Galina Ulanova

Perhaps it was inevitable that Galina Ulanova would dance. After all, it was the family business. Her father, Sergei Ulanov, was director of the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, and took her to her first performance: Sleeping Beauty. When the Lilac Fairy appeared, Galina cried out, “That’s mama, my mama!” Her mother, Maria Romanova, was a dancer and teacher at the Imperial School of the Mariinsky Ballet (later, during the Soviet period, the Kirov State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet).

Yet, as a young girl, Ulanova did not enjoy dancing. It was a struggle, especially after the Bolsheviks came to power. Ulanova’s parents had to find extra work. Besides performing at the Mariinsky, they also gave performances three times a day in cinemas, while films were being changed and rewound.

Nonetheless, Galina was sent to the Petrograd School of Choreography as a boarding student. Ulanova constantly asked her mother, who was her first dance teacher, to let her come home. But soon she reconciled herself to her fate and made new friends. She was also making incredible progress in dance and was invited to the Academy Opera to perform in Riccardo Drigo’s Caprices of a Butterfly. It was her debut onstage.

By the age of 18, Ulanova was dancing the lead of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. However, later she would say that it had taken her over 100 appearances in this ballet to truly understand it. “I used to dance without deeply understanding the characters I portrayed,” she said. After her mother’s classes, Ulanova was trained at the famous Aggripina Vaganova School; in 1928 she joined the Mariinsky. She made friends with many intellectuals of her era and was always interested in their new ideas. Fascinated by the theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky, for example, she attempted to bring his ideas into her dance.

Ulanova belonged to dance’s St. Petersburg School, the home of such stars as Mikhail Fokine, Marius Petipa, Vaclav Nizhinsky, Georges Balanchine and others. In 1944, though, on Stalin’s personal order, she left the Kirov Ballet for Moscow’s Bolshoi, to become the Prima Ballerina. There, Ulanova performed most of the greatest roles in classical ballet, including the leads in Swan Lake, Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. And, aside from this classical repertoire, she performed in Romeo and Juliet, Lost Illusion, Stone Flower and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. Convinced that “a dancer must be a hard plodder,” Ulanova danced frequently.  “Daily practice is the meat and drink,” she used to say, “and it must never cease, not even during summer holidays.”

After the war, Ulanova danced several times in the West  –  in Vienna and Rome (1949) and in Florence and Venice (1951). It was an important break through the Iron Curtain, as very few artists were allowed to go abroad. In the West, Ulanova was best remembered for her amazing Juliet and Giselle – Ulanova’s appearances with the Bolshoi Ballet in London in 1956 and in New York in 1959 were huge sensations.

It is worth mentioning that, at that time, Ulanova was nearly 50. She was not only beautiful, but charming; offstage she was always perfectly proper and reserved, even slightly diffident; she never gossiped (unlike many Bolshoi stars), avoided conflict, and rarely appeared in public.

KGB agents always traveled with the Bolshoi Ballet when it toured abroad. In 1959 in New York, Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya managed to escape their KGB agents. After purchasing two gorgeous bouquets, they went to visit Olga Spesivtseva at the rest home operated by Alexandra Tolstaya (daughter of Lev Tolstoy) just outside New York. Spesivtseva had been a celebrated Russian ballerina who had spent 25 years in an insane asylum (according to one version, for attempting to escape from Soviet authorities) before emigrating to the US. Needless to say, it was a very bold and brave thing for Ulanova and Plisetskaya to do in 1959.

Ulanova retired from dancing in 1962, but never left the Bolshoi, continuing to work as a teacher. She wore high heels until the end of her life, did daily exercises and took it to heart when ballet dancers of the new generation did not recognize her – “a living legend” – in the halls. She did not despise wealth, yet she was quite indifferent to it. She lived in a five-room apartment in the famous skyscraper on Moscow’s Kotelnicheskaya embankment, where many famous Soviets had their flats. When the new, post-Soviet world arrived, Ulanova, one of the greatest ballerinas of our century, a chief teacher at the Bolshoi and a ballet critic (The Making of a Ballerina), could no longer afford her expensive flat and moved to a smaller one. No one bothered to remember that Ulanova had earned more awards than the leaders of the Communist regime (Stalin Prizes in 1941, 1946, 1947 and 1951; People’s Artist of the RSFSR (1951), Order of Lenin (1974) and many more). Galina Ulanova died in Moscow in 1998.

A postscript: Despite her star status, and the tension that can cause, Ulanova was quite popular and became a teacher of many great dancers, including Vladimir Vasiliyev (later the Bolshoi’s director), Nina Timofeyeva and the legendary Yekaterina Maksimova. Maksimova was actually Ulanova’s first student, in 1960, and always said Ulanova taught her not only ballet but also life.