Online-Programme: DER SCHNEESTURM [THE BLIZZARD]

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The Blizzard

BS 20 – 21

Bayerisches Staatsballett 20 — 21 C: A. Kaydanovskiy M: L. Dangel UA: 17-04-21

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BS 20 – 21

The Blizzard

Bayerisches Staatsballett 20 — 21 C: A. M: L. SD: F. A. SD: K. CD: A. LD: C. D: S.

Kaydanovskiy Dangel Trawöger, Landsmann, L. Dangel Hogl Arbesser Kass Honegger

Bayerisches Staatsballett Bayerisches Staatsorchester

World premiere on 17 April 2021 at the National Theatre in Munich under the musical direction of Gavin Sutherland

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Content

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Synopsis Points of Reference Open Structures Fateful Snow Snow Tempestuous Spirit Choreography and Storm Biographies Pictures Imprint

04 12 18 28 36 52 64 74 100

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01 – Synopsis

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The Blizzard

P 4 – 5 Act One

Family Portrait I Marja, her well-to-do parents, her maid and their servant attempt what they hope will be a successful family portrait. Marja is holding a snow globe and repeatedly shakes it to create a blizzard. It has been in her family for generations and it means a lot to her.

The Ball The young woman feels hemmed in by her surroundings. She is unable to work up any enthusiasm for the ball that her parents are holding and refuses to have anything to do with the three suitors who are seeking her hand in marriage.

The Couple Marja has already bestowed her heart on Vladimir, a young man from a relatively poor local family. He has awoken in her ideas of a grand romantic passion and of a life far removed from the well-worn byways of her present humdrum existence. But her parents are unenthusiastic about Vladimir and so the young lovers decide to marry in secret and elope. Vladimir’s presence makes Marja’s father uneasy. He hustles him out of the house.

The Nightmare During the night before their planned wedding, Marja is plagued by a series of terrible nightmares that are an expression of her doubts and fears about the coming events.

Family Portrait II By the following morning Marja is completely exhausted and it is only with some difficulty that she is able to resume her normal routine. Meanwhile Vladimir is continuing undeterred to organise their wedding and initiates everyone necessary into his plan. He buys the wedding rings from two shady characters whose task it is to carry the candles in church. He speaks to the priest and, after agreeing on the time and the order of the service, he gives him the rings. The maid and the servant are also let in on the plan. Marja has agreed with Vladimir that she will pretend to be unwell so that she can retire to her room and then make her way to the church, where he will be waiting for her.

The Flight Together with her maid and the family servant, Marja sets off on her adventure. At the very last minute she decides to take her snow globe with her as a reminder of her family and of the house that she believes she is leaving for good. As the three of them leave, a violent blizzard blows up.

The Blizzard Vladimir too is caught in the blizzard and wrestles with the unbridled forces of nature. A hussar colonel by the name of Burmin has likewise been engulfed by the blizzard and lost his way. While the storm rages all around him, he chances upon the church where Marja and Vladimir are due to be married.

When Vladimir finally arrives at the church, he finds that the doors are locked and collapses in despair and exhaustion. A troop of soldiers on its way to war passes across the stage.

Family Portrait III Back in Marja’s parents’ house a new day has dawned. It is unclear what has happened in the meantime. Completely exhausted and suffering from a fever, Marja emerges from her room. Her maid takes her wedding veil and ring, secreting the latter in Marja’s dress pocket so that her parents do not suspect anything. In his despair that Marja has not waited for him, Vladimir has decided to enlist. He says goodbye to his parents. Marja’s parents meanwhile are deeply concerned about their daughter, who is suffering a nervous breakdown.

They hope that her condition will improve if they allow her to marry Vladimir.

They set off to visit Vladimir’s parents in order to inform them that they agree to the union and are present when his parents are greeted by a devastating piece of news as a priest informs them that their son has been killed in battle.

Family Portrait IV Some time has passed. The war is over. Marja’s family has fallen on hard times and her father has died. Her maid and the family servant have both left their former employers. They are now working for the government and are responsible for seizing property, in which capacity they call on Marja and her mother. The latter succeeds in salvaging a few possessions in order not to have to pawn them.

The End of the War A party is held to celebrate the safe return of the soldiers. Among them are Burmin and his traumatised comrade Belkin. Marja sits to one side and feels the terrible emptiness left by Vladimir’s death. Suddenly startled, she bumps into Burmin. The two feel a powerful attraction, only for Burmin to realise that he is wearing his wedding ring and that this might rouse Marja’s suspicions. Meanwhile Belkin stages a grotesque play on a tiny stage. The audience is so puzzled by the piece that they leave. The party breaks up.

The Ring Once the others have left, Burmin enlists Belkin’s help to get rid of the ring, but he fails to do so. Despite this setback, he decides to tell Marja about all that has happened to him and to beg her for her understanding: he is

Act Two

P 6 – 7 already married. But he married in a moment of folly and has seen his wife only once.

The Chain Reaction Thanks to Belkin, the whole village knows that Burmin intends to speak to Marja. But the news is garbled and reaches Marja in the form of an unambiguous message that Burmin is in love with her and plans to propose to her.

She is overjoyed and filled with hope.

The Dress With the help of the villagers, Marja sets out in search of a suitable trousseau.

She finds the old wedding dress in which she had planned to marry Vladimir many years earlier and that is associated in her mind with memories both beautiful and painful. The excited villagers have already started to make preparations for the wedding celebrations.

The Conversation Burmin seeks out Marja in order to speak to her. When he shows Marja the ring on his finger and tells her that he is already married, she is thunderstruck.

She slaps his face resoundingly.

The Flashback The blow triggers a flashback recreating what happened during the blizzard, when Marja was planning to marry Vladimir. The events onstage also reveal what took place in the church, something that the opening act had left unclear.

It turns out that all who were present in the church had mixed up Burmin with Vladimir, the confusion compounded by the fatal combination of the blizzard, the lengthy wait for Vladimir, the need to hurry and the poor lighting in the church. The men carrying the candles had placed Burmin next to Marja as her bridegroom. The priest had staked everything on completing the service as fast as he could and had handed over the rings. Everyone had been focused on the kiss. At that moment Marja had realised that the groom was not Vladimir but a stranger. Drawing on her final reserves of strength, he had struck the false bridegroom, bringing the flashback to an end.

The End …

Marja puts her hand in her dress pocket and discovers the ring that her maid had put there for safekeeping. She realises that it was Burmin whom she had married on that occasion. The false bridegroom now turns out to be the right one. The two of them dance an intimate pas de deux. They believe that they can see how the force of destiny has been spinning its thread of fate. They nestle in each other’s arms, secure in the knowledge that they have finally gained control of their lives. This moment of fulfilment is interrupted when

Belkin calls his friend outside. Marja remembers her parents, her house and the sense of order that she used to feel in her life. She picks up her snow globe and shakes it, lost in thought. Suddenly she is overcome by a sense of foreboding and runs to the door. Opening it, she sees a violent blizzard raging outside.

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02 – Points of Reference

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T: Igor Zelensky

P 12 – 13 I first met Andrey Kaydanovskiy a number of years ago in Russia, when he was switching from dancing to choreography. His work as a choreographer impressed me at once. Hugely creative, it is notable for its infectious energy and for its great musicality. But it also presents its dancers with complex challenges. His ballet The Blizzard after Alexander Pushkin’s short story may be regarded as a new and very special milestone in the successful tradition of the ballet d’action, a tradition for which the Bavarian State Ballet has been known for many years through the work of Frederick Ashton, John Cranko, John Neumeier, Christian Spuck and Christopher Wheeldon.

When a choreographer like Andrey Kaydanovskiy has a gift for story-telling, he is not only capable of skilfully linking together the various scenes that make up the plot, he is also able to communicate certain values. These values serve to provide us with our bearings, allowing us to navigate life’s choppy waters and to gain an understanding of the world. In The Blizzard these vital points of reference are found in very different forms. They occur in the idea of a permanent home, in the multiple family portraits, in the musical quotations, in the various costumes and especially in the encounters between the characters.

Pushkin’s genius consists in showing us in his characteristically poetic way that these values are fluid and that the framework that imposes order on our lives is not permanent but is in a state of constant flux that we as individuals can steer only with great difficulty. Time and again it is a question of defining our place in a reality that we can never fully grasp. What is so fascinating about a ballet d’action like The Blizzard is that it allows us to see order and disorder in the course of a single performance in the theatre and in that way gain a kind of overview.

On the basis of the very dense narrative, with its abundance of action, Adrey Kaydanovskiy and his artistic team have succeeded in creating a suitable structure for the ballet. The ambiguity and gripping intensity of the literary source have been retained. This means that as an audience we can watch this interplay of creativity and destruction from a safe distance and at the same time ask ourselves whether we have found a safe haven or whether we are still outside in the storm. In my own view it is both of these aspects that make our lives so full and so fulfilling.

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03 – Open Structures – Lorenz Dangel on the Genesis of the Score

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LD: Lorenz Dangel SH: Serge Honegger

P 18 – 19 SH You

were in very close contact with Andrey Kaydanovskiy while you were working on the score. How exactly are we to imagine this partnership?

