Out of the past.(Bolshoi Ballet )

The Bolshoi Ballet used to come through this country like a bulldozer pushing huge passions and vast landscapes into mountainous, murderous panoramas the dancers had to negotiate onstage. "Bolshoi" means "big" the previews always said. Bolshoi is Moscow, and the Mariinsky Ballet (called the Kirov from 1935 until the 1990s) is St. Petersburg. Bolshoi is salmon caviar to the Mariinsky's Beluga. Bolshoi is Soviet, and the Mariinsky, candy box of the Czar, Imperial. Which is not to say that Mariinsky dancers haven't ended up at the Bolshoi (it really doesn't go the other way). In 1944, the legendary ballerina Galina Ulanova was transferred from the Kirov to the Bolshoi, a powdery white moth into the hot red flame where she fluttered whiter still, unsingcd. But there's a Bolshoi style, and it has something to do with all that's unwieldy and unimaginable about Russia: the size, the scale, the killing power from above, the feral will rousing itself from below, the ghosts of oppressed peasants who knew nothing of ballet, the no-exit Kremlin counting rolls of toilet paper while checking off deaths. The Bolshoi is so complicated it's simple, or so simple it's complicated. But the previews never say that.

The toe shoes really do look like toilet-paper tubes when the paper's gone: they're cylindrical in the toe with a shank as stiff as cardboard. A metaphor for scant resources? Perhaps. But I do recall the first time I saw the Bolshoi, back in 1979, and there was nothing scant about it. The company swept through America on the kind of big-city, sold-out, sonic-boom tour that companies did in those days. It was a tour complete with a defection. The dashing Alexander Godunov, a vodka blond with icepick attack and dueling-scar dimples, jumped ship at New York's Kennedy Airport, leaving a wife behind. (Three years later he was my first interview as a fledgling dance writer--and rather struck by my long long list of questions.)

The company came to Chicago's Arie Crown Theater, and everyone clamored to see the golden couple, Nadezhda Pavlova and her husband, Viacheslav Gordeyev. They were a pair made in Sol Hurok heaven, or in Tolstoi, she the very picture of an exotic Russian--black-haired, with the moonlit face of a baby raised by Cossacks--and he one of those Ashley Wilkes types the Russians periodically produce, noble profiles with blond coloring and blue-blood technique, aristocratic echoes of Sun King classicism. His retiring male beauty was cloistered in the shadow of his wife's windborne arabesque, her pointes like peregrine falcons. The company presented Yuri Grigorovich's latest, his Romeo and Juliet, and in the ballroom scene young Pavlova was a rich draught, a Vermeer innocent in that long sweetheart tutu the color of claret.

The company always brought at least five ballerinas, and on that tour I remember Grigorovich's wife Natalia Bessmertnova, a mournful soul as dark and velvety as melted chocolate, and Ludmila Semenyaka, a long-stemmed blonde with a field-flower delicacy. The Bolshoi came again in 1987, a tour that seemed to focus on a single dancer, Irek Mukhamedov. Ever since Rudi and Misha, the West has hankered for the next scathing male from the Steppes, someone to put us in our place and show us how it's done (never underestimate an audience's wish to be smacked). Irek was "it" that year, a wonderful dancer, but he wasn't singular in the same way. He didn't present audiences with a complex sexuality that had been sublimated into dancing, the kind of compression that resulted in Rudi's hot-to-trot satyr's lust for every second of stage time (he liked to clench his buttocks when his back was to the audience, squeezing extra nanoseconds out of the spotlight), or Misha's cold and withholding classical distance, a blue baby in tights. There were mixed generations of women on that tour, honest and aged Bessmermova who suffered an injury and was out, and Semenyaka, who'd progressed, as so many dancers do, never really reaching maturity, going instead from spotless ingenue to a more formulaic version of that youthful reach and promise, a kind of empty professional dispatch. The fledgling Nina Ananiashvili was on this tour, along with Nina Semizorova. Semizorova was the finer dancer, but with her wasp waist and Orientalist articulation of steps she was very much the Eastern wing of Bolshoi dancing, while Ananiashvili's body type, long and rather curveless, her dancing comparatively light and ...