the site of the last of
The Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, home to the acclaimed Bolshoi ballet and opera companies. © STEVE VIDLER/SUPERSTOCK
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these, which burned in 1805. The drama, opera, and ballet troupes of these older, private Moscow theaters were combined to create the Moscow Imperial Theaters the following year. One year after the drama troupe moved to a new home (the Maly [“small”] Theater) in 1824, the opera and ballet troupes took up residence in the newly constructed Bolshoi Theater. That theater burned in 1853. The present theater opened three years later, retaining the old name.
Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater functioned as a poor relation to the better-funded, national stage of St. Petersburg’s Maryinsky Theater until the Soviet era. Italian and Russian opera troupes coexisted in the rebuilt house in the nineteenth century, though Russian opera held a distinctly second place, and the theater witnessed few noteworthy premieres of Russian operas. The ballet repertory likewise consisted mostly of restaged works from the repertory of the St. Petersburg ballet. Marius Petipa’s 1869 Don Quixote furnishes the rare exception. When Peter Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake debuted in the Bolshoi Theater in 1877, it was considered a flop (and was reworked in St. Petersburg in 1894 and 1895). The opera’s fortunes rose slightly when Sergei Rachmaninoff became its chief conductor from 1904 to 1906. Rachmaninoff debuted two of his own operas in the theater, which then featured such outstanding singers as Fyodor Chalyapin, Leonid Sobinov, and Antonina Nezhdanova.
The Bolshoi Theater became a showcase of Soviet operatic and balletic talent in the Stalin era. Dancers and choreographers from St. Petersburg were transferred to Moscow, much as the repertory had once been. A highly dramatic, athletic style evolved in the ballet in the post-World War II period, as the ballet school began to produce home-grown stars. Dancers such as Maya Pliset-skaya and Vladimir Vasiliev achieved worldwide renown touring the world in new vehicles in the years of the post-Stalin Thaw, though the company’s balletmasters and repertory continued to be imported from Leningrad. The opera followed a similar strategy, mostly restaging works that had premiered successfully elsewhere. None of the operas of Dmitri Shostakovich or Sergei Prokofiev had their premieres in the Bolshoi, for example. Instead, the opera specialized in monumental productions of the nineteenth- century Russian repertory, though singers such as Galina Vish-nevskaya, Irina Arkhipova, Elena Obraztsova, and Vladimir Atlantov established international careers in them. The prestige of both the Bolshoi’s opera and ballet fell precipitously in the first post-Soviet decade. The era of glasnost revealed that productions, performers, and the theater’s management were out of step with the theatrical mainstream of Europe and North America as once- generous state subsidies dwindled. As the theater approached artistic and financial bankruptcy, the Bolshoi ceded its place as a national institution to the more western-oriented Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. See also: BALLET; DIAGILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH; NIJIN-SKY, VASLAV FOMICH; OPERA; PAVLOVA, ANNA MATVEYEVNA; RACHMANINOV, SERGEI VASILIEVICH; THEATER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pokrovsky, Boris, and Grigorovich, Yuri. (1979). The Bol-shoi, tr. Daryl Hislop. New York: Morrow. Roslavleva, Natalia. (1966). Era of the Russian Ballet. London: Da Capo. Swift, Mary Grace. (1968). The Art of the Dance in the U.S.S.R. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
(b. 1923), human rights activist and widow of dissident Andrei Sakharov; recipient of the National Endowment for Democracy’s 1995 Democracy Award.
Yelena Bonner grew up among the elite of the Communist Party. Her mother, Ruth Bonner, joined the party in 1924. Her stepfather, Gevork Alikhanov, was a secretary of the Communist International. Bonner’s childhood ended abruptly with the arrests of her stepfather and mother in 1937. She finished high school in Leningrad and volunteered as a nurse during World War II. After the war, Bonner attended medical school and worked as a pediatrician.
Bonner met physicist and political dissident Andrei Sakharov in 1970, at the trial of human rights activists in Kaluga. They married in 1972. Bonner devoted herself to Sakharov, representing him at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1975. After Sakharov’s exile to Gorky in 1980, Bonner became his sole link to Moscow and the West, until her
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own exile in 1984. In December 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev invited the couple to return to Moscow.
Since Sakharov’s death in 1989, Bonner has emerged as an outspoken and admired advocate of democracy in Russia. She joined the defenders of the Russian parliament during the attempted coup of August 1991. She withdrew her support of Boris Yeltsin to protest the war in Chechnya, which she condemned as a return to totalitarianism. Accepting the 2000 Hannah Arendt Award, Bonner denounced President Vladimir Putin’s unlimited power, the state’s expanding control over the mass media, its anti-Semitism, and “the de facto genocide of the Chechen people.” See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; SAKHAROV, ANDREI DMITRIEVICH
Bonner, Elena. (1993). Mothers and Daughters, tr. An-tonina W. Bouis. New York: Vintage Books. Bonner, Elena. (2001). “The Remains of Totalitarianism,” tr. Antonina W. Bouis. New York Review of Books (March 8, 2001):4-5.
BOOK OF DEGREES
The Book of Degrees of the Royal Genealogy is the first narrative history of the Russian land. The massive text filling some 780 manuscript leaves composed between 1556 and 1563 is one among various ambitious literary projects initiated by Metropolitan Macarius, archbishop of Moscow and head of the Russian church during the reign of Ivan the Terrible as tsar (1547-1584). Ivan, whose Moscow-based ancestors had ruthlessly appropriated vast tracts of territory for their domain, encouraged writers to craft defenses of his legitimacy. Churchmen responded with a version of the dynasty’s history conveying their own perspective on the country’s future course. Conflating chronicles, saints’ lives, and legends, the book traces the ancestry of the Moscow princes in seventeen steps or degrees from Augustus Caesar and highlights the noble deeds of each ruler from Grand Prince Vladimir I (980-1015) to Tsar Ivan. The book’s purpose was not just to praise the tsar. The larger aim of its writers was to portray the Muscovite state as a divinely protected empire whose rulers would flourish as long as they obeyed God’s commandments, listened to the metropolitans, and supported the interests of the church.
The Book of Degrees is a work of both historio-graphical and literary significance. As an exercise in historiography, its scope and ideology are comparable to ninth-century compilations of Frankish history glorifying the line of the Carolingian rulers. Like the Carolingian historians, its authors define their country as the “new Israel.” By so doing, they legitimize members of a lesser princely clan whose founders had neither political nor dynastic claims to power, but who wished to be treated as the equals of the Byzantine emperors. Elite political circles accepted the book’s representations as authoritative proof of the rulers’ imperial descent. The portraits of the Moscow princes as champions of their faith commanded no less authority for the church. Lives, newly composed for the book, depicting rulers as saints equal to the apostles or as wonder-workers, served as testimony for the canonization of some Moscow princes and members of their families.
As a literary work, the Book of Degrees marks a critical turning point between the predominantly monastic, fragmentary medieval writings and early modern narrative prose. Entries culled from annal-istic compilations (primarily the Nikon, Voskre-sensk, and Sophia chronicles) and saints’ lives supplied its building blocks, but the book transcends traditional generic categories and has no single literary model. Guided by the priest Andrei (Metropolitan Afanasy), writers unified their materials in a systematic way, fashioning fragments into expansive tales and integrating each tale into a progressively unfolding story of a tsardom whose course was steered by divine providence. A preface sets forth the book’s theological premises in terms of metaphors serving as figures or types for Russia’s historical course: the tree (linking the genealogical tree of the rulers, the Jesse Tree, and the tree in