LD With any ballet the big question is always who came first: the composer or the choreographer? There are many instances of someone writing the music and of the choreographer then receiving the score and starting to choreograph it. Our own case was very different. It was an intense process during which I asked Andrey about the detailed microstructure of the scenes in order for me to be able to understand what is meant to be happening in the course of the action onstage. Some things were timed right down to the very last second. I asked Andrey, for example, how long it would take for one of the characters to walk from A to B or how long the pas de deux should be. This is something I’m familiar with from film music. At the same time I had to make sure that the individual sections of the work made dramaturgical sense within an overarching whole. It was a huge challenge to incorporate the vertical structure of the choreographic elements into the horizontal line of the musical argument. Balancing these individual aspects and holding them together took up a lot of our conversations.

Are there any particular recurrent elements that you’ve used to construct this musical arch?

LD As a composer, you approach these projects simply by being confronted with a particular theme. You then gather all the initial information that you can on an action, a scene or a mood. Sometimes these are only very small elements. But the brain starts almost automatically to look for certain things, for certain links and certain motifs. Afterwards it’s always interesting, of course, to see if any of your initial spur-of-the-moment reactions have survived or not. In this case, too, I didn’t simply sit down at the beginning and decide which elements had to perform this or that function. It was rather the case that in the course of my engagement with the subject, my repeated re-reading of Pushkin’s text and my getting Andrey to recount the story to me a structure began to emerge. It is during this work that parallels between different scenes become obvious. These include the parallels between the family portraits and Baroque music, which avails itself of a certain irony by playing with the rigour that is part and parcel of these scenes. A further element that recurs in the course of the action is the bandoneon, the instrument allotted to Vladimir. From my own point of view the bandoneon is incredibly well suited to its role here in that it has an immediate emotional impact. It is also able to accompany the dancing in very precise ways with different colours, which is why it is often used in the tango. Then there’s the music for the first pas de deux that returns in Act Two as a kind of reminiscence motif. These things happen while I am working on the score.

SH

You write not only for the opera, ballet and concert hall, you also compose film music. Are there any common elements to your work when you are writing for these different genres?

LD My music often has a narrative thrust to it. And I sometimes ask myself whether I was born in the right century. The tone poem, for example, is SH

a medium with which I can closely identify. But even I myself don’t know where this interest comes from.

An interest in story-telling is something that we on the production team have often discussed. Why is this no longer so self-evident today?

LD We’re constantly evolving, of course, in the history of music – at least as far as various narrative forms are concerned. Despite the technically impressive level that Strauss achieved in his Alpine Symphony, this narrative dimension already seems somewhat old-fashioned there. Our aim, therefore, was to adapt Pushkin’s short story, which in itself is already very modern, and present it to a modern audience, while retaining the complexity of the original and translating it into a form that we ourselves regard as valid.

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SH

Can you give me an example of what I should be imagining here?

LD A scene quickly becomes flat if the music and the choreography simply

duplicate one another. This is a recurrent topic of discussion in the cinema.

Here it’s often the case that the image doesn’t depict what is being expressed in the music and vice versa. Sometimes Andrey would say »You don’t need to recount this in the music because I can no longer show it on stage.« But then there were times when we agreed that it would be good if we were in sync. As a point of principle, what I provide when I write a score for a ballet is an open structure, by which I mean that something is still missing. I have to leave certain passages open-ended so the choreographer can add something new and the whole thing is ultimately a unified entity.

Can one regard this open structure, with its gaps for the choreography, as a kind of carpet?

LD We’re dealing rather with a kind of underlying energy that holds together the vertical structure. The music mostly just flows along, there are no interruptions or chapter endings. In this way the work fits together to form a colourful and intoxicating blend of very different elements and scenes.

We’re dealing here with something that has a great deal of energy to it, something with which a choreographer can work.

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For me, your music is defined by its symphonic character, allowing its multiform variety to be woven into this »underlying energy«. Is this a misleading impression on my part?

LD Whenever I write music, there’s a compositional instinct at work that ultimately decides the gesture that I need in order for me to express the message that’s demanded by the subject. And sometimes I need those elements to have a symphonic force to them. In this particular case I decided at an early stage where the emotional high points and where the moments of calm are located. It’s very important to keep this in mind in order to get a feel for the structure. As a result the second scene in Act One – the ball scene – is one of the most demanding numbers in the work.

It’s complex, densely orchestrated and rhythmically complicated. I’m amazed at how self-evidently the dancers approach this scene. The end of the opening act is also symphonic in character. When Vladimir exits through SH

P 20 – 21 the door in order to go off to war, it’s impossible for me to write »smallscale« music here. This is one of the work’s dramatic climaxes. More generally, this scene allows us to hear the different functions of the music in this production. The scene begins with the orchestra conjuring up a mood that allows us to see that much is out of kilter. We then hear a propulsive rhythmic pattern that Vladimir invests with tremendous energy.

Finally we find a marked synchronicity between the music and the choreography, and when Vladimir then opens the door to go to war, the music forces us to confront the drama that is inherent in this moment – both for Vladimir and for Marja.

One of the reasons why Pushkin’s text strikes us as so modern is that he uses a whole series of narrative devices that we don’t normally associate with a story based upon classical rules. Did you incorporate similar elements into your music?

LD Rhetorical devices like these are often used in music: Shostakovich, for example, frequently worked with ironical and sardonic motifs in order to provide a musical reflection of the whole political situation and of his own state of mind. This doesn’t exist in this form in our piece. But we do use musical details from Pushkin’s text that occur here as quotations. True, these are only brief moments, but I’m very fond of them. We also use an important narrative principle of Pushkin’s in the flashback in Act Two. I’ve sought to capture this note of self-reflection by using material from Act One and redeploying it in a different form by drawing on the resources of electronic music. This isn’t simply restricted to the music that is played backwards but represents an inversion of the order of what happened during the blizzard scene in Act One. SH

You solve the problem of recalling an earlier moment by means of the sound design. What is the role played by this musical and acoustic component, which is defined by electronic procedures?

LD In the flashback in Act Two the electronic music functions as a kind of reflector wall that throws back at the listener musical material from Act One, but in an altered, alienated form. It becomes a counterpart to the orchestra, opposing and entering into a dialogue with it. I also often use electronic music to create cinematic moments, to expand the range of expressive possibilities and to introduce theatrical elements as in the case of the doorbell or the effect of shaking the snow globe. Often the electronic track helps me to build very specific acoustic spaces.

SH

We haven’t said anything about the blizzard as such. I know that you don’t want to give too much away. In a certain sense you have an affinitywith Pushkin, who likewise says very little about the actual details of the blizzard and in that way creates a cinema of the imagination.

Unlike Pushkin you couldn’t simply allude to the blizzard by means of a single word but had to incorporate it into a temporal and spatial structure.

LD This was a challenge that Andrey and I had to overcome. But the choreography provided us with a relatively clear structure because Andrey SH

felt that it was important to describe the roads and the obstacles to which Vladimir is exposed in the blizzard. The storm is accompanied both by the orchestra and by the electronic score, although the orchestra remains with Vladimir, whereas the storm is unleashed by the electronic element and is effectively faceless and anonymous. Like Vladimir, the orchestra has to fight against this backdrop, an immaterial backdrop of sounds and noises that is diametrically opposed to the physicality on the stage and in the orchestra.

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04 – Fateful Snow – Russia, Pushkin and the Cold

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T: Julia Herzberg

P 28 – 29 Contrary to the title, Pushkin’s story The Blizzard begins in the warm season.

In 1811, the rich aristocratic daughter Marja Gavrilovna, who draws her knowledge about love only from French novels, discovers her feelings for the penniless ensign Vladimir Nikolaevich. In order not to incur the wrath of her parents, who long for a better match for their daughter, the two young people meet secretly in the forest, at an old chapel. But the onset of winter prevents these meetings and shifts the courtship to an exchange of letters.

Together, Marja and Vladimir decide not to hope for their parents’ approval, but instead to create facts and marry in secret. The wedding ceremony is to take place in the chapel, the secret meeting place of the lovers.

But a blizzard interferes with the lovers’ plans and determines their fate.

On the way to the chapel, the ensign gets lost in the blizzard. It is not until early morning that he arrives at the closed chapel. The wedding does not take place for him. Instead of starting a new life, the ensign goes to war against the French. But even before the French enter Moscow he is wounded; a few days later he dies. The unfortunate ensign does not live to see the glorious victory of the Russian army. And while the Russian women lose »their accustomed coldness« in the frenzy of victory, Marja defends her innocence with »the fidelity of a virginal Artemisia« and rejects all attempts at love. »Regardless of her coldness« - Pushkin plays with temperature metaphors in his story - the rich and beautiful daughter of noble decent remains idolised by her admirers, who soon include the hussar Burmin. Only in the confession of love does it become apparent that the blizzard four years ago was used by the mischievous Burmin to take Vladimir’s place even back then. Marja and Burmin realise that their wedding ceremony has already taken place.

That cold, snow and frost can be fateful in Russia is not surprising. Low temperatures and the meteorological and climatic phenomena associated with them are linked to incisive events in Russian history. Great victories were won in and with the cold: The Mongols advanced into Russia across the frozen rivers, while the Teutonic Order in 1242, Napoleon’s troops in 1812 and the German Wehrmacht in 1941/42 experienced their fiasco in the proverbial Russian winter.

