second-guessed his decision and so met his end. Upper Petrov Monastery offered another ghastly scene. The sacred fourteenth-century grounds had become an abattoir. Pigskins sagged from hooks in the walls, cattle and lamb parts slicked the floors. French soldiers with bloodstained hands carved and distributed slabs of meat from the altar. Horses whinnied for food from the choir lofts.

After three days the fire had run its course, and the September weather turned glorious. Napoleon returned to the Kremlin, instructing his officers, in between card games and reports from the field, to reestablish order on the streets. Polyakov witnessed French soldiers smoking, eating, and mucking about before forming ranks for morning inspection. One or two trumpets blared; drums rattled. Napoleon himself arrived on a white horse, and the soldiers smartened themselves up. Napoleon gave them a quick, bored glance, ignored their salutation, then released them back to their tobacco. Thus the occupation settled into a routine. Millers returned to their mills, washerwomen to their washing. Theatrical life also resumed, after a fashion, with the performance of six French comedies and vaudevilles in a pleasant serf theater on an undamaged street. The texts were tweaked in honor of Napoleon and the depleted Grande Armée. Among the performers were Frenchmen employed by the Imperial Theaters alongside officers who had once trod the boards in Paris. The audiences were uncouth, with Glushkovsky describing undisciplined adjutants in berets “coolly smoking tobacco from Hungarian pipes with small stems,” unresponsive to the performances except during the patriotic speeches, at which point they leapt to their feet to shout “Vive l’empereur! Vive la France! Vive l’armée française!” During the intermission they swilled wine and gorged on chocolates and fruit; afterward they remained in the halls of the theater dancing polkas.

Russian forces refused to capitulate, and engaged in a war of attrition. The people of Moscow starved; pigeons and crows were killed for soup. When they had all been eaten, only the sourest of staples remained—cabbage. Napoleon’s men roamed the ashes “as pale as shades, searching for food and clothing but finding nothing, wrapping themselves in horse blankets and torn coats,” with “either peasants’ hats or women’s thick, torn scarfs” covering their heads. “It was like a masquerade,” Glushkovsky recalled of the weird getups on the streets. Nothing remained of the belief in liberating conquest that had borne the French into Moscow, a city with a texture that they could not fathom. Napoleon ordered the Great Retreat, but not before imagining a heroic return and, in a letter to his aide Hugues-Bernard Maret, vowing to blow up the Kremlin. Rumors of the impending bombing reached Polyakov’s mother, who died of fright. Marshal Éduoard Mortier carried out the plan in the middle of the night on October 20, laying the charges to raze the citadel. But rain, or perhaps heroic Cossacks, put out the fuses attached to the barrels of gunpowder. Most of the towers and walls remained intact.

The French retreat was a pitiful sight. Battered, famished soldiers skittered along litter-strewn, stench-filled streets in twos and threes to their formation points. Most made it out; some were killed on the spot, others were captured. Those who had tended to sick Russian babies at the start of the occupation or otherwise demonstrated a human touch were given shelter in cellars. Mobs awaited the retreating soldiers in the forests, seeking revenge for the burning, the looting, the desecration of churches, the butchering of livestock. Tools of iron and wood gouged out eyes and vital organs.

The withdrawal continued into November. The temperature dropped. Subzero winds put out campfires; frozen corpses were cannibalized. Napoleon survived to regroup, but his command was fragile and his straggling forces humiliated. European allies became foes, and after a series of defeats he was forced to abdicate. Ambitions crushed, Napoleon would be imprisoned in exile on the island of St. Helena, where at least the climate was more forgiving.

WHEN DIDELOT RETURNED to St. Petersburg in 1816 from his purported leave, he resumed his duties in an utterly transformed political and cultural landscape. Tsar Alexander I recognized that he had the self-sacrificing Russian masses to thank for rescuing his rule from Napoleon. Their triumph against improbable odds inspired the cultural shift, the enthusiastic embrace of all things Russian. Cossacks took the stage to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat. Gypsies and peasants joined them and were paid to give lessons in their native crafts to performers otherwise trained in pliés, battements, ronds de jambe, and courtly dances. The new fad for the prisyadka squatting position and choral round dances, accompanied by pipes, hurdy-gurdies, and assorted noisemakers, did not last but left an impression nonetheless. Didelot adapted to the patriotic turn by adding Russian dances of the streets and the fields to the pedagogical curriculum of the ballet school in St. Petersburg. In 1823 he staged the second ballet to be based on a text by Alexander Push-kin. Titled The Prisoner of the Caucasus, or The Shade of the Bride (Kavkazskiy plennik, ili Ten’ nevestï), it included a dark-eyed oriental heroine, lasso-wielding barbarians, a ghost, and, in the final act, a chorus of praise for the tsar. It had little to do with Pushkin, but Pushkin was not in the slightest offended. Rather, he wanted to know everything about it, telling a friend that he had once courted the beloved ballerina in the lead role.

