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By CLEMENT CRISP
I, MAYA PLISETSKAYA translated by Antonina W. Bouis Yale Pounds 25 /
Dollars 35, 386 pages
The Moscow ballerina Maya Plisetskaya was - and, I know, still is -
glorious, beautiful, dangerously gifted, irresistible on stage. She was
worshipped in Russia, adored in Europe (especially in Paris), revered in
North and South America and Australia: everywhere her lightning-bolt
presence inspired fevered public response. London audiences, alas,
viewed her rather as if a tigress had been unleashed in their
drawing-rooms and some dinky pieces of Moorcroft pottery might fall
victim to lash of her tail. I loved her, was knocked sideways by her
interpretations - her Kitri in Don Quixote was like watching a volcanic
eruption of joy and sublimest bravura; her Juliet, her Odette/Odile were
portraits drawn with impassioned lines - and I became, like many others,
a slave to her art.
She was also, and this is the most significant fact, an artist
formed, bruised, shackled, insulted, used, by the Soviet system. The
commissars and the hope-defeating bureaucrats of the Moscow ministries
made her life - both artistic and private - an extended torture: torture
by promises of travel that were then withdrawn; torture by the despatch
of her mine-director father to death and her actress mother to a gulag;
torture by mistrust (she was Jewish; her father was an enemy of the
state) and by such indignities as making her take the massive
dollar-fees she commanded back to Soviet officialdom. (She was lucky to
see Dollars 50 from every Dollars 5,000.)
From 1943, when she graduated from the Bolshoi's ballet school into
the main troupe, she danced exultantly. Her unquenchable desire for
performance (she celebrated 50 years on stage in 1993, at the age of 68)
has won her continued acclaim. Her marriage to the composer Rodion
Shchedrin has been a central force in her life. And she remains an
impassioned artist, as I found when we talked before an audience at the
Verbier festival a couple of years ago, during a series of concerts
devoted to Shchedrin's music.
In 1994 she wrote her memoirs. No ghost-written politenesses are on
offer from her pen. This autobiography, now translated into English, is
very like Plisetskaya on stage. The text seems torn from her heart. Her
anger, her sense of injustice, her vehemence in affection as in hatred,
and her reluctance to mince words, produce the same passion, the same
flaming and even lurid colours. She gives an excoriating delineation of
how artists suffered in the Soviet Union for the least infraction of
those often unknown and unguessable rules of political favour and
disfavour which conditioned every action.
It is a story marked by a compelling sincerity, as by swiftly vivid
portraits of people she has met. (Nehru's "thin, aristocratic
sandalwood fingers"; her meetings with Robert Kennedy, whom she
spared the gift of a massive samovar, kindly provided by the KGB for
reasons we can guess). I could never - audiences could never - resist
being drawn into the imaginative world she created on stage. I remember
in Paris that, after dancing in Bejart's brief tribute to Isadora Duncan
that he made for her, she stood at the edge of the stage as we cheered,
and gradually we all moved forward, nearer and nearer, to warm ourselves
at her fire. Impossible not to. And so we must feel as we read this
polemic, this justification for a massive talent.
The book is not without its imbalances, its over-loud protests. But
it is a cry of protest from a great dancer, whose spirit was not broken
by Soviet hypocrisy, by the exigencies and cruelties of communist
opportunism. Ultimately, Plisetskaya triumphs, as she has triumphed as
an artist from her very first years on the Bolshoi stage. She is a
glorious ballerina - and she celebrates her birthday this month. I send
you, Maya Mikhailovna, all my gratitude for your dancing, my admiration
for your bravery, my devoted greetings. Shamefully, these memoirs have
no index. |