Triptych door

In the publishing house A.R.T. a new book by Vadim Gaevsky has been published

The publisher's annotation calls “Choreographic Portraits” the final part of the trilogy. It is implied that the first volume of this trilogy was “Divertimento”, published in 1981, the second was “The House of Petipa” (2000). And it must be that in history these books will be perceived as a single whole, although initially Vadim Gaevsky did not plan any three-volume set. And despite the fact that the books differ significantly from each other.

These three volumes are united by characters - people of classical ballet - and the author's style, which is both patterned and clear. But just as classical ballet itself, which seems to be the most conservative art, changes under the influence of swaying and torn time, so the works of the best Russian ballet critic changed in interaction with the described environment.

In 1981, gloomy times slipped through our fingers; it seemed that the best years in ballet were behind us, and Gaevsky’s quiet but confident statement of this fact led to the banning of “Divertimento” and the destruction of the circulation. (Everything Soviet means excellent; there can be no problems at the Bolshoi Theater.) In 2000, the text of “The House of Petipa” still contained the euphoria of victory - because the Mariinsky Ballet was confidently taking off. But no matter what artists offended by inattention or misunderstanding may say about critics, there is no more favorite thing for any theater reviewer than writing about the successes of the theater. You can laugh at failure or sympathize with it, but you can only rejoice at success, only you can write about it with pleasure. And the success of the Mariinsky Ballet - the success of not just one performance, but the whole theatre, its new policy, its new stars, success based on a great history and grandiose work today - became the impetus for writing a book about the past and present of the St. Petersburg ballet.

By now, 2008, the situation has changed.

In the critic's beloved Mariinsky Theater, times are dubious and unstable. A series of conflicts between the theater's artistic director Valery Gergiev and ballet artistic director Makharbek Vaziev led to the latter's resignation this spring. Meanwhile, it was Vaziev (and his repertoire assistant Pavel Gershenzon) who formed that new theater repertoire that made the whole world say that Russians can dance everyone, and not just Marius Petipa and Yuri Grigorovich. The same projects that appeared in the theater on the initiative of Gergiev himself often looked dubious (just remember Mikhail Shemyakin’s monstrous “The Nutcracker” or the failed “Golden Age”). What will happen next to the theater is a mystery, and the prospects look bleak. And in the same last five years that the Mariinsky Theater was first slightly shaken and then shaken by a full-fledged earthquake, Alexei Ratmansky worked at the Bolshoi Theater - and his writings forced Vadim Gaevsky to talk about new Moscow hopes.

But these hopes are still given a very small place in the book. The text is about "Bolt", a manifesto composed by Ratmansky of a private person caught in a large-scale production machine. The text is about “Cinderella” by Yuri Posokhov, a subtle and sad fairy tale, about one of the best performances of past years. Most of the 600 pages of “Choreographic Portraits” are devoted to people of the past. Diaghilev and Balanchine—massive sections about them open and close the book. About the choreographers of the Soviet years - Fyodor Lopukhov and Rostislav Zakharov. The section “News from Europe” is also small - each of the famous choreographers who worked in Russia (John Neumeier or Roland Petit, for example) or came to Russia on tour (Maurice Bejart and Pina Bausch) is given only a few pages. After reading the book, one gets the feeling that the author distances himself from the present day of ballet and, offering the reader deep, precisely structured historical essays, advises him to think about this present day for himself. It seems that he is tired of this “current moment” and the past is more interesting to him. But “Choreographic Portraits,” composed by an almost eighty-year-old master (his anniversary will be in November), meanwhile, does not look like a “book of partings” (that was the name of Gaevsky’s memoirs about departed fellow critics, published last year) with ballet. In the calm text, here and there glimpses of debates about the artists of today and the choreographic ideas of tomorrow flash through. It is obvious that much has not yet been agreed upon and there are still things for which Gaevsky is ready to enter into a full-fledged critical battle. That is, God forbid, the book is not the last.

Anna GORDEEVA