However, the fact that the first association when thinking about Russia is often linked to the cold is not only due to events from military history, but also to stories such as The Blizzard by Alexander Pushkin, which have contributed to the reinterpretation of the cold: Frost, ice and snow were no longer associated solely with doom and death since the Age of Enlightenment, but with courage, strength of will and providence. Decisive for this were also considerations that the discussions about the effects of the climate on people, linked life in severe frosts with an imagined Russian national character.

Who can use the cold Since ancient times, climate has been considered an environmental condition to explain the differences between peoples. Following the premises of the physician Hippocrates, the philosopher Aristotle saw climate as the cause

of the Greeks’ supremacy over the »barbarians«. In these ideas, cold was associated with inferiority and a lack of culture. After Europe’s expansion into America and Siberia, the climatic theories that emerged between the 16th and 19th centuries were an attempt to reduce the new notion of diversity of the human species to a few principles. European explorers, conquerors and colonists used climatological descriptions to classify the newly discovered peoples in Asia, Africa and America. In doing so, climate offered a rational explanation for the differences between the peoples from the perspective of their contemporaries. In a Eurocentric perspective, a temperate climate was favoured, such as that prevailing in Western Europe. It was considered ideal for achieving progress and prosperity. In contrast, great heat and cold were seen as obstacles to the development of civilisation and culture.

In the middle of the 18th century, however, there was a radical change, in which the evaluation of the cold also changed at the same time as Russia’s reputation grew and through the exploration of the Siberian region. It is difficult to say what factors were decisive in the mid-18th century that changed the evaluation of cold in climatic theories. In any case, the rise of Russia as a great power, the radical modernisation policy of Peter the Great, which was closely observed abroad, as well as St. Petersburg’s increasing importance as a hub of the Enlightenment contributed to a revaluation of the cold and the rehabilitation of the North in public discourses and climate theories. Peter the Great was regarded by contemporaries as an example of a ruler who had cured the disadvantages of the climate by a clever modernisation policy and his »intensest heat«1 from the curse of the cold latitudes. Travellers to Russia referred to the newly founded capital of St. Petersburg in 1703 as the »Palmyra of the North« or »Northern Venice«, while the Tsarina Catherine II, who ruled in the second half of the 18th century, went down in history not only as Catherine the Great but also as the »Minerva of the North«.

These metaphors, which also refer to antiquity and thus to the roots of Europe, reveal two aspects of Russia’s image of itself and of the world. First, it reveals that the new capital, built in swamps on the 60th latitude, made it necessary to compensate for the adverse weather and environmental conditions by transfiguring the North. Secondly, the references to antiquity make it clear that Russia, which had been considered cold, Nordic and thus barbaric among its European neighbours, was no longer perceived as the complete Other.

The revaluation of the cold and the North since the 18th century is primarily associated with Montesquieu’s name. In his work On the Spirit of Laws (1748), the French philosopher drew on theses by Hippocrates and the ancient historian Herodotus, in which fertile, warm lands were associated with softness and laziness, while less fertile, cold lands supposedly produced »heroic« individuals. Montesquieu wrote: »The inhabitants of warm countries are fearful as are the aged; those of cold countries are brave as the young.«2 Climate continued to be the central explanatory model for Montesquieu to explain social and cultural phenomena, such as political institutions, family structures and social order. But unlike his predecessors, Montesquieu no longer drew a picture that favoured the temperate zone alone.

P 30 – 31 Alexander Pushkin also contributed to this revaluation of the cold and winter in the first half of the 19th century. In his texts, winter is not just a backdrop for dramatic action, but becomes an actor who can radically change the course of events, as in the story The Blizzard. Those who bravely know how to use the cold and do not let snow and storm divert them from their path can triumph in the end, like Burmin, who has become an unplanned bridegroom.

But it was not only literature and art as well as Montesquieu’s reflections on the constitution of peoples that contributed to the appreciation and recognition of the cold. Central was the year 1812, which represents a decisive turning point both in Pushkin’s story The Blizzard and for the order of Europe.

1812. Triumph of the Cold Marja’s two love stories are grouped around the »Great Patriotic War« of 1812 to 1814, which ended in military disaster for the Grande Armée, forced Napoleon to abdicate and led to the reorganisation of Europe. Pushkin’s narrative reflects the euphoric mood after the victory. Like many others, he celebrates 1812 as a year of national awakening that proved Russia’s equality with Europe.

Napoleon had surprisingly withdrawn from Moscow in the late autumn of 1812. The onset of snow and frost quickly transformed the glorious Grande Armée into a pitiful heap of ill-equipped and freezing soldiers. The question of whether Napoleon was defeated militarily or primarily by the Russian winter is still debated today. This question is not to be answered here and now. What is much more decisive is that the victory over Napoleon gave a further boost to the borealisation of Russia’s image of itself and others, which had begun with Peter’s politics and Montesquieu’s reflections.

Large sections of Russian society saw the early onset of winter as a gift from heaven that had helped to repel the French attack.

In interpretations of the events of the war, winter became a natural ally of the Russians and thus also an allegedly genuinely Russian phenomenon.

In art and literature, winter became a popular motif that was frequently taken up in the first half of the 19th century and received much acclaim. At the moment when the military and political equivalence, even superiority, became visible, discourses on frost, ice and snow increased in order to emphasise the peculiar and unique. Art and literature celebrated the Russian winter and those who could brave it. The winter, characterised by snow, storms and frosts, was now seen as a national symbol that could also be used to explore Russia’s relationship with Europe. It was precisely by referring to the winter in which the French had failed in 1812 that one could set oneself apart from France as a cultural role model. While Marja’s passion for French novels ends in a fleeting flirtation, the Russian snowstorm leads her to her true love and fateful destiny.

1

Hill, Aaron: The northern star. A poem. Originally publish’d in the life-time of Peter Alexiovitz, great Czar of Russia.

The fifth edition. Revised, and corrected, by the author. London 1739, p. 7

2

Montesquieu, Charles: Vom Geist der Gesetze. Bd. 1. 2. Aufl. Tübingen 1992, p. 311

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05 – Tempestuous Spirit, Tempestuous Life, Tempestuous Work – Notes on Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837)

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T: Markus Wyler

P 36 – 37 This is my season: Spring is quite the worst, I hate the thaw, it makes me ill – stench, mire, My blood ferments, my spirit is oppressed.

The sternness of Midwinter I prefer; How I love its snow, when free and fast The sled speeds on beneath the evening star, When she beside you gives your hand a squeeze, Warm beneath fur, fresh, trembling and ablaze!

Alexander Pushkin, from Autumn, a poetic fragment (1833), trans. Antony Wood

In Russia they see the seasons differently from the way we see them in Central Europe. Even there, of course, spring heralds the end of winter but it also contains within it not only the signs of an awakening but also an elemental force that brings with it a sense of menace when the ice shatters with a tremendous crash and raging floodwaters take the line of least resistance, flowing along the still frozen rivers and nature, once ice-bound, rises up with explosive force and the blinding sun and stupefying smells overwhelm the senses and – year in, year out – homes and gardens are effortfully brought back to life.

The hot summers are shorter than ours and, as in Scandinavia, they tend to be spent out of doors. It is now easy to move, and provisions are eagerly laid in for the coming cold season. For a foreigner like myself, who feels at ease in a city, it seems somehow strange when the promised pleasant pastime of a relaxing weekend in the country turns out to be a back-breaking dig for potatoes, a thorny search for mushrooms and berries, a chance to grill fish that you have caught yourself or an opportunity to make improvised repairs on machinery. Life on a datcha has changed little in the modern world.

Although many houses now have Wi-Fi, central heating and electric lawnmowers and can be reached by tarmacked roads, this is certainly not true of all of them. What I like most of all is the dilapidated original farmhouse with water from a rain barrel and an earth closet surrounded by nettles that a Muscovite family of mathematicians and pianists with whom I’m friendly has owned for over thirty years and where a bottle of vodka is hidden inside an out-of-tune cottage piano.

Starting in September, there is a brief golden autumn that quickly turns cheerless, misty and wet. It is taken up with preparations for the winter or for a return to city life. In the country it is barely possible to think of any further progress, the mire is too deep, the weather too inclement. The huge puddles prove an insurmountable obstacle for the foreigner timidly trying to cross the main street on foot in a small town on the Siberian steppe, and the excursion ends sooner than planned in the haven of a warm hotel.

For their part the winters are long, cold and snow-bound – in the far north from the month of October. But at least the ground beneath your feet is firm again. Travellers of a bygone age must have found a brisk and bracing sleighride in winter to be welcome relief from the dusty journeys on bumpy unsurfaced roads in summer and from the impassable mud of the autumn: such journeys suddenly seemed comfortable and easy.

