English Summary
Editor’s Letter
By Igor Garanin
My childhood did not involve any ballet. Just as in our family, there was no tradition of spending December 31st listening to Tchaikovsky. Which is, of course, a shame. I didn’t have to wait too long for compensation. At the end of university, fate sent me straight to work for a foreign company — a large sponsor of the Bolshoi at the turn of the century. My employer so generously showered gifts on the opera and the ballet that he had unlimited use of loge 15 of the mezzanine without limit. Which was right next to the Tsarist loge. And I, as a young employee who knew foreign languages and was unburdened by a family, was regularly charged with accompanying the directors and partners of the company to the aforementioned loge. My happiness knew no bounds. Is it even conceivable to spend every evening in the Bolshoi? Champagne, grandiose productions that had endured since Soviet times, sandwiches with fish on the previously set table in the buffet. The euphoria quickly passed. After the tenth time I was forced to see Don Quixote in a month, neither champagne nor fish could save me. Benefit concerts became an outlet for me. I’ll never forget the day that I saw Nikolay Tsiskaridze up close: November 22, 2000, at the jubilee celebration of Maya Plisetskaya. All of Moscow was in the hall, awaiting President Putin. Nikolay was one of the last to appear in his loge. He was dressed all in black — nothing remarkable, but everyone turned around. A star had arrived. These kinds of people you don’t see — you feel them in your spine. You understand that he is the master here. I spent the evening comparing the degree of royalty coming from the stage of the great ballerina, and that of my neighbor in the loge. Time has passed. Tsiskaridze has concluded his career as a dancer, but he will always remain a premier of the Bolshoi. Yes, now he is successfully managing a role as head of the A. Y. Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet and has charmed the prickly St. Petersburg intelligentsia. He teaches an impermissible amount