Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia

537 Pages·2015·5.173 MB·English

by  Janice Ross, Ms. Lynn Garafola

Like a Bomb Going Off

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L i k e a B o m b G o i n g O f f
Leonid Yakobson and
Ballet as Re sis tance
in Soviet Rus sia
Janice Ross
Foreword by Lynn Garafola
New Haven & London
Copyright © 2015 by Janice Ross. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ross, Janice.
Like a bomb going off : Leonid Yakobson and ballet as resistance in
Soviet Russia / Janice Ross ; foreword by Lynn Garafola.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-20763-7 (hardback)
1. IAkobson, Leonid. 2. Choreographers—Soviet Union—Biography. 3. Dancers—
Soviet Union—Biography. 4. Ballet—Soviet Union—History. 5. Dance—Political
aspects—Soviet Union. I. Title.
GV1785.I17R67 2015
792.8'0947—dc23 2014022306
A cata logue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Frontispiece: Yakobson in rehearsal for Troika with dancers of his company,
Choreographic Miniatures, Leningrad, 1973. Photo: Anatoly Pronin.
Dedicated with love to the memories of Joshua Bartel and Keith Bartel
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Contents
Foreword, by Lynn Garafola ix
Note on Transliteration xiv
Introduction 1
one Ballet and Power: Leonid Yakobson in
Soviet Rus sia 9
two Beginnings: Learning to Be an Outsider 60
Contents
three What Is to Be Done with Ballet? 83
four Chilling and Thawing: Cold War Ballet
and the Anti- Jewish Campaign 164
five Spartacus 241
six Dismantling the Hero 301
seven A Company of His Own: Privatizing
Soviet Ballet 333
eight Totalitarianism, Uncertainty, and Ballet 372
Epilogue 419
Appendix: Works by Leonid Yakobson 435
Notes 455
Ack now ledgm ents 501
Index 505
viii
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Foreword
Lynn Garafola
soviet dance history is full of muted voices, artists who spent de cades
in creative silence while keeping inner faith with the modernist ideals of
the 1920s. Among this courageous group was Leonid Yakobson. A chore-
ographer as crotchety as he was resolute, Yakobson was an artist of con-
tradictions, a modernist who shed his early proletarian skin but continued
to make war on ballet and use unconventional movement, even as he
worked with Rus sia’s greatest ballet dancers. He made dances for the lead-
ing Soviet companies, but struggled for years to establish his own troupe,
which became the fi rst of its kind in the postwar Soviet Union. He was a
Jew who created his fi rst Jewish- themed dances in the late 1940s as Jews
were being arrested as “rootless cosmopolitans” and “bourgeois national-
ists,” yet he refused to emigrate even when it became possible to do so. He
was a man with a profound sense of irony who seemed unfazed when a
ix