1KYIV AND ST. PETERSBURG
Alexei Ratmansky’s life has been one of almost constant change and forward motion. One thing has led to the next, with little time for reflection in between. There were the ten early years in Kyiv in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before ballet, when he was just a normal boy going to school and concerts and doing gymnastics and taking vacations in Crimea with his parents and older sister. Then there were eight years of rigorous ballet training in Moscow, far from his family, during which he was initiated into his future profession.
In 1986 he returned to Kyiv to start his dancing career. The Soviet Union was on its last legs. A few months before his arrival, the Chernobyl disaster had taken place just eighty miles north of Kyiv. And six years later the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would cease to exist, virtually overnight. Ratmansky set off again, this time for the West, in search of a wider, more interesting repertory to dance. He spent three years in Canada, at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. By then he had started to choreograph small works for himself and his friends. After Winnipeg, he worked as a freelancer for a few years, performing across the former Soviet Union with his new wife, Tatiana. This period became a kind of choreographic laboratory, and it was then that he began to develop a style.
After a while he wanted an artistic home. Copenhagen, a slightly out-of-the-way dance capital with its own unique ballet tradition, became the Ratmanskys’ next destination. They stayed for seven years, 1997 to 2004. It was there that Alexei and Tatiana became parents to their only child, Vasily.
It was during these seven years that Ratmansky made his transition from dancer to choreographer. When he arrived in Copenhagen at age thirty, in 1997, he was mainly a performer. By 2004, he had stopped dancing. He had received an almost unthinkable offer: to direct the Bolshoi Ballet. In 2003, he had made a ballet for the company, The Bright Stream, that became a surprise success. This was the great turning point in his life. He was young and quite unprepared for the task, but at thirty-five, he quit dancing and moved to Moscow with his family.
The Bolshoi is one of the largest and oldest ballet companies in the world, filled with large personalities and prone to epic power struggles. To complicate matters, the company was in the midst of a period of turmoil and turnover, having gone through three directors in less than a decade.1 Before that, in the Soviet period, it had had the same director for thirty years. Ratmansky had no managerial experience at all. For the previous seven seasons he had been working in relaxed, meritocratic Denmark. His personality was introverted, soft-spoken. The five seasons that followed, from the beginning of 2004 to the end of 2008, were a trial by fire. He experienced resistance from all quarters: teachers, coaches, staff, and, often, the dancers. As he has said of that time, “It was almost a war.”
But he stayed. He managed to make inroads in the repertory and the company culture, and emerged from the experience tempered, with a new set of priorities: making ballets, as many as possible, with as much artistic freedom as possible.
In the years between 1978, the year he left to study ballet in Moscow, and 2009, the year he left for New York, the world had changed dramatically. Russia was no longer part of an empire. The borders were now open. It was easy to travel back and forth between East and West. (This would end with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.)
In 1978 the distance between Kyiv and Moscow had been huge—at school Alexei was known as “the boy from Kyiv,” practically a foreigner—but by 2009 it was easy to imagine leaving Moscow for New York, or vice versa. The distances between places had collapsed. As he often said, “The world is small.”
New York was eager to have him. He has lived there longer than anywhere else. But unlike his Soviet predecessors, such as Baryshnikov and Balanchine, he wasn’t forced to leave Russia behind, at least not then. By background and inclination, Ratmansky is an internationalist, driven by a wide-ranging curiosity and the desire to work, as much as possible.
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Alexei Ratmansky was born on August 27, 1968, in St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad. It was the beginning of the Brezhnev era, a period of political stability and economic stagnation. Though Ratmansky’s parents, Valentyna and Osip, were living in Kyiv, they traveled to Leningrad for the birth. It was Valentyna’s hometown, where she had been raised by two aunts, Maria Nikolaevna and Tatiana Konstantinovna.* Valentyna’s father, Vasily, was out of the picture. After the war, he had been imprisoned for a short time, possibly for selling goods on the black market, no one really remembers. After he got out, he started a new family. Valentyna’s mother, Claudia, had died of meningitis in 1944, when Valentyna was five.2 She too had gotten into some sort of trouble, though the family didn’t discuss it.
Maternal great-aunts Maria and Tatiana in the late 1920s (Photograph courtesy of Alexei Ratmansky)
Ratmansky remembers meeting his maternal grandfather only once, when he was still a small boy living in Kyiv with his parents and sister, before leaving for ballet school in Moscow. “I remember I performed a dance for him, and that he had a big hat,” like a character in a story by Gogol. Neither he nor Claudia were spoken of by his great-aunts. “It was a taboo. My mother had always been told that they were bad people,” Ratmansky told me.
Despite traumatic events in her early life, Valentyna had led a more