If, in a modern metropolis like Moscow, the snow suddenly turns to a filthy slush that freezes over at night and the cars are black with grime, it is

still possible to find a few magic moments of winter enchantment: mulled wine for the grown-ups and ice-skating for the children in Red Square, colourful New Year lights that illumine the darkness that now lasts for months, skiing to get warm again in the recreational area of a satellite town and, above all, a radiant sun in a deep blue sky causing the white frost on the silver birches’ sugar-coated branches to glitter with myriad colours in the freshly fallen snow!

Setting Standards as High as Goethe’s No one has ever described the Russian seasons as enchantingly, as vividly and as poetically as Alexander Pushkin. Indeed, few other writers have even come close to Pushkin in the beauty of their descriptions. He was a literary genius who set new standards in every genre he tackled. In terms of the quality and breadth of his writing he is at least on a par with Goethe. Pushkin’s lyric poetry, his fairytales, verse epics, plays, short stories and novels, his literary criticism and even his countless letters are all among the principal works of world literature. But he was also an influential theorist and towards the end of his life he published a periodical that dealt with current sociopolitical, historical and scientific subjects. Sovremennik appeared quarterly and devoted much coverage to new literature: it was here that Pushkin presciently published short stories like The Nose by the young Gogol and verse by the Romantic poet Fyodor Tyutchev.

Pushkin travelled widely within the Russian Empire, although the elegant city of Saint Petersburg was at the centre of his life. On his father’s side he was descended from an ancient aristocratic line. Thanks to his mother, whose grandfather hailed from Africa and who held a series of important military posts under Peter the Great, he had close links with the tsarist court.

Regular visits to the country’s second city, the traditionally conservative Moscow, were also a part of the routine of members of the higher aristocracy. Of decisive influence, too, were the lengthy periods that he spent in the untamed valleys of the Caucasus, on the banks of the Black Sea, where ancient cultures had left their mark, and finally in what is now Moldavia. In the course of a major expedition to the region between the Volga and the Urals, Pushkin collected material for his history of the Cossack uprising under Yemelyan Pugachev.

The years between 1824 and 1826 were particularly important for allowing Pushkin to process all of his experiences. He spent this period under police surveillance on his mother’s estates at Mikhailovskoye near the city of Pskov not far from the present border with Estonia. No less decisive were the regular visits that Pushkin paid to Bóldino some 200 km (125 miles) to the south of Nizhny Novgorod. This was a family estate that Pushkin received from his father on the occasion of his forthcoming wedding. Pushkin spent his first autumn here in 1830 and it proved hugely productive from a literary point of view. The village still commemorates this stay with a famous festival of literature and music. The five short stories that make up the Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin and that include The Blizzard also date from this period.

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Shaping the Modern Language like Shakespeare While at Mikhailovskoye Pushkin visited his neighbours on a daily basis, and it was their daughter who became the prototype of Tatyana in Eugene Onegin.

His old nursemaid, whom he met here again, regaled him with local fairytales and told him about regional customs. Strolling across the nearby marketplace he would observe the simple people and their typical mode of expression.

It is this that invests his drama Boris Godunov – conceived along the lines of one of Shakespeare’s history plays – with its authentic tone.

Among his achievements as a writer of the first order is another one that is of supreme importance for Russia: essentially, the present form of the written language can be traced back to Pushkin. On the one hand he succeeded in creating a single form from the different layers of Russian, while at the same time giving it a new vocabulary. The new colours that we owe to Pushkin’s writings allowed Russian to develop into a recognised literary language. And this in turn favoured the rapid emergence of several generations of leading writers whose works are a part of the canon of world literature.

Like Shakespeare, Pushkin succeeded in combining what had previously been strictly discrete idioms and stylistic registers, revealing a degree of virtuosity that allowed the new conglomerate to appear entirely natural, even though it was made up of layers that had previously been impossible to unify: until then, the language of the early Russian Church, with its archaic and religious connotations, had existed alongside the German and above all the French borrowings from the elegant world of the salon, to say nothing of the often coarse and earthy expressions of the language of the common people. The language that was felt to be suitable for literature was hotly debated in literary circles.

Pushkin conversely switched uninhibitedly between different stylistic registers from the most elevated to the most colloquial. If he was unable to find a term, he would invent one. It was presumably this total freedom from ideology, combined with a breath-taking brilliance, that suddenly allowed his Russian to appear differentiated, elegant and invariably worth taking seriously. The aristocracy had previously conversed in German or, depending on the prevailing political situation, in French but suddenly found that it enjoyed speaking the vernacular, a vernacular that in the context of the Napoleonic Wars was a godsend when it came to creating a new sense of national identity.

Pushkin exerted a lasting influence on the Russian language: many of his expressions have become set phrases, or else people simply believe that they have always been a part of the language. And a line from one of his poems finds its way sooner or later into every Russian conversation.

As Profound in his Art and as Carefree in his Life as Mozart Pushkin never set foot outside the Russian Empire. But he had an excellent knowledge of Western European literature and was able to introduce his readers to its principal genres and to make its most popular writers more accessible by means of quotations and parodies. Motivically and formally

speaking, Pushkin’s own output is firmly grounded in the tradition of the European Enlightenment, whereas his ideas are drawn in the main from the ideals of the burgeoning Romantic movement and, towards the end of his life, from realist art and literature. Despite the thoroughly Russian stamp of his language and of his ideas, Pushkin was an Apollonian artist with a well-grounded classical European education who moved with ease between the great stylistic periods of world literature.

In his everyday life Pushkin often evinced a degree of high spirits that bordered on the reckless: he viewed his social surroundings from an ironical distance, uninhibitedly taking aim at influential courtiers and even the tsar in his satires. Both then and at a later date this was a risky exercise that could easily have cost him his life. His writings, conversely, are without exception the product of a profound sense of artistic seriousness. All of this, as well as his tragically premature death, invites comparisons with Mozart, an affinity immortalised in his one-act play Mozart and Salieri. This play is familiar to Western audiences above all through Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus und Miloš Forman’s film of the same name. Time and again Mozart had to wrestle with the themes of talent, genius and envy. Pushkin too ultimately paid for his superiority with his life.

Three Months of Creativity in the Country Pushkin was extremely impulsive by nature, but his writings are marked by great thoughtfulness: everything that he conceived, researched and revised was done with the utmost care. And it was in Mikhailovskoye, far from the hurly-burly of the big city, that he found the peace and quiet that he needed.

In the autumn of 1830 he was again detained in the country by circumstances beyond his control. On this occasion the cause was not political exile but a cholera epidemic that was ravaging Russia, the resultant quarantine measures making it impossible for him to wander far from the village of Bóldino for a period of three whole months – all the surrounding roads were closed as a safety precaution. Conditions here were very modest and apart from walks and companionable visits to call on his neighbours, there were no particular distractions from his work. As a result this period proved unexpectedly productive from a creative point of view even though Pushkin questioned the point of the safety measures and inveighed against the unwelcome enforced isolation: ursed be the hour when I decided to leave you and come to this beauC tiful countryside of mud, plague and flies – because that is all we see …

Alexander Pushkin to his fiancée, Natalia Goncharova, 30 September 1830 In Bóldino Pushkin struggled to finish the last two chapters of his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, on which he had been working for seven years. He also wrote a brief verse narrative, The Little House at Kolomna, and four short tragedies (The Miserly Knight, Don Juan, Mozart and Salieri and A Feast in Time of Plague), all of which were set to music by leading Russian composers, including Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Dargomizhsky, Rim-

P 40 – 41 sky-Korsakov and Cui. Pushkin also spent these months correcting the proofs of Boris Godunov and writing thirty poems.

After an earlier attempt to write a novel about the fate of his great-grandfather (Peter the Great’s Blackamoor) Pushkin turned more exclusively to prose – the first time he had done so. He himself said little about his five Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin. It is possible that for him they were merely the starting point for longer, more realistic works and, as such, a sounding board for a new genre and for new ideas.

The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin that include The Blizzard find Pushkin striking the same note that we know from his other works, and yet the extreme simplicity and concision of his prose is really quite astounding for its time. The reader may be reminded of Jane Austen in the way that Pushkin constantly rouses our romantic expectations only to confound them and introduce a new note of realism. Even the manner in which he pillories the popular sentimental literature of his time can be found in the English writer’s novels: owards the end of 1811, an epoch so memorable for us all, kindly Gavrila T Gavrilovich R—— was living on his estate at Nenaradovo [the name implies »endless bliss«]. He was renowned throughout the district for his cordial hospitality; his neighbours would be forever arriving to have a bit to eat or drink, or stake five kopeks on a game of Boston with his wife, Praskovia Petrovna – and some to gaze upon his daughter, Marja Gavrilovna, a pale, slender girl of seventeen. She was considered a wealthy match, and many a man had designs on her, either for himself or one of his sons.

Alexander Pushkin, The Blizzard, trans. Alan Myers

Pushkin’s light touch and his use of irony are familiar from his epigrams and from the verses of Eugene Onegin, whereas his correspondingly dry and literally »prosaic« style reveals a new direction that he was to follow increasingly in the final years of his life. A well-known example of this tendency is the sardonically grotesque short story The Queen of Spades that has absolutely nothing in common with the romantic effusiveness that is a feature of Tchaikovsky’s Pushkin-inspired opera.

