Galina Ulanova

born January 8, 1910

galina sergeyevna ulanova was a great ballerina.

The number of people who wrote, spoke, and cried out these words is beyond count. She was called a goddess, a visitor from some other world. She was showered with flowers and was the subject of poetry and films. There were people who so revered her that they washed the floors in their homes before watching her perform on the television. Her first performances abroad, in London, occasioned wild ovations and crowds of fans, and all this when the ballerina was already 46, not exactly a suitable age to be performing classical ballet.

But there was another Ulanova. There was the little girl whose parents placed her in a special school to study classical ballet against her will, where she cried every day and pleaded to be allowed to go home. There was the teenager who graduated that school with all “threes” — a C average — but then was catapulted to fame, first in Leningrad, at the Mariinsky Theater, and then, in the 1940s, reaching the highest pinnacle the Soviet arts had to offer, when she became a star of the Bolshoi.

And there was the loner, aloof, standoffish. Nobody could get close to her, although she married three times. And three times she divorced, because living with the ballerina — with Juliette, with Giselle — was completely impossible. She lived a long life, and throughout its second half she always said that she did not understand the younger generation and that they did not understand her, and yet she had a huge following of adoring disciples.

Finally, there was the laureate of every possible prize and medal, including two Hero of Socialist Labor stars and four Stalin Prizes.

But who the real Galina Ulanova was, we do not know. Probably the time for her true biography has not yet come. Any attempt, if not to criticize the great artist, but simply to take an objective look at her personality, has been immediately met by outbursts of indignation on the part of her countless fans and admirers. Alexei Simonov, who made a documentary about Ulanova, described in his memoirs how agonizing it was to try to break through the façade of the official icon of Soviet art to the genuine, living person, and how a whole range of people prevented him from getting anything done. It ranged from Ulanova herself, who sometimes seemed to suddenly stop listening to what he was saying, to virtually everyone else involved: from the scriptwriter who adored the subject of the film, to fans always ready to talk about their idol using one and the same words, to officials, who refused to say anything that did not conform exactly with the beautiful and cold image that had taken shape and become petrified over decades.

As soon as Simonov’s memoir, The World of Ulanova and the Myth of Ulanova, was published, its author was immediately “cut down to size.” “Ulanova will not be forgotten even when the world, Heaven forbid, goes stark raving mad. She will be remembered. She is a sacred relic. Sacred relics are untouchable and immortal,” one writer for the magazine Ballet wrote with an exaltation typical for ballet lovers. What can you say to something like that? To make any judgments about the ballerina’s genius based on recordings that are more than 50 years old is rather difficult, so what we are left with is those fervent words — “goddess,” “miracle,” “genius.” To make any judgments about the personality of a woman who was completely closed to others, who not long before her death destroyed most of her papers, is almost impossible.

We do know that Ulanova lived a life completely devoted to ballet. Amazingly, her childhood hatred for this difficult craft was replaced by a complete and utter preoccupation. Ballet and nature walks — that about summed up the components of her life, but also universal admiration. During the Stalin era, universal admiration, the status of superstar, meant, on the one hand, total official recognition and, on the other, constant anticipation of the falling axe, of being dethroned, disgraced, and eliminated. In Ulanova’s case, thank goodness, that never happened, and she lived through the years of the terror with her characteristic calm detachment, or at least there is no evidence that she suffered the sorts of fears, apprehensions, and anxieties that afflicted most people involved in the arts in those days.

In the late 1950s, many Stalin-era stars waned with the dawning of a new day. Actresses were no longer cast in films (take, for example, the tragic descent into semi-oblivion of Lyubov Orlova; see Russian Life, Jan/Feb 2008), poets lost their laurels and were forgotten, and films that everyone had once loved were, in the best of cases, now met with derision (and in the worst, with rage). But Ulanova continued to captivate throughout the fifties, and the sixties, and later, when she was no longer dancing but devoted herself to teaching. Everyone knew that Ulanova’s Giselle was the best, that nobody could dance Juliette better than she.

Alexei Simonov was bold enough to dig out an admission from the ballerina that, every time she performed her famous run across the stage toward Romeo, what she saw in her mind’s eye was a flowering garden and, in the background, the handsome face of a gynecologist who performed an abortion on her, and that she was running toward that face. What a shock! What an unexpected bursting of the bubble! But maybe this detail allows us a tiny glimpse into the true Ulanova, the one that she worked so hard to hide from everyone.

It would be nice to know what was behind the poetic images she created on stage that so thrilled her audiences. It would be nice to figure out how this woman, who was always in the public eye, managed to remain completely invisible and inaccessible to analysis. Was she truly brilliant, or was this just some universal delusion that was carefully promoted by official propaganda? It is hard to find any actor, musician, or singer who inspires universal adoration. There are always critics or at least people who are indifferent. But it is virtually impossible to find people who did not like Ulanova, or at least who would dare say that they were not moved by her dancing. Did she really enchant everyone, or is it just that nobody is willing to contradict unanimous opinion?

Alexei Simonov, worn out by his struggle with the Ulanova legend, finally came to the conclusion that there was no point trying to penetrate her armor. “Only now, after so many years have passed, am I beginning to understand why all my attempts to look behind the curtains of the Legend were doomed: the Legend had no curtains. The Legend became the very life of this great and probably very unhappy woman, who imprisoned herself in an ivory tower in order to protect the glimmering light.”