Moscow, the battered survivor of the siege, became the seedbed of the new nationalism. Plans for rebuilding included a colossal theater for ballet and opera, one that would surpass Maddox’s long-gone Petrovsky Theater, an enterprise tainted by corruption and its owner’s English origins. A proper school would be established, with a proper curriculum, headed by an exceptional pedagogue: Glushkovsky. His first and ultimately greatest contribution to ballet in Moscow was as a teacher, and he carved out a chapter for himself in ballet history. He correctly described keeping his students alive during Napoleon’s invasion, providing them with a school (three of them, in fact, between 1814 and 1829, the year of his retirement as teacher), and improving every aspect of the training for everyone.

Glushkovsky formed a professional troupe from his most talented disciples and set about enriching the theatrical repertoire with patriotic pageants, after the example of Valberg, and longer plot-based ballets based on the texts of Pushkin, following Didelot. In his account of the period, Glushkovsky described the installation of boards, straps, and cushions in his classrooms to help the students develop lift and improve their turnout at the hip and ankle. He spoke about the types of movements privileged by his teachers and which of their ballets he resurrected once a new theater was opened in Moscow—ballets that emphasized gracefulness and flow over coarse contrast. The repertoire changed to mirror the newly nativist cultural context. “In 1814, 1815, and 1816,” he claimed, “in the Petersburg and Moscow theaters, Russian national dances reigned supreme.” These dances supplanted “the French recherché manner.”¹⁹ The French element eventually reasserted itself, but he continued to make room for folk fare. He blended materials of diff erent urban and rural origins in order to represent magical extremes or the desire to overcome commonplace situations.

Glushkovsky took on overlapping duties and honed his ballet-making skills during the rebuilding of Moscow, its fantastical rise from the ruin of total war. Juggling the positions of dancer, teacher, and ballet master caused him great stress, however, and he begged the directorate for help. Yet in 1831 his duties only increased when he was appointed chief inspector of the ballet and its director. Glushkovsky had to be present at rehearsals and oversee the staging of up to eighteen ballets in a single season, by his own count. He had to haggle for funding, find replacements for ill and injured dancers, and provide both dancers and dances for operas, melodramas, and the ballet groups inserted into vaudevilles, among other things. Out of consideration for the colossal load on his shoulders, the directorate of the Imperial Theaters allowed him and his wife, Tatyana, herself a dancer, to escape Moscow for a month each summer to “correct” what he termed his “ruined health.”²⁰ Having served with what his overseers termed “great zeal” and “commendable behavior,” Glushkovsky petitioned for retirement in 1838, at the age of forty-six, and thereafter received a pension of 4,000 rubles along with a parting gift of a pair of diamond rings. The pension was impressive for the middle class, though an abyss below what an aristocrat earned each year from his serf estates.

GLUSHKOVSKY’S CAREER IS associated with the invention of “Russian” ballet, which emerged at once as an assemblage, an orientation, and an ideal. The East Slavic Cossacks brought some of their traditional dances to the theaters and schools of the post-Napoleonic Russian imperial ballet, as did the inhabitants of the interior steppe, Siberia, and the Caucasus Mountains. Glushkovsky and his successors also had access to the dances of nomadic peoples. These were altered and exaggerated, losing their ethnographic substance to become symbols, stylized representations, of the “Russian” empire. Later, the folk fare would be relocated to dream scenes, hallucinations, or the parade-of-nations pageants as found in French ballets dating back to the time of Jean-Georges Noverre and Louis XIV. “Dances of the peoples” in nineteenth-century Russian ballets would be confined to the margins and would fall out of the plot.

Into the mix of Russian ballet was also added imperial court dances from Europe. The blending of non-Russian elements into Russian ballet seems paradoxical, but such was Glushkovsky’s aesthetic—at odds with itself. The more his dancers sought an angelic escape from gravity’s pull, the more important it became to have them step on the soles of their feet, flatly, in a flesh-and-blood, human manner. And the more important the plot, the freer the performers felt to shift out of character, to break the emotional and psychological frame for the sake of bravura athletic display. The divertissements of the post-Napoleonic period included a lot of talking and singing; muteness, the defining element of ballet, was surprisingly rare. Ballet in Moscow thus developed along its own lines, reflecting local conditions much like species of birds evolving on a remote island—particular, even peculiar, in its adaptations. Elsewhere, popular ballets and operas imported from the West ensured ticket sales. But Moscow offered a bounded space for Russian ballet, like Russian opera, to flourish.

A new public theater in Moscow was constructed under the administrative umbrella of the St. Petersburg court between 1821 and 1825, toward the end of Glushkovsky’s career. It rose from the craggy gorge where the old Petrovsky Theater once stood, yet was meant to represent a clean break from the past and reflect the new nationalist ambitions. Despite the patriotic turn in the arts, however, the spacious new theater, like the performances within, still derived from continental European models. Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and Paris’s Salle Le Peletier lurked in the conscience of the architect. As a symbol of a city making a new start, a city of the future rather than the past, it needed to be bigger, grander, than the theaters of France and Italy, standing above if not apart from them. Thus Imperial Russia’s orientation toward, yet projected dominance of, the West was translated into marble and plaster.