Among the features that may be termed realistic are the milieu as well as characters and events that have little in common with the ideas on literary subjects that had been formed by writers such as Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo and Sir Walter Scott. Pushkin was one of the first Russian writers to describe the quiet and generally unpromising lives of ordinary people, with their basically unspectacular problems, people who include middle-ranking soldiers and simple or impoverished landowners. Only members of the younger generation abandon themselves to romantic ideas, which turn out to be a form of self-delusion. Anyone who succeeds in climbing even a few rungs on the social ladder and perhaps settling in Saint Petersburg is forced to make compromises. In Eugene Onegin, for example, Tatyana enters high society as an adult but common sense dictates that she must forgo her young girl’s dreams and with them arguably the only true love of her life.

But Pushkin is not an implacable realist like Turgenev, Goncharov, Dosto-

evsky or Tolstoy, even if these writers regarded him as one of their great models. It is thanks to his spirit of mockery that his prose – inspired from start to finish by his tempestuous temperament – is such a pleasure to read.

A Blizzard Throws Everything into Confusion Tanya (profoundly Russian being, herself not knowing how or why) in Russian winters thrilled at seeing the cold perfection of the sky, hoar-frost and sun in freezing weather, sledges, and tardy dawns together with the pink glow the snows assume and festal evenings in the gloom.

The Larins kept the old tradition: maid-servants from the whole estate would on those evenings guess the fate of the two girls; their premonition pointed each year, for time to come, to soldier-husbands, and the drum.

Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, Chapter Five, Stanza IV, trans. Charles Johnston

This quotation from Pushkin’s novel in verse – for which he devised his own strophic form with an elaborately interlaced rhyming scheme – shows us that what Tatyana loves about winter are those attributes that were mentioned at the outset and that can still be felt today: the magnificence of the snowbound countryside, the breath-taking effects of the light, the sensation of gliding over the ice and snow without a care in the world, the cosy evenings spent at home, the venerable feast days and the ancient rituals.

Marja Gavrilovna, the main character in The Blizzard, is in many ways a prose version of Tatyana. She flees from the constraints of her provincial life, dreamily seeking refuge in a world of books, and falls passionately in love with an immature young man who is a composite figure based on the characters she has read about in foreign novels. And in her case the youth is indeed a soldier: arja Gavrilovna had been brought up on French novels and, consequentM ly, was in love. The chosen object of her affections was a penurious army ensign, on leave in the village. It goes without saying that the young man was consumed with an equal passion, and that the parents of his beloved, noticing their mutual partiality, had forbidden their daughter to so much as think of him, and treated him worse than a retired assessor.

Alexander Pushkin, The Blizzard, trans. Alan Myers

Tatyana is arrogantly rejected by the roué Eugene Onegin. After all, he must never associate with a naïve provincial girl if he is to maintain his image as a dandy who is bored by the world. But how bitterly he regrets his action when he meets his rustic acquaintance a few years later in Saint Petersburg,

P 42 – 43 by which time she has matured and become a member of the aristocracy.

But by now it is too late: Tatyana is married to an army general and is a faithful wife.

In The Blizzard, by contrast, Marja Gavrilovna is the best of friends with her mindlessly romanticised ensign Vladimir Nikolayevich and is merely waiting for a suitable winter’s night when the two of them can be united. But their attempt to elope goes badly wrong when a terrible blizzard drives them apart.

In The Blizzard, in which a dreamy young woman goes to meet her lover, Pushkin refers humorously to Vasily Zhukovsky’s Svetlana – he even prefaces his short story with a few lines from Zhukovsky‘s wildly Romantic ballad.

Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852) was one of Russia’s first Romantic poets. His output is largely made up of free translations of English and German works of literature. His famous ballad Svetlana, for example, is based on Gottfried August Bürger’s gothic ballad Leonore, which Zhukovsky has expanded by adding a new episode in the form of terrifying sleighride during a blizzard.

Pushkin’s best friend, Peter Vyazemsky (1792–1878), who was also one of the pioneers of Russian Romanticism, went on to establish the snowstorm as the topos best suited to depicting the Russian national character. Vyazemsky admittedly portrays it as an eerie power that often presages death involving a flurry of savage demons and reducing both the lonely traveller and the fascinated reader to a state of utter terror. These raging storms later came to be associated with a sense of gruesome horror, notably in Gogol’s The Night Before Christmas and in Pushkin’s own magnificent poem Demons, which was likewise written in Bóldino and which chills the blood in its altogether masterly way.

Pushkin’s five Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin date from only six weeks later but already we find here a variant of the swirling snowstorm, now invested with philosophical implications: here a powerful storm opposes our will, which drives us in the wrong direction, and it forces us in our helplessness to follow a course ordained by the world order. Later examples of this topos in Russian literature include Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina and, more recently, Vladimir Sorokin’s The Blizzard of 2010, a dystopian novel in which the reader loses all grip on tangible reality.

Against the background of such a succinctly and sardonically narrated tale, the existential experience of a dangerous and wayward drive through a raging blizzard creates a particularly powerful impression that is increased at the end when it turns out that the three main characters are spiralling off in new directions.

In the second part of Pushkin’s tale, which takes place a few years later, the ever-attractive and pale Marja Gavrilovna – still beset by potential suitors – has settled in a different oblast with her now widowed mother. Here she initially grieves for Vladimir, who died on the eve of the French attack on Moscow. But one day a twenty-six-year-old wounded soldier from the Hussars, Lieutenant Burmin, turns up in the village »with the Saint George Cross in his buttonhole and sporting an interesting pallor, as the young ladies of the time used to say«. He piques the interest of the local community. At first sight he resembles Eugene Onegin or a world-weary Byronic hero wandering aimlessly through life – the kind of man whom later writers such as

Turgenev and Dostoevsky were to treat as »superfluous individuals« and ultimately as revolutionary nihilists. Marja Gavrilovna feels instantly drawn to the mysterious soldier, and her customary melancholy vanishes in his presence: urmin was in fact an extremely amiable young man. He had just the kind B of mind which appeals to women: one of delicacy and observation, devoid of the slightest pretension and with a gift for light-hearted badinage. His manner with Marja Gavrilovna was easy and straightforward, but whatever she said or did, his heart and glance followed her. To all appearances he was of a peaceable and modest disposition, but rumour insisted that at one time he had been a terrible scallywag. Nor did this do him any harm in the eyes of Marja Gavrilovna, who, like the generality of young ladies, readily excused any devilment which revealed a daring and ardent disposition.

Alexander Pushkin, The Blizzard, trans. Alan Myers

Marja Gavrilovna decides to use her feminine wiles to tempt Burmin out of his shell, and an encounter takes place that Pushkin stages like an episode from a kitschy novel, its aim being to lure the reluctant candidate into the trap of proposing marriage, just as everyone expects: »Burmin found Marja Gavrilovna by the pond, under the willow; she was wearing a white dress and had a book in her hand, like a true heroine of a romantic novel.« But Pushkin invests the following candid dialogue with a note of irony by introducing an account of Marja’s thoughts: throughout the conversation she sees herself self-complacently as the hapless heroine of Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse.

A thoroughly fantastical tale now begins to unfold. Initially it turns out that although Burmin loves Marja, he cannot marry her as he has been married for several years. It then emerges that Marja too is married and finally that they are evidently married to one another, albeit without realising it. It had indeed been Marja and Burmin whom the confusion of the snowstorm had brought together as if by fate. When, in the final lines of the story, Burmin finally recognises Marja as the young woman from the dark church, he abandons his former reserve. He then »turned pale … and threw himself at her feet …«.

Pushkin’s tale of The Blizzard thus ends with startling succinctness, leaving us with the difficult task of making sense of the events in question. Is the author offering us a possible alternative ending to Eugene Onegin? The young woman is now more mature, so is it possible that thanks to the fateful intervention of the blizzard she has found a worthy husband who, moreover, has enough romantic attributes to stand comparison with a hero from one of her books? And will Burmin, hitherto aimlessly seeking a purpose in life and much changed as a result of his experience of war and repentance, find a worthy wife with whom he can finally lead a life of true fulfilment?

Or is Pushkin – regardless of the fact that he too was soon to be married – so ruthlessly cynical that he simply presents us with these two young people? Is he hinting that once again things will not work out because Marja continues to see herself as a romantic heroine, while Burmin throws himself impulsively at the feet of a woman whom he hardly knows and be-

P 44 – 45 lieves that he loves her deeply even though he once married a young female stranger by way of a joke and abandoned her two minutes later?

Or is Pushkin’s concern not the content of the story but a desire to denounce the then popular epistolary novels of writers like Richardson and Rousseau? In Pushkin’s view these writers turned women’s heads with disastrous consequences and persuaded them to believe in the completely misguided illusions of love and marriage, illusions that he himself has already warned us against in Chapter Two of Eugene Onegin?

Convincing arguments can be found to support any of these interpretations, and a brief poll of Russian acquaintances offers only contradictory answers. As with so many of Pushkin’s other works, our perception is clouded by the work’s powerfully romanticising reception history. Take, for example, the very beautiful but sentimental film made by Vladimir Basov in 1964 and featuring Georgy Sviridov’s affecting score; or what about people’s abiding perception of Pushkin’s ironical style, a style that elicits very different responses and which is often obscured by nearly two centuries of adulation as Russia’s national poet.

