ON THE BOLSHOI, AND ON KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV’S NUREYEV

Thousands of ballets have been created since the eighteenth century but the canon consists of fewer than twenty of them. The reasons for the culling are diverse: budget crunches; national and international politics; demographic shifts; the privileging of dramatic coherence over prima ballerina assoluta showiness. Historically in Russia, styles and genres happily mixed in mobile pastiches catering to competing tastes. Ballets considered less Classical than capricious fell out of the repertoire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Ballet needed to enlighten as well as entertain to survive, and in the Soviet era, enlightenment became didacticism and entertainment was reduced to garish exotica and athletic derring-do. State censors canceled ballets before the general rehearsal stage or subjected them to extensive revision.