The impetus to build the theater came from Dmitri Golitsïn, who replaced the disgraced arsonist Fyodor Rostopchin as governor general of Moscow. A basic neoclassical concept was approved in 1819, but no specific plans were drawn up until the summer of 1820, when four members of the Imperial Academy of the Arts put their heads together. The lead planner was Andrey Mikhaílov, a senior professor of architecture, with three other members of the academy, including his brother, also participating. The first draft was subject to revision, and the budget went beyond what Golitsïn was prepared to approve on behalf of the court. The extravagant plan needed to be scaled back. Throughout his career, Mikhaílov, who also designed the hospital where Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821, saw numerous building projects either canceled or completed by others, the Bolshoi included. The court indulged him with commissions but recognized his limitations.

Another architect involved from the start, Osip (Joseph) Bové, modified the design with the approval both of Golitsïn and the tsar. Bové had long enjoyed official support and oversaw the post-Napoleonic reconstruction of Red Square and the restoration of façades throughout Moscow. He could not, however, control the imaginations of the private builders contracted for the restoration work, the result being a riot of reds and greens that displeased the tsar, who ordered the façades swathed in paler colors. (These pale colors characterize the older buildings in Moscow to the present day.) For the Bolshoi Theater, Bové exercised restraint, eliminating, for reasons of taste, the nineteenth-century version of a shopping center that Mikhaílov had envisioned for the first floor and lowering the flat roof. He did everything he could to control costs, including contracting the masons himself and transporting stone bases to the site on his own dray. It was also his idea to salvage whatever he could from the detritus of the old Maddox theater; not all traces of the past were expunged. But as the wiser men of the Imperial Theaters directorate had predicted, costs still ran well over budget, from the 960,000 rubles allotted by the treasury to the colossal sum of 2 million.

Construction of the theater lasted more than four years. In July of 1820, the first of the ditches was dug and the first of the thousands of pine logs forming the foundation hammered into place in the bog on Petrovka Street. (Estimates vary on the number of logs pounded into the mire: more than 2,100 for certain, more than 4,000 perhaps.) Construction involved hundreds of laborers in the winters, even more in the summers. It did not end until December of 1824, and then just barely. The zodiac-embossed curtain and scrims were completed after the extended 1824 deadline, and, because of the budget overrun, both Mikhaílov and Bové had to sacrifice the 8,000 rubles in imported chandeliers that they had intended to hang in the side rooms, replacing them with illuminations of papier-mâché and tin fashioned by local craftspeople. Bové also had to forego the giant mirror that he had wanted to hang in front of the curtain, allowing audience members to gaze at themselves; the mere thought of it terrified the directorate, as much for its radicalism as its cost.

The finished building was nonetheless luxurious, with the loges facing the stage drenched in crimson velvet, gold fringe, and braids, and the open boxes on each side suspended, as if from the air, from cast-iron brackets. Columns on pedestals framed the galleries, supporting the arabesque-decorated ceiling, from which a massive crystal chandelier was raised and lowered by pulley. Oil lamps provided lighting, along with two parallel rows of candles fronting the loges. Even Russophobe Europeans were impressed at what had been achieved. “Travelers who visit Russia expecting to find a people just emerging from barbarism are often astonished to find themselves in scenes of Parisian elegance and refinement,” the Illustrated London News opined. The new theater was the greatest example of this unexpected urbanity. Although the theater was slow to adapt to new technologies—gas lighting was not installed until 1836, in tandem with the building of a special gas plant—the “orchestra and chorus were strong,” making the theater “a favorite place of resort of the Russian nobility, who usually wear their stars and ribbons at the opera.”²¹

It could hold more than 2,200 people, but demand exceeded capacity, especially in the first years, prompting management to repeat programs and cram additional seats into the auditorium. The side rooms had enough space to host chamber concerts by touring foreign musicians. The entrance was graced with a portico and led to a grand central staircase and ample reception rooms. Five massive semicircular windows provided light for the auditorium and the stage on each side of the theater. Ten paired columns supported the gable at the back. Since it was bigger than Maddox’s operation, it was called the Bolshoi—meaning “Grand”—Petrovsky Theater. Over time, the reference to Petrovka Street was dropped. The space in front, Theater Square, acquired a public garden. Later a fountain was added. The ravine and pond that had once been on the site were filled with rock and soil hauled from demolished bastions in Kitay-gorod. Theater Square also came to include a smaller theater for plays, the Malïy, also designed by Bové.