Svetlana Shnitman-McMillin, who teaches Russian at University College, London, has set out her thoughts on The Blizzard in a private letter to the present writer: I ’m no Pushkin expert but I believe that [in writing these stories] he wanted to create what I can only call a series of precious jewels in prose. Using irony, of course – this is indubitably true because with the exception of his early poems all his narrative works are imbued with a sense of irony. The snowstorm represents Russian destiny, the boundless space and the state of chaos where we are no longer in control of our lives: the elemental power of the snow is greater. First in Zhukovsky’s Svetlana, then in Pushkin’s own poem Demons and in The Captain’s Daughter and later in Tolstoy’s Master and Man and War and Peace.

Pushkin is a brilliant beacon of light, he was capable of creating brightly lit endings, something that not everyone is able to do. It’s no doubt a case of “All’s well that ends well”, and in this case there’s a conclusion that ends the work with a smile and leaves us with the feeling that there is a sense of harmony in the world – I believe that Pushkin could achieve this just as Mozart did in music.

I should also like to believe that Pushkin‘s short story has a cathartic significance that changes Marja and Burmin on the very deepest level and that their second attempt at marriage sets them on the right course for the future.

After all, Burmin describes how he is motivated not by frivolity but by »an unaccountable sense of unease; it was as if someone was positively urging me on«. He heads out into the teeth of the blizzard, which leads him in turn to the grotesque wedding ceremony. Such an interpretation would also reflect the aforementioned premise that beneath the elaborately chiselled surface of Pushkin’s works – and here we may note a further parallel with Mozart – there is always a profound sense of seriousness. I may of course be completely wrong in proposing this assessment. But no matter whether Pushkin

might have secretly agreed with me or not, he would definitely have reacted to these lines with his typical caustic mockery, especially when I state at the end that such an unrealistic happy ending may very well be one interpretative possibility inasmuch as books reflect pure life and incredible things happen to us time and again – not just on paper but also in our everyday lives.

* All quotations from The Blizztard are taken from The Queen of Spades and Other Stories, trans. Alan Myers (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1997), 23–35; Pushkin’s letter to Natalia Goncharova is taken from After Onegin, trans. Mary Hobson (Thorpewood Publishing: London, 2017), 17; and Autumn (A Fragment) is reprinted from Alexander Pushkin: Selected Poetry, trans. Antony Wood (Penguin Books: London, 2020), 64–65.

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T: Serge Honegger

P 52 – 53 Since the first meeting with Andrey Kaydanovskiy and the reading of Alexander Pushkin’s text, a constant storm has been blowing in my everyday life.

It makes me increasingly aware of the constant efforts of myself and my environment to establish order, to fulfil order, to preserve order. It seems as if the whole world is fighting against a force that seems to drive back all rational planning, organising and rules. Jean Paul’s Speech of the Dead Christ in the second volume of Siebenkäs, published in 1796/1797, comes to mind, where the author describes the violent hurricanes that blow through the »starry blizzard« and reports how chaos is gnawed by eternity: »Rigid, mute nothingness! Cold, eternal necessity! Insane chance!« Pushkin takes a similarly nihilistic view of human existence. So when storm, chance and arbitrariness rage everywhere, shattering all buildings according to Jean Paul and reducing the suns as points of orientation to ashes, how can one still devote oneself with confidence to a constructive activity such as choreographing? An activity that is primarily about creating order and bringing it into a form that can be reproduced by dancers.

Wringing a form out of chaos The fact that Andrey Kaydanovskiy was so captivated by Pushkin’s The Blizzard in order to make a ballet out of it could also be related to the fact that The Blizzard points to the conditions of creating order and thus of choreographing itself. How do you wrest a form from chaos? How does one create a narrative thread that brings things into a comprehensible sequence?

In Pushkin’s literary model, the storm is only explicitly mentioned in a few places. But it has the most massive impact on the lives of the characters. In the translation of the text into the language of the ballet, it must therefore be decided whether the storm becomes a central object of the choreography or whether, as in Pushkin’s work, it is only very briefly outlined in order to set the audience’s mental cinema in motion. The phenomenon of the snowstorm, whose innermost essence consists of chaos, nothingness and coincidences, is conquered in the Bavarian State Ballet’s production with the very own means of theatre. The entire machinery is deployed to get a grip on the incomprehensible. And because Andrey Kaydanovskiy is an excellent narrator, he knows that one must never tell the core of a story. The storm is a fact. It is neither explained nor is its existence questioned. It is there. The story ballet now shows what the characters experience when they rebel against the forces of nature. During the rehearsal process, I kept asking myself whether this snowstorm can be seen as a metaphor for the situation of all those who, against all odds, follow their artistic path. As Andrey Kaydanovskiy’s choreography was created under the adverse conditions of the COVID19 pandemic, which made temporary adjustments to the original choreographic concept necessary, the artistic process was inscribed with a snowstorm of its own. A fascinating parallel arises with Pushkin’s story, which was written in 1830 on his Bóldino estate. A cholera pandemic was raging in Russia at the time and curfews were imposed. Pushkin was anything but enthusiastic about this. But he suddenly had a lot of time for writing and experienced one of his most productive phases.

Adversity as a generator for creativity In various conversations with the artistic team of The Blizzard, I was interested in how, especially under such ›stormy‹ conditions, the individual elements come together to form an overall picture. In this way, the realisation of a visual work of art or a theatre performance can even be understood as a manifesto, in that the work of art turns against Jean Paul’s ›rigid, mute nothingness and insane chance‹. When we talked about the powerlessness of the main characters in the course of the rehearsal work, the set designer Karoline Hogl said that it is often precisely such difficult, hopeless situations that set a creative process in motion for her and Andrey Kaydanovskiy.

People in dire straits, as in the case of Vladimir and Marja, fascinate them both. Starting from such situations, Hogl and Kaydanovsky have intensive conversations during the conception phase: »Most of the time, the creative process starts with Andrey bringing a keyword, a text or a small scene. Then I go out and look for images and materials that are associated with it. We then discuss this until a space or a sequence emerges.« When asked if there was a similar conceptual starting point for The Blizzard, Karoline Hogl described the moment when Marja leaves her parents’ house: »This movement through the door in the sliding wall connects the protected interior space with the unprotected exterior space. There, not only a weather phenomenon takes place, but also a war that has a much more massive effect on society as a kind of ›second storm‹. The blizzard means a fate for Marja and a change for Vladimir, but the war causes a deeper caesura that forces the whole community to start with something new. On stage we don’t just show a landscape of ruins where everything is broken, but try to show how something new begins, the possibility of recovery, of reconstruction.« This idea is also reflected in Arthur Arbesser’s costumes. Whereas in the rather strict, conservative home of Marja’s parents, little skin is shown and no patterns or graphics appear in the fabrics, Arbesser stages a striking change in the second act through the use of specific colours and fabrics: »The second act is about freedom, individuality and self-expression. There are many patterns to be seen, plus many different dresses, some of them even quite shapeless, which fall softly, sometimes look a bit washed out and unironed, but also express a zest for life.« The image of the world as grotesque The newly won possibilities, which become recognisable in the play as conquered social freedoms, are joined by those wounds deeply cut into bodies and souls by the war. Kaydanovskiy not only has the physically injured soldiers appear on stage, but he also invented a new character, Belkin, who does not appear in Pushkin’s story. He bears exactly the same name as the fictional author of the five stories in Pushkin’s Tales of the late Ivan Petrovič Belkin, which also include The Blizzard. In the ballet production, Belkin is traumatised by the horrific experiences and is taken under his wing by Burmin. As a somewhat exaggerated chronicler of his environment, he creates a turmoil of which he himself had previously been the victim. In the play, he

P 54 – 55 is characterised by both a keen power of observation and a lunacy. This is quite evident in the second act at the feast for the war returnees, where Belkin is seen in the role of a director. Here he stages a grotesque play with the three war invalids using motifs from past events. As in a burning mirror, the effects and challenges of the disruptive become visible in Belkin: storm and war experience, a sensorium for the fragile existence of man as well as the endeavour to bring the incomprehensible into a form with the means of theatre art.

Early Romantic Utopia: Universal Poetry Belkin can even be understood as an incarnate cipher for artistic action; an action that not only in a ballet production like The Blizzard is confronted with the task of finding a form for the rationally impenetrable chaos of our existence. This topic was already intensively debated in Pushkin’s lifetime, most prominently in the circle of early Romantics around Friedrich Schelling.

Pushkin’s writing was also inspired by their preoccupation with the idea that the visible and invisible could be represented by means of a universal poetry, as well as their experimentation with self-reflexive writing practices in literature. What Pushkin has in common with the representatives of this artistic and philosophical movement is that they locate the origin of art in dazzling chaos. At the beginning of the 19th century, for this reason, the novel and narrative forms of prose in particular became a popular field of experimentation in literature to explore the relationship between order and disorder. The organising principle with which Pushkin artistically copes with chaos is ›demonstrated‹ to the reading public via literary and historical references, idioms, authorial commentaries and recursions. Comparable stylistic devices can also be found in the ballet production The Blizzard under contemporary auspices; these include leaps in time, ironic refractions, making the theatre apparatus visible or reflecting on movement patterns.

