Pushkin adored the ballet (and ballerinas). For the radical Pisarev that was a readymade target, and he gleefully mocked Pushkin’s “useless poetry,” attractive only to “those mentally challenged subjects who can be thrilled by ballet poses.” Not being “mentally challenged,” Lenin resolutely dismissed opera and ballet as a “piece of purely landowner culture.”6
It is hard to deny a certain logic in Lenin’s thinking. Opera and, even more so, ballet, under the personal patronage of the Romanov family, held a special place in the official Russian culture.
The professional theater, including musical theater, began in Russia as court entertainment. Tsar Alexei, father of Peter I, invited musicians from Europe “who know how to play various instruments, such as: organs, horns, pipes, flutes, clarinets, trombones and viola da gambas along with vocal performance, and also other instruments.”7 (The money to support theater and ballet came from the Salt Chancery for many years: the state had the monopoly on the salt trade, and part of the enormous salt income went to actors, singers, dancers, and musicians.)
After various perturbations, the imperial theaters were moved to the Ministry of the Court, which ran (through the Directorate of the Imperial Theaters) the Maryinsky and Alexandrinsky theaters in St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi and Maly theaters in Moscow. In fact, they were the personal theaters of the Romanov family: a display window of their vanity, a platform for elaborating their ideological projects, but also a place for relaxation and merriment and, last but not least, a high-class and exciting harem.
Nicholas I sometimes took over the rehearsals of ballets and liked to hang around backstage, where the ballerinas ran around in tights; Alexander III never missed a dress rehearsal of an opera or ballet, much less the premieres.
Alexander III also introduced the tradition of emperor and family attending the graduation exams of the ballet school. After the performance, the young dancers were presented to the tsar and his wife, and at the dinner that followed, the young grand dukes flirted with their lovely companions.
At one such dinner in 1890, the graduating ballerina seated next to Alexander III was Mathilde Kschessinska, small, dark, muscular, very talented, and incredibly ambitious. She drank tea between the huge, flabby emperor and his miniature heir (who took after his mother), the future Nicholas II, a shy young officer with dreamy gray-blue eyes.
Alexander III told them with a benign smile, “Watch it now, don’t flirt too much.” The heir timidly spoke to Kschessinska, pointing to the unornamented white mug before her: “You probably don’t drink from such plain mugs at home?”8
That was the prelude to their famous and stormy affair, which lasted from 1892 until the spring of 1894, when the heir’s engagement was announced to Princess Alix Hesse-Darmstadt, who converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Alexandra.
Kschessinska had a brilliant career at the Maryinsky and dictated all her conditions there. Although detractors claimed that her special place at the theater was due to her high connections, the majority of the press and public received her with enthusiasm and considered her among the great stars of the Maryinsky.
Marius Petipa, the great choreographer and creator of
At the turn of the century, the era of Petipa, master of Petersburg classicism in ballet, was closing. Kschessinska, always brazenly chasing after success, befriended innovators, appearing in the experimental ballets of Mikhail Fokine and even traveling to Europe with the Diaghilev troupe, where her partner was the legendary Vaclav Nijinsky. But she lost out to the new stars—Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina. Nevertheless, Kschessinska did not give up, and in 1916, at the age of forty-four, she debuted successfully in
Nicholas II continued acting as her patron all those years. As she later recalled, “[W]henever I had to turn to him, he fulfilled my requests without demur.”9 His beneficence was not affected by the fact that she moved on from him to being the mistress of first one and then another of his cousins, both grand dukes.
The diaries of Nicholas II are peppered with references to attending ballets at the Maryinsky—works by Tchaikovsky,
. . .
Lenin’s theatrical and musical tastes were quite different from the tsar’s. In the Soviet Union his comments on Beethoven, recorded by Maxim Gorky, were quoted endlessly:
I know nothing better than the Appassionata, I could listen to it every day. Astonishing, sublime music. I always think with pride, perhaps naively: what miracles people can create! … But I can’t listen to music frequently, it affects my nerves, I want to say sweet nothings and pat people on the head, people who live in a filthy hell but can create such beauty. But today you can’t pat anyone on the head—they’ll bite your hand off, and they should be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly, even though we, ideally, are against any violence.11
Those are intriguingly frank words, and they are confirmed in other memoirs of how Lenin reacted to music: it “upset,” “wearied,” “acted too strongly” on him. The musical impressions of Nicholas II, noted in his diaries, are just the opposite—“very beautiful,” “a beautiful opera,” “marvelous concert.”
These were two different ways of perceiving culture: for Nicholas II it was a pleasant entertainment; for Lenin, emotional torture. One was a British gentleman (everyone noted Nicholas’s anglicized manner) and the other a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia, absorbing culture intensely, overly so.
Like Nicholas II, Lenin was not tall, not very striking, but a rather sympathetic person. (They both rolled their Rs in a charming way. The choreographer George Balanchine told me about the tsar’s Rs; as a young dancer—then called Georgy Balanchivadze—he met Nicholas II in 1916.)12 But in every other way, Lenin was the complete opposite of Nicholas. He was immeasurably more energetic, persistent, focused, and power hungry.
Nicholas II was a profoundly private and reserved man whom birth and destiny made ruler of a great country at a moment of acute crisis. The obligation to be monarch clearly wearied him; that may be why he abdicated.
Lenin, on the contrary, was a born leader, elbowed his way to power, grabbed it despite the misgivings of his closest comrades, and held on to it tightly until his physical strength faded. (He died in 1924, at the age of fifty- three. Peter I, with whom Lenin was frequently compared for boundless energy and revolutionary zeal, also died at the age of fifty-three, two centuries earlier.)
Nicholas II was brought up by his family and the imperial court. We do not know for sure whether a work of Russian culture ever wrought a life-changing shock for him. But we do know that about Lenin.
A decisive factor in Lenin’s development was