Both the inside and outside of the theater inspired, and were inspired by, national pride. An unsigned article in Moskovskiye vedomosti heaps praise on the theater and on Moscow, the rebuilt symbol of “the sword of victory,” ready to join the ranks of the great world cities.²²

The swiftness and grandeur of certain recent events in Russia have astonished our contemporaries and will be perceived as nothing less than miracles in distant posterity … Our fatherland draws closer to the great European powers with each achievement. Such a thought arises within the soul of the patriot at the appearance of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, whose walls have risen, like a phoenix, in new splendor and magnificence from the ruins. For how long in this place has the eye been exposed to the foul heaps, the remains of horrendous disaster, and the ear to the thumping of the worker’s hammer? And now to capture the delighted gaze is a splendid building, an edifice of enchanting taste in height, immensity, and noble simplicity, coupled with elegance, stateliness, and ease. And now the inner walls receive the thunder of the muses; positive inspiration for humanity! Such is the magnitude, in spirit and deed, of Russia’s government.

Unlike Maddox’s catch-as-catch-can song-and-dance operation, the grand space was conceived from the start as a cathedral to the finest of the fine arts, one that placed the mercantile middle classes and the inhabitants of the Table of Ranks side by side “on the path to Enlightenment.”

The nineteen-year-old poet Mikhaíl Lermontov celebrated the construction of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater in similarly lavish terms. In his “Panorama Moskvï” (Panorama of Moscow), a meditation on the walls, roofs, and boulevards of the city, he imagined the god Apollo, whose alabaster statue topped the portico of the Bolshoi, glaring at the crenelated Kremlin walls from his chariot, upset that “Russia’s ancient and sacred monuments” were hidden from view.²³ Those monuments had been seriously damaged in 1812, after Napoleon ordered the Kremlin detonated and soldiers looted the decorative insignia and ornaments. Tsar Alexander I commissioned the repairs in a neo-Gothic style, and his successor, Tsar Nicholas I, saw them through. The Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, in contrast, struck a neoclassical pose: symmetrical, monumental, and harmonious.

The theater opened on January 6, 1825, with a benediction and an allegorical prologue featuring Apollo and his muses. Then “a soothsayer from a mythological world” predicted the nation’s future, the triumphs to come. There was also an affirmation of the vastness of the Russian Empire, the terrain it occupied from Poland to the Caspian Sea, from “the mists of Finland” to the “cloud ridges” of the “formidable Caucasus.” Bové, the hero of the moment (Mikhaílov was all but forgotten), heard well-earned bravos from the stage. Following the six p.m. opening performance, at eleven p.m. the theater hosted its first masquerade. It was meant to be an elegant occasion; patrons were told not to bring hats or “indecent masks” into the theater.²⁴

The opening of the theater brought the peregrinations, if not the hardscrabble existence, of Moscow’s performers to an end. There remained the challenge of learning multiple roles for multiple short-lived stagings. Some were made in Russia, others freely imported, in the absence of copyright protection, from Europe. The first years featured burlesque comedies and benefits for individual dancers and singers, but Pushkin also made his presence felt (as source for the ballets Ruslan and Lyudmila, Prisoner of the Caucasus, and The Black Shawl), likewise Cervantes (Don Quixote) and Goethe (Faust). Preternatural fare put the fabulous machines of the stage to good use. The repertoire included a balletic version of Cinderella, the beloved seventeenth-century folktale about an abused and overworked maidservant who becomes, via a magical helper and friendly critters, the sparkling bride of a prince. It was choreographed for the 1825 opening of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater by the twenty-year-old ballerina Félicité Hullen to existing music by her middle-aged husband, Fernando Sor. She was Parisian and he was from Barcelona, but they both ended up in Moscow in the employment of the Imperial Theaters. Their marriage did not last.

Sor’s career in Moscow spanned three years. He composed other ballet scores, but is best known for his guitar pieces: studies, sets of themes and variations, transcriptions of songs, and sonatas. The music is discreet, polite, and much indebted to Mozart. Hullen was brasher, flashier. She was mentored in Moscow by Glushkovsky, who promoted her talents as a ballerina and then made her his partner as ballet master at the Bolshoi and pedagogue at the Imperial Theater College. She became Russia’s first female choreographer, and included Russian dances in ballets on Russian themes. Like Glushkovsky, Hullen distinguished herself in Moscow by producing comic works on peasant themes that would never have been staged in St. Petersburg, for reasons as much aesthetic as political. Yet Hullen still privileged the repertoire that she had performed as a young dancer in Paris, fueling the criticism from one of the administrators of the Imperial Theaters that she was pushing Russian ballet back in time when it needed to move forward. She serviced her debt to her homeland by introducing features of French Romanticism to Russian ballet. The amalgam she created—of the local and international, from the land, of the ether—helped distinguish ballet in Moscow as something different, something distinct from what was staged in St. Petersburg and throughout Europe.

