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Pushkin and Istomina: Ballet in Nineteenth-Century Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Paul Schmidt
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Extract

Where is the point from which we say “I see”? We begin with our eyes (“all eyes,” we say), and we watch. We become spectators, those who watch, and who are defined by that act alone. The act is old, but each perception is new, and each is individual: “I see,” I say, not someone else. Do others see indeed? What do they see? Turn to your left, to your right; enquire, and arguments abound. Believe your eyes, we say: I do, of course, but do I believe yours? There's the rub — and I rub my eyes; the problem vexes. No spectacle provides its spectators with an identical experience. I close my eyes; the spectacle dissolves, yet a vision persists: persistence of vision, we say. Yet how can I see what someone else has seen, if the eyes that saw are gone, if the spectacle they saw is gone? Your eyes, his eyes, those eyes long dead and gone — can I believe them? How does the vision persist?

Type
Research Article
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , Winter 1988 , pp. 3 - 8
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1988

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References

NOTES

1. Avdot'ja Istomina (1799-1848), one of the most celebrated Russian dancers of her time, later a vaudeville actress as well. She was a pupil of Didelot, and made her debut in his ballet Acis et Galathée in 1816. Among her major roles were Liza in La Fille mal gardée, the Circassian girl in The Prisoner of the Caucausus, and the heroine of The Lily of Narbonne; the last two were among the many ballets Didelot created for her. She died of cholera in 1848.

2. The translations here are my own.

3. Charles-Louis Frederic Didelot (1767-1837), dancer and choreographer. Born of French parents in Stockholm — his father was a dancer with the Royal Swedish Ballet — he studied in Paris with Dauberval, and worked in London, Bordeaux, and Paris. He first went to Russia in 1801, and in 1802 became head of the theater school attached to the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg. He was dismissed as a result of intrigue in 1811, and went again to London. He returned to Russia in 1816, again as head of the school and dancer and choreographer for the Imperial Theaters. After a change in administration of the theaters on the accession of Nicholas the First, and a quarrel with the new director, Prince Gargarin, Didelot was dismissed again in 1830. His fame was at its height; he was crowned with laurel at a benefit held for him in 1833. He retired to Kiev and died there in 1837.

4. For accounts of the duel in English, see Eugene Onegin, translated by Nabokov, Vladimir (New York: Bollingen, 1964), vol. 2, pp. 88–90Google Scholar, and Swift, Mary Grace, A Loftier Flight (Middletown: Wesleyan, 1974), pp. 162–163Google Scholar.

5. Mallarmé, Stéphane, Oeuvres complètes, (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 304, 307Google Scholar.