Ballerina who embodied Bolshoi
MAYA PLISETSKAYA | Nov. 20, 1925 - May 2, 2015
Maya Plisetskaya, one of the greatest ballerinas of the 20th century and virtually the embodiment of the Bolshoi Theater for decades, died of a heart attack Saturday in Munich at age 89.
Ms. Plisetskaya — renowned for her fluidity of movement, expressive acting and willful personality — danced on the Bolshoi stage well into her 60s. Vadim Gaevsky, a dance historian and critic who followed Ms. Plisetskaya’s career, once said of her that she “began by creating her own style and ended up creating her own theater.”
Maya Plisetskaya was born in Moscow on Nov. 20, 1925. Her mother was a silentfilm actress, and her father an engineer who was posted as a Soviet mining official to Spitzbergen, Norway. Ms. Plisetskaya spent part of her childhood there. Her father, Mikhail Plisetsky, had a job that was to prove fate: he was arrested in 1937 and shot to death in 1938, a victim of Stalin's purges. Ms. Plisetskaya learned the date of his death only 1989, durin perestroika. Her Mother, Rakhil, was arrested and to a labor camp with her infant son and then exiled to Kazakhstan.
Those tragic early events stamped the future ballerina with an enduring anti-Soviet streak that often teetered on the edge of dissidence, but another family connection and her innate talent predominated. Ms. Plisetskaya’s maternal aunt and uncle were Sulamith and Asaf Messerer, famous soloists at the Bolshoi who then continued as teachers at the theater’s ballet school.
In her autobiography, “I, Maya Plisetskaya,” published in 1994 and written, she stressed in its opening sentence, “by myself,” she describes tension with her aunt, who took her in during her mother’s arrest and saved her from being sent to the orphanages to which children of “enemies of the people” were usually relegated.
She remained close to her uncle, who still taught at the Bolshoi and accompanied her on tour to the United States when Ms. Plisetskaya was in her 60s and he in his 80s. But, wrote Ms. Plisetskaya, her aunt, known in the family as Mita, exacted a wrenching emotional cost for her kindness and over the years their relations soured and then broke off completely.
Mr. Messerer was infuriated when Ms. Plisetskaya refused to take her son, Misha, newly graduated from the ballet school, as her partner in “Swan Lake,” Siegfried to her already classic Odette/Odile.
“She cut off my embarrassed and meek objections: ‘You owe me everything. Was it in vain that I petitioned for your mother and resisted when they came to take you to the orphanage?’ ”
It was Mita who had brought 8-year-old Maya to the Bolshoi Ballet Academy where she both shone for her talent and stood out for her stubbornness. She was known from earliest childhood for her endless reserves of energy and daring. In her autobiography, Ms. Plisetskaya recalls breaking into dance, and gathering an admiring crowd, while walking with her nanny along a Moscow boulevard. Ms. Plisetskaya undertook the grueling whirl of Bolshoi training. Stalinist Russia, however, was an overwhelming presence that colored her memories of her growing accomplishments as a dancer, which she clearly relished. “I would like to talk about “Sleeping Beauty" and "Swan Lake," about my battements and may handsome partners," she wrote. "But whichever way I look at my childhood, it all revolves around politics abd Stalin's terror. As an adolescent, she was a rising star at the school and assigned the leading role in the divertissement from "Paquita" to be performed before an elite audience , officials of the NKVD. Stalin's secret police . in 1949, she danced at Stalin's 70th birthday celebration. Mao was among the guests. "Years later, I admit it. I was simply afraid of meeting
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