Hullen’s and Sor’s Cinderella, which was premiered at the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater during its inaugural season, exemplifies her particular mix of European and Russian influences as well as the distinctive qualities of ballet as revived in Moscow. The familiar European story is clothed in distinctly Russian garb to off er much more than a lesson in protracted courtship or even a tale of personal transformation, whether on the surface, through the heroine’s donning a ball gown and glass slippers, or, more deeply, as she learns to distinguish good from evil. Instead, audiences in Moscow (no strangers to cinders) were accustomed to patriotic sentiments being tucked into ballets and operas, so could interpret Cinderella, at least in part, as a parable of national striving. No longer revealing a girl’s poetic isolation, the ballet now featured Mother Russia as the heroine unwilling to be a maidservant to Europe. Her years of neglect and disrespect had come to an end through the expulsion of Napoleon. The heroes of the war, including the governor general of Moscow, Golitsïn, vie for the role of the prince, and the ball is set in the Russian imperial court. The big new theater also infused the modest folktale with potent grandeur.

The ballets by Valberg, Glushkovsky, and Hullen mark the emergence of a Russianness that would define the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater for the twenty-eight years of its existence—and not only in ballet. The Bolshoi was (and is) also an opera house, and this same search for Russianness is found in the operas of Mikhaíl Glinka, who was immortalized even before his death as the father figure of the Russian musical tradition. Whereas the choreographers at the Bolshoi made their dances seem Russian by manipulating models from France and Italy, Glinka and his successors relied on exoticisms taken, more often than not, from points to the east. Archaic scales and scale segments came to define Russianness in Russian music, along with invented scales like the whole-tone and the octatonic, church bells, drawn-out lamentations, and, in opera, text settings sensitive to the accents and stresses of the Russian language. Most of these musical novelties were invented, including the tunes supposedly borrowed from the peasants. But by concocting them they became more affecting and alluring, more seductive both to audiences at home and abroad.

Glinka came from a village near Smolensk, but he was cosmopolitan in mind-set, spending as much time outside of Russia as inside. He learned music in Europe and died in Berlin. His first opera, the pro-Russian, anti-Polish A Life for the Tsar (Zhizn’ za tsarya, 1836) was nonetheless feted as a model nationalist score. (In the Soviet period in particular, it received the blessing of nationalist ideologues, though not before the libretto had been rewritten, to exclude the tsar.) Glinka’s second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842), did not fare as well. Its eclecticism ensured it a difficult journey to the stage. Later, however, the concoction was heard with different ears and esteemed for its earthiness. The score blended European styles and genres. It also paid homage to the ancient bardic epic narrative tradition, and thus seemed to reach back to a Russia of yore: Russia before Peter the Great, Russia before Ivan the Terrible—in other words, Russia before Russia.

Real or imagined, the success of Glinka’s Russianness was the bane of the existence of his less skilled, less well-trained peers. Among the more resentful of them was Alexei Verstovsky, a prolific composer as well as a central figure in the operations of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater. He composed music for the theater, but his legacy rests on his administrative contributions. His career overlaps with Glinka’s and picks up where Glushkovsky’s leaves off.

VERSTOVSKY (1799–1862) WAS of modest noble lineage and grew up listening to the subpar serf orchestra on his father’s land in southeast Russia. He trained as an engineer in St. Petersburg but cared much more about his chief hobby: music. He studied singing, took violin lessons, and realized accompaniments at the keyboard. Engineering bored him, so he decided to offend his father by becoming a part-time composer, an occupation that even he thought beneath his station. Verstovsky’s first substantial composition, a vaudeville called Grandma’s Parrots (Babushkinï popugai, 1819), set a low aesthetic bar. His technique improved thanks to lessons with, among others, the great Italian opera composer Gioachino Rossini. (Legend has it that Rossini gave these lessons to Verstovsky only after Verstovsky agreed to settle his gambling debts.) Patrons of the Bolshoi Theater flocked to see Verstovsky’s Slavonic devil opera, Pan Twardowski, but it was ridiculed by operagoers in St. Petersburg for its vacuousness and two-dimensional characterizations. It also paraphrased the scariest pages in Carl Maria von Weber’s German devil opera, Der Freischütz.

Verstovsky found greater success with a clever blend of love songs, horror effects, and comic minstrel tunes entitled Askold’s Tomb (Askol’dova mogila, 1835). Set in the ancient days of Kievan Rus, the opera involves two lovers, a witch, and an unnamed character seen lurking, in the first act, around the grave of a pagan prince. Dark forces keep the lovers apart, but the witch ensures the rescue of the heroine and her reunion with the hero through some well-timed spells cast around a cauldron, with black cat and owl looking on. The unnamed character helps as well, but ends up drowning in the River Dnieper. Askold’s Tomb played to nationalist sentiments both on the level of Russian medieval plot and archaic musical elocution, and it received hundreds of performances in Moscow and St. Petersburg, becoming arguably the most popular Russian opera of the nineteenth century. Even after it was dropped from the repertoire, the dances survived (Verstovsky joked about the dancers taking them to their graves). Had Glinka not come along with his canonic Russian operas, Verstovsky might be regarded as a central figure in Russian music history. He ended up in the margins.