The classical ballet vocabulary forms the technical basis for Andrey Kaydanovskiy’s choreography, but he expands the formal language with a multitude of other elements, deconstructs them from time to time and explores their narrative quality in the choreographic process.

Choreography for the non-choreographable With The Blizzard, Andrey Kaydanovskiy has chosen a material for his action ballet that at the same time raises the question of the conditions of artistic work in the form of choreographic activity. For a blizzard, as a weather and storm phenomenon, is not choreographically structured, but functions according to arbitrary principles of chance. Andrey Kaydanovskiy confronts the paradox of translating the storm as an object determined by chaotic principles into a fixed choreographic structure with an approach that has always recommended itself for larger undertakings: He laid out a precise scenario before rehearsals began. Unlike Vladimir and Marja in the piece, however, the choreographer left himself enough freedom for playful and experimental moments in the creative process. In this way, he allowed him-

self and the participants to remain open to discovery. A second important decision for the ballet production in relation to the realisation of Pushkin’s literary evocation of the blizzard lies in the depiction of the storm event itself.

Kaydanovskiy did not want to treat it as an abstract phenomenon. Rather, the blizzard was to be given a factual stage reality through the material qualities of the means employed. In this way, the blizzard exposed a great potential for Kaydanovskiy, both creatively and conceptually: »I think a blizzard like this puts us back on the ground. Here we realise how little we can do as individuals.« For set designer Karoline Hogl, too, the realisation of the blizzard is a central theme of her work on the production: »You could tell such a blizzard with all the possibilities, but you have to decide whether it is an inner or an all-consuming, outer blizzard. It should also be touching and not simply an illustration of a fundamental event that swirls through everything, changes and turns upside down all the plans that have been made and all the ideas that everyone has fixed for themselves. It’s about how to transport that stage-set-wise and choreographically and put it into a space. For us, it was important to make the blizzard as tangible as possible, to ambush the theatre and its machinery that makes it possible. Especially in this day and age, it’s nice to have the analogue, the immediate, like the sweating bodies of the dancers on stage. We are interested in the made, with which the illusion is built. Because at the end of the day, the blizzard on stage is only composed of paper scraps, wind machines, fans and some stage fog. It’s not a real blizzard, it’s not water freezing and swirling through the wind, it’s a theatre scene.« The will to be surprised.

In contrast to human action, there is nothing like a will behind a natural force like a blizzard. Neither is the storm an action, nor is it guided by a divine or demonic hand of any kind. If one follows the reflections of the cultural scientist Frank Bruno Wild, it is ultimately the experience of nothingness that has been increasingly thematised in art since the beginning of the 19th century and is processed in literature in a work such as Pushkin’s The Blizzard: »What is life but an imperfection bursting forth from infinity, falling back into infinity, already foaming away into nothingness, from which one briefly rises and then vanishes again? Whoever expects a solution to these realities has already failed, for nothingness does not know or think itself through; it only spits us out to create facts waiting for incompetent interpreters.«1 In contrast to the will-less nothingness, however, artistic activity is precisely the expression of a will that rebels against the nihilistic impositions to which we are exposed. Whether it is a choreography, a composition or a pictorial creation is irrelevant. The formless, unspeakable and non-representable of nothingness is countered in the artistic form, with which points of orientation are created in the world. In a conversation during rehearsals, Kaydanovskiy referred to the action determined by the will, which for him functions as one of the central elements in Pushkin’s narrative: »The story is written like a ballet libretto, there is hardly any dialogue, only action. If the characters asked themselves whether what they are doing now is right and thought

P 56 – 57 about the consequences, they would face fewer problems. Their unreflective will leads them straight into misfortune.« For Kaydanovskiy, a counter-model to this is trial and error, as can be observed in children: »They are constantly exploring, they find an object, start playing with it and find out how to handle it. That’s how life works; as a game, as a trying out of possibilities.« This attitude of Kaydanovskiy’s also manifests itself in the ballet studio. He does not apply a blind, domineering principle of design, but approaches the story through constant probing, trying out and peeling out the most suitable dance form for it: »There are always moments when I have thought of a precise sequence, from which the dancers then make something completely different. Often that works even better. In general, I like to be surprised.

That’s not only the case in rehearsals, but also when I go to the theatre. I like to be an audience member so I can be inspired by something someone else has come up with.« Stage directions from books Pushkin was fascinated by the effects of chance and by fate, which cannot be predicted but can only be put together in retrospect. In numerous of his works up to The Blizzard, he literarily dealt with man’s relationship to the world, which is determined by chaotic principles. In The Blizzard, the title motif is used to set the unplannable, random and arbitrary in sharp contrast to rational ideas of planning and order. Thus Vladimir and Marja base their actions on a scenario modelled on French romance novels. The literary fictions from the world of books are understood as directing instructions for actual life. This is a motif that appears repeatedly in Russian literary history, where »turning to the book [...] means turning away from everyday problems.

Hence [...] the deep-rooted contempt, inherent in all classes, for a sensible organisation of everyday life. It was better not to see all that. Reading was more pleasant«.2 At the end of the plan, which is thought out in every step, there is to be a daring, romantic love match, with which the lovers intend to triumph over small-mindedness and parental resistance. Both Pushkin and Kaydanovskiy let this scenario fail grandly. The storm tears apart the carefully planned love-marriage scenario, causes the greatest chaos, creates irrational action and drives to his death the very man who most believed in the plan, Vladimir. The fact that Marja finally meets the man to whom she is already married, without her knowing it, is Pushkin’s final ironic twist in the story. In this way, he ties the plot threads together at the end of the story in the most improbable way imaginable, which can indeed be called ‘literary choreography art’. He makes the ending look as if a preordained fate was at work here, but it is the hand of the writer that allowed the events to unfold in exactly this way. The Blizzard is one of those stories that, starting with Odysseus journey, revolve around one of the primal human and cultural traumas: powerlessness in the face of external factors, higher powers and uncontrollable events. Andrey Kaydanovskiy illustrates how we nevertheless can move quite successfully through the disorder: »The pas de deux is a conversation between two people and has many facets. In the conversation itself, a kind of order is created; a situation emerges, they discuss how to

get from A to B and where they want to go. At the same time, there is an emotional level. And between all that there is a lot of space in which we can move. It’s always a back-and-forth, between very concrete and completely incomprehensible things. The individual choreographic elements are almost like words that you can just understand, but there is a lot of space in between.

I play with that in the choreography, that’s how we move forward.«

1

Wild, Frank Bruno: Suizidäre Metaphern [Suicidal metaphors]. Hamburg 2018, p. 132

2

Kantor, Vladimir: Das Westlertum und der Weg Russlands [Westernism and the path of Russia]. Stuttgart 2010, p. 3

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07 – Biographies

AK: LD: FT: AL: GS: KH: AA: CK: SH: JH:

ndrey Kaydanovskiy,Choreography A Lorenz Dangel, Music Felix Trawöger, Sound Design Aleksandra Landsmann, Sound Design Gavin Sutherland,Conductor Karoline Hogl, Set Design Arthur Arbesser, Costume Design Christian Kass, Lighting Design Serge Honegger, Dramaturgy J ulia Herzberg, Author Fateful Snow MW: M arkus Wyler, Author Tempestuous Spirit

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Kaydanovskiy received his ballet training in Moscow, Stuttgart and Vienna and subsequently danced in the ensemble of the Vienna State Opera Ballet. Since 2009 he has also worked as a choreographer in addition to his work as a dancer. Since then he has created works such as Waste of Time and Stravinsky’s The Firebird for the Vienna State Ballet, The Ugly Duckling for the Vienna Volksoper and Love Song, which was also performed at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, among others. His production of Tea or Coffee eventually led to a more intensive artistic collaboration with the Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow. Subsequently, he created Birthday Waltz for the theatre’s centenary and Pajama Party. He also choreographed two works for the Hamburg Federal Youth Ballet, Perfect Example for the Czech National Ballet and a solo conceived for Sergei Polunin as part of the Origen Festival in Switzerland. In March 2018, he made his debut as choreographer and director with his piece Fable at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow, a fulllength evening with actors. His creations have received several awards, such as the Best Dance Theatre Performer and Choreographer award at the international dance festival TANZOLYMP in Berlin and the 2016 German Dance Award in the Future category. In 2017 Andrey Kaydanovskiy collaborated with the Bavarian State Ballet for the first time for the choreography Discovery. In June 2019, his new creation Cecil Hotel premiered at the Prinzregententheater, which he developed with the ensemble of the Bavarian State Ballet. In 2020 he created the work petit pas in his new role as house choreographer, which humorously drew parallels between the first day of the theatre’s closure and Marius Petipa’s birthday. Both dates fall on 11 March.

With The Blizzard, Andrey Kaydanovskiy presents his first full-length story ballet at the Bavarian State Ballet.