His failure to top the success of Askold’s Tomb left him bitter, especially after the ascent of Glinka. Jealous, he grumbled that Glinka’s 1836 opera, A Life for the Tsar, failed as a piece of drama: “One does not go to the theater for the purpose of praying to God,” he declared in the middle of his hotheaded critique.²⁵ Verstovsky thought of himself as the greater pioneer, but was stymied in his pursuit of fame, and thus laid down his pen, becoming a bureaucrat and politician. Positioning himself in the right place at the right time, Verstovsky toadied up to people in power so as to move up the bureaucratic ladder of the Moscow Imperial Theaters from music inspector to cast and crew inspector and then to repertoire inspector. Eventually he took over the Moscow directorate altogether.

The image that emerges from his employment records is that of a poor gentleman who constructed an administrative career for himself from scratch with no great successes or failures. Despite never loving his work, he was unable to devote himself to leisure for financial and social reasons. On the other hand, his letters reveal a much more vivid persona, bordering at times on the outrageous. He comes across as a jolly good fellow, a lover of gossip (about brides and the doddering “old mushrooms” in the civil service), teasing, and outrageous puns.²⁶ His pen and his tongue could be cruel, however, and he did not hold back when deriding critics and censors and all of the other people who had crossed him. He wrote in extreme haste but fluidly, especially when he vented spleen about his various peeves. These included same-sex relationships. In his letters from the late 1830s, he mocks the effeminate manners of male dancers, some openly homosexual, others not, by using feminine endings and misspellings to describe their behavior: “A new dancer has come to us in the theater with the grandest of pretensions; I don’t like him and most of our decent people agree with me entirely. Most of all I don’t like his girlish ways. He prances around as if to say ‘I’m sooo tired!’ ‘I daaanced until I practically faaainted on the stage!’”²⁷ Verstovsky could not help but wag his caustic tongue about the perceived lesbianism of the ladies in his circle as well: “The former actress Semyonova and Princess Gagarina have the most passionate correspondence, one can’t live without the other—it’s magical, simply magical!”²⁸ His letters often include strange drawings altogether unrelated to the subjects under discussion: a chap with a rooster’s comb bowing like an ape to a baroness; a Chinese man with an umbrella riding an elephant; the pope baptizing three babies in a pot.

The group of nobles running the theaters of Moscow and St. Petersburg was small and tight-knit. The librettist of Verstovsky’s opera Askold’s Tomb, Mikhaíl Zagoskin, was director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters from 1837 to 1841. Soon Verstovsky agitated to replace Zagoskin, pledging “to repair all of the cracks in the directorate” that had appeared under his leadership.²⁹ The largest, he complained, had been created by the choreographer Hullen, who was not, in his opinion, a progressive force at the Bolshoi but someone who had “pushed things back by five years, goaded by Zagoskin, and completely destroyed the ballet company. Many fine dancers dispersed and those who stayed were spoiled.”³⁰ The slander did not, however, help him to get the job, at least not immediately. He continued to report to the governor general of Moscow, Dmitri Golitsïn. Thus he was required to attend parties at Golitsïn’s home, which he found tiresome, “more like dusks than evenings,” and worse than the enervating occasions at the English Club that rounded out his social calendar. The older “bastards” at the parties “pranced like cranes”; the bearded, “greasy” youth put on a dissatisfied affect, pretending that they had better places to be.³¹ The social scene improved when the sovereign visited Moscow, at which time the city became like an “excavated anthill,” everywhere “busybodies sweeping and repairing,” “beards getting trimmed, moustaches already shaved, everyone cleaned up and sobered up!”³²

Zagoskin was replaced, first by Alexander Vasiltsovsky, an anxious, humble individual much prone, in his letters to the court, to protestations of worthlessness. Finally, after Vasiltsovsky took sick and could no longer fulfill his duties, Verstovsky assumed the directorship of the kontora of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. He served in the position from 1848 until his own retirement in 1861, a year before he died. He did not like Moscow; its provincialism was not a virtue. But as he confessed at the start of his administrative ascent, “the grace of expected rewards” kept him there. Certainly he was able to reward himself by keeping his opera Askold’s Tomb in the repertoire. And when the management structure of the Bolshoi shifted, returning control from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Verstovsky gladly cast himself in the role of a dedicated public servant and hands-on reformer.³³

Throughout the nineteenth century, the directorate of the Moscow Imperial Theaters reported to the directorate of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters—except between 1822 and 1841, when the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters were overseen by the governor general of Moscow and the Opekunskiy sovet, the governing board of the Imperial Foundling Home and its bank, to which the Moscow theaters still owed money from the Maddox era. After 1842 the administration of the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters resembled that of the main theaters in St. Petersburg. Repertoire was reviewed by the (initially) three-member Censorship Committee established within the Ministry of Education in 1804, and budgets were set by the State Treasury of the Ministry of Finance—all under the supervision of the Ministry of the Imperial Court and His Majesty the Emperor. Control of the Bolshoi and the Malïy Theaters reverted to St. Petersburg in 1842, when the elderly Golitsïn’s health began its final decline.

The impetus for the administrative restructuring in 1842 was a report ordered by the Ministry of the Imperial Court on the condition of the Bolshoi. The report was compiled by Alexander Gedeonov, the director of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters, and by painting a picture of neglect, it suited Gedeonov’s needs—namely, placing the Moscow theaters under his personal control. The extremely biased conclusion was that Bové’s architectural marvel had not been properly cared for since its opening in 1825. The water tanks were empty, which created a serious fire hazard; the “mechanism” under the stage was insufficient for performances involving frequent set changes; there were not enough stagehands, and they often found themselves double-booked, scheduled to work at the Bolshoi and the Malïy on the same night; the costumes used by the opera were threadbare; those used by the ballet were newer but had been stitched together by a “rather mediocre tailor.”³⁴ The Malïy had a modest “shop” on its premises to store its costumes and props, but the Bolshoi was forced to lease “temporary wooden sheds in total disrepair.” Other difficulties at the Bolshoi included poor lighting. “All of the oil lamps are in a dilapidated state,” Gedeonov commented, “leaving the stage dark” even during performances. The ends of the ceiling beams in the hallways were rotting, posing an obvious danger, and the “retreats” (meaning the latrines) produced a noxious stench.

He saved his harshest words for the Moscow Imperial Theater College, which supposedly existed in a state of “total destruction.” The students who did not live on the premises outnumbered those who did, and the non-residents caused the directorate difficulties: “They missed rehearsals and performances owing to bad weather, sickness, or even just problems in their homes attributable to their extreme poverty.” The college itself was inadequate for the needs of its residents, owing in part to the lack of water for bathing (which had to be brought in from the street and carried up a narrow staircase) and improper sanitation; such squalor, according to the college doctor, “caused the students colds and other serious illnesses with potentially lethal consequences.” The boys who fell ill were confined to a room with four beds on the second floor of the college, with a nurse and attendant next door. A thin wall made of wooden planks was all that separated the patients from the stage used by the students, so that “the dances and other activities held there throughout most of the day cause great concern to the patients and much harm.” The girls’ sick room was on the third floor and much roomier, but the windows had been installed less than a third of a meter above the floor, posing a safety hazard. “Obsessed with fever, suffering intense delirium and disorientation,” the report conjectured, “a patient might, irrespective of all precautions taken, potentially meet misfortune by jumping through the window.” And the teapot in the boys’ sick room had gone missing.

Gedeonov commissioned two independent inspections of the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters and the Theater College in support of his claims and soon found himself in charge of the entire theatrical complex, along with a summer theater in Petrovsky Park in Moscow. When he took over, he arranged for the payment of the debt owed by the theaters to the Opekunskiy sovet. Since he also had to oversee the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters and could not be in two cities at the same time, he relied first on Vasiltsovsky and then Verstovsky to provide him with regular reports on the situation in Moscow. The offices of the Moscow directorate operated in a three-story stone building in the Arbat neighborhood before moving to quarters on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, just steps from the Bolshoi. According to one source, the bureau contained a small room known as a “lockup,” where artists and employees suspected of malfeasance could be placed under arrest.³⁵ Thus was discipline enforced.

The first order of business in the reports for Gedeonov was financial: an accounting of box-office receipts. This was followed by a description of the success or failure of individual productions, followed by, in the case of the Bolshoi, mention of the health of dancers (who in the ranks had pulled a muscle or sprained an ankle), minor or major accidents (the broken ribs suffered by a musician who fell asleep on the sill of an open window), and the status of repairs to the theater. When praised for their work or asked about their personal affairs, Vasiltsovsky and Verstovsky swooned, grateful for the attention from on high. Gedeonov had a short wick and wore a scowl, but he cared about his employees, guaranteeing salaries for performers in the first and second ranks and granting special privileges after two decades of service. Housing was a never-ending concern, both for the artists and the staff as well as for their families. Gedeonov’s kindness was felt by the eldest daughter of Verstovsky’s clerk; she had been living across from a “filthy kitchen and yard in a room next to laundrywomen” and an actor who “dried and ironed his black underwear” in plain sight. (According to her father’s appeal to Gedeonov, the poor girl also had to endure the “perverse company” of middle-of-the-night card players and horn blowers.) Verstovsky rescued her from the squalor. For such consideration, Gedeonov earned the love and affection of his employees, who praised him, with “sincere souls and contrite hearts,” as “a Father and Benefactor of the human race.”³⁶

Gedeonov had angled for control of the Bolshoi, and though he managed it with care he was also a micromanager, personally involved in ticketing (in general he refused to provide comps to Bolshoi Theater performances, even to high-ranking nobles) and matters as seemingly trivial as the cost of the bouquets tossed at dancers and singers during benefits. He even pursued the case of a malfeasant who, in November of 1845, tossed an apple at the stage during a benefit performance. He took pains to return a beloved pipe that a German count had left in a loge and haggled over the prices for a hurdy-gurdy and carpets imported from Scotland. In addition to setting the salaries of the artists in the Imperial Theaters, he facilitated the granting of vacations and medical leaves.