LD Triggered by the need to experience music in its various functional and

expressive possibilities, the composer Lorenz Dangel has deliberately chosen a broad field of creativity. Both in his concert works and in his theatre projects, his affinity for the narrative and the dramaturgical becomes clear. From 2004 to 2013 Lorenz Dangel was composer in residence at the Origen Festival in Switzerland. During this time, his works included the opera David as well as Inferno, a sound installation on a moving train, and Noah, a ballet score for large orchestra. In 2007, the orchestral work Ströme, commissioned by SWR, was premiered by the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. In December 2017, his second ballet Satori was performed by the English National Opera Orchestra at the Coliseum in London. Lorenz Dangel is also known for his film compositions, including the music for the feature film Hell by Tim Fehlbaum, for which the composer was awarded the German Film Prize in 2012. The commissioned composition for Andrey Kadanovskiy’s The Blizzard is Lorenz Dangel’s first work for the Bavarian State Ballet.

FT Felix Trawöger studied music theory and philosophy in Berlin. He was

responsible for the production of music and sound design for many independent theatre productions. After assisting various film music composers, he has been working at the Babelsberg Film Orchestra since 2014. As an operator and recording manager, he is involved in the realisation of nu-

merous national and international film music and album productions (Alexandre Desplat, Max Knoth, Alex Komlew, Johannes Repka, Alex Geringas, among others). An important focus of his work is the mixing of film soundtracks, most recently for Der Boandlkramer und die ewige Liebe (music: Ralf Wengenmayr and Marvin Miller). He has a long-standing collaboration with the composer Lorenz Dangel.

AL After graduating from music school with a degree in

violin, Aleksandra Landsmann studied ‘Sound Master for Film and Television’ at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw. As a scholarship holder she went to the Film University Babelsberg KONRADWOLF and the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity in Canada. She was responsible for the music montage in documentaries by the Canadian director Niobe Thompson (Equus, Nomadboy) as well as for the sound direction in numerous productions at the Film University Lodz and Babelsberg. She currently works as a sound engineer and music editor for films and series.

GS Gavin Sutherland is Music Director of English National Ballet, and has for

over 25 years enjoyed a wide and diverse career as conductor, arranger and orchestrator. He made his BBC Proms debut in 2016, and his Royal Opera House debut in 2017. Born in County Durham, he graduated from the University of Huddersfield. In 2019 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of the University for distinguished services to music. Over the last 25 years, he has collaborated with nationally- and internationally-acclaimed dance companies and orchestras. He has recorded over 100 CDs. This strand of his career has led to a fruitful collaboration with the BBC, most notably with the BBC Concert Orchestra, as well as the Royal Ballet Sinfonia. Sutherland has recorded numerous film scores with the London Symphony Orchestra, and the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, and many other recordings with the Münchner Rundfunksorchester and Australian Philharmonic Orchestra. As ENB’s Music Director he collaborates artistically on all company repertoire, including orchestrating Vincenzo Lamagna’s score for the Olivier Award-winning Akram Khan’s Giselle and arranging, orchestrating and reconstructing much of the company’s production of Le Corsaire. He has performed at venues as diverse as the Sydney Opera House and Buckingham Palace, and he frequently talks about music on TV and radio. In 2019, he was nominated for the Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for Outstanding Contribution.

KH Karoline Hogl studied scenography with Erich Wonder at the Academy of

Fine Arts Vienna and has since worked as a freelance stage and costume designer. She has created stage and costume designs for the Volksoper Wien (The Ugly Duckling, Firebird), the Theater der Jugend in Vienna (Momo, Grimm), the Odeon Theater Vienna (Love Song) and the Next Liberty in Graz (The Princess on the Pumpkin). In Prague she worked at the New Stage of the National Theatre (Perfect example), in Moscow at the Taganka Theatre (Fables) and at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre (Tea or Coffee, Pajama Party). In 2020, her stage design of Pajama Party was

P 66 – 67 nominated for the »Golden Mask« award. For the Bavarian State Ballet she was responsible for the sets of Discovery and Cecil Hotel. Both pieces premiered at the Prinzregententheater. The set design for Andrey Kaydanovskiy’s The Blizzard is the third work by Karoline Hogl to be seen at the Bavarian State Ballet.

Born and raised in Vienna, Arthur Arbesser was strongly influenced by the history and culture of his home city. Equally important were his years of study at London’s Central Saint Martins College. After graduating, he worked for Giorgio Armani in Milan for seven years. In February 2013, Arthur Arbesser presented a collection under his name for the first time during Milan Fashion Week and has been represented there ever since. In the meantime, Arthur Arbesser has continued to develop his personal language.

His work is characterised by a clear cut, graphic patterns and a romantic approach. In addition to his own label, Arthur Arbesser also works as a consultant for international fashion brands. Various projects ranging from graphic, product to interior design constantly provide new creative impulses. Productions in the field of theatre include the ballet set for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s Concert 2019 (choreography: Andrey Kaydanovskiy) as well as the costumes for Der Rosenkavalier (director: André Heller) at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin in February 2020.

AA

CK Christian

Kass, born in Frankfurt, studied stage design in Salzburg. In 1990, he was engaged at the Bavarian State Opera, where he has worked as lighting master since 1997. In 1992 he worked as Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s personal assistant at the Summer Academy in Salzburg and in 1995 developed a lighting and multimedia installation for the Mozarteum in the Mozart House. He subsequently created the lighting design for Rigoletto at the Arena di Verona (1996), Sergei Polunin’s Satori at the London Coliseum (2017) and Kinsun Chan’s Coal, Ashes and Light at the Theater St. Gallen (2020), among others. He first worked as lighting designer for the Bavarian State Ballet in 1999 on Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon. Since then, Christian Kass has created the lighting design for Swan Lake, Raymonda, Sleeping Beauty, Heroes, Les Ballets Russes, L’histoire du Soldat and Cecil Hotel, in addition to numerous works for the Heinz Bosl Foundation.

SH Serge

Honegger studied German language and literature, art history and organisational theory. He completed his doctorate at the University of St. Gallen with an interdisciplinary thesis on choreographic instructions in written form. Theatres to which he has been engaged for productions in opera, dance and drama include the Zurich Opera House, the Staatsoper unter den Linden, the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, the Theater St. Gallen, the Schauspielhaus Zurich and the Watermill Center New York. Since the 2020/2021 season, he has been working as a dramaturge for the Bavarian State Ballet. Among the dance and theatre professionals with whom Serge Honegger has worked are. Liliana Cavani, Jürgen Flimm, Yossi Berg and Oded Graf, Claus Guth, Daniel Hay-Gordon, Jens-Daniel Herzog, Linda Kapetanea and Jozef Sprucek,

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Konstantin Keykhel, Marcel Leemann, Jonathan Lunn, Vladimir Malakhov, Yuki Mori, Marco Santi, Johannes Schmid, Heinz Spoerli, Stephan Thoss, Beate Vollack and Robert Wilson.

JH Julia

Herzberg is professor of the history of Russia and East Central Europe in pre-modern times at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

Her research interests include the environmental history of Eastern Europe.

She is co-editor of the anthologies The Russian Cold. Histories of Ice, Frost, and Snow (2021) and Ice and Snow in the Cold War: Histories of Extreme Climatic Environments (2019). She is currently working on a study of Frost.

Cold as a Cultural Challenge in Russia, in which she examines the changing subjective perceptions, social practices and discourses that informed the treatment of frost, snow and ice from the early modern period to the Soviet era.

Markus Wyler studied English and Russian language and literature at the universities of Zurich and Aberdeen. He was dramaturge at the Zurich Opera House for twelve years and Cecilia Bartoli‘s manager for ten years.

Today he works as a freelance dramaturge, author, artistic advisor and concert organiser for institutions such as the Moscow State Philharmonic, the Trans-Siberian Art Festival, the Salzburg Festival, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, the Zurich Opera House, the Musikkollegium Winterthur, Decca Classics and the Géza Anda Foundation.

MW

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08 – Pictures

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01 – E lvina Ibraimova, Séverine Ferrolier, Ksenia Ryzhkova, Matteo Dilaghi, Robin Strona 02 – Ksenia Ryzhkova, Jonah Cook 03 – Jonah Cook, Ensemble 04 – Ksenia Ryzhkova 05 – Jonah Cook, Ensemble 06 – Jonah Cook, Ensemble 07 – Ensemble 08 – Osiel Gouneo, Ensemble 09 – P olina Bualova, Konstantin Ivkin, Ensemble 10 – J inhao Zhang, Ksenia Ryzhkova, Osiel Gouneo, Ensemble 11 – O siel Gouneo, Nikita Kirbitov, Shale Wagman 12 – Ksenia Ryzhkova, Jonah Cook 13 – Jonah Cook

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09 – Imprint

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P 100 – 101 Bayerisches Staatsballett Season 2020-2021 Ballet Director IZ: Igor Zelensky Programme book for The Blizzard April 2021 Compilation SH: Serge Honegger Design: Bureau Borsche MB: Mirko Borsche RG: Robert Gutmann SM: Stefan Mader JW: Julian Wallis References for texts and photos All texts are original contributions for this issue.

Photos from the final rehearsals © Marie-Laure Briane [S.91, 96-97, 100-101, 110-111, 115] © Yan Revazov [S.92, 112-113] © K atja Lotter [S.94-95, 98, 102-103, 104, 106-107, 108-109] All rights reserved.

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