Once he had been promoted to director, Verstovsky endeavored to prove that he was up to the task of keeping Moscow’s larger and smaller stages running by regaling Gedeonov with up-to-the-minute descriptions of Bolshoi and Malïy Theater operations, placing much greater emphasis on ballet and opera productions than concerts—though he made special mention of Franz Liszt, a composer and pianist he deeply admired and whose recitals in Moscow proved lucrative. Verstovsky inserted himself into all of the operations of the Bolshoi Theater orchestra, insisting on auditions and precise tuning, making sure that bows were repaired and rosin stocked. The music sounded wonderful, as Gedeonov admitted in his otherwise damning assessment of the condition of the Bolshoi Theater in April of 1842. Verstovsky had an obvious personal interest in keeping his own works on the stage and shamelessly promoted Askold’s Tomb, which stayed in the Bolshoi repertoire exactly as long as he remained employed by the Moscow Imperial Theaters. His position enabled him to postpone or problematize the Moscow premieres of works by his rivals, including Glinka.

Verstovsky also took a personal interest in improving the education provided by the Imperial Theater College, complaining in 1841 that “the voice teacher, M. Gerkulani, has yet to have them open their mouths in his classes and teaches solfeggio on the keyboard, which is quite curious. And even more amusing, the dance teacher in the school, M. Peysar, has lame hands. Sitting, he demonstrates what he wants his students to do with just his feet.”³⁷ In truth, the situation was never as bad as he described, and the problems he identified improved after the restructuring. Energetic young teachers were appointed to the staff, ensuring that instruction lived up to the needs of the college and the theaters it supported.

Verstovsky cultivated the image of a hearty good fellow for his superiors, but not for the artists under his supervision, who found him standoffish. The long-time Bolshoi Theater decorator and technician Karl Valts remembered him

inevitably being on the stage before performances, standing before the curtain, and everyone having to come up to him to bow. He never wore the mandatory uniform at the time, but was always dressed in a short jacket and dark grey pants. He was almost bald, but a few unruly hairs remained stuck to his crown, like Bismarck. In conversation with the artists he always kept his hands in his pockets and addressed them in the familiar form. Beside him, like a shadow, arose the figure of the inspector of the Theater College.³⁸

Although he generally treated the artists of the theater with cold derision, Verstovsky fell head over heels for one of them: the beautiful, talented, and overextended singer Nadezhda Repina. She was lowborn, the daughter of a serf musician, but had a proud prima donna career on the stage of the Malïy Theater and inspired some of Verstovsky’s songs, including the most eloquent of his Russian Romances. He married her.

Given the customs of the time, however, it was not an easy marriage to maintain. Rumor had it that, for political reasons, Repina was forced to retire in 1841. Verstovsky signed the resignation papers behind her back just before control of the Moscow Imperial Theaters reverted to Gedeonov. Repina’s feelings on the matter are unknown, but it was said that she returned home from a triumphant performance to learn from her husband that her career was over. She fainted and took to drink.

Verstovsky must also have been distraught at what he had been forced to do. He adored his wife and would not be parted from her, just as he would not be parted from his true self—that of an artist, a composer, not a bureaucrat. Out of frustration with his lot, his paperwork, and the intrigue that he himself had promoted, he would one day wish the Bolshoi away.

But the Bolshoi was now more than a building. It stood as the symbol of a pursuit: the struggle for national identity through cultural identity. Because Moscow had borne the brunt of Napoleon, because it had burned and been rebuilt, because its populace had endured and finally triumphed, the formerly brackish backwater claimed the mantle of national purpose from the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Bureaucratic wrangling between Moscow and St. Petersburg aside, Moscow found itself ascendant. Its distance—from St. Petersburg, from Europe—proved a benefit rather than a hindrance. Even before it became the seat of power in the twentieth century, Moscow in the nineteenth, after Napoleon, began to assume importance. The Kremlin, and the Bolshoi, could bide their time on the bend of the river along trading routes that the government could only pretend to govern.

The struggle to represent Russia in the arts continued through the imperial Russian era, through the Soviet era, and into the present day; surely, it is a struggle without end, Romantic in the extreme for its investment in ideals of the people and the nation. Yet the Bolshoi could lay claim to that most clichéd of concepts: the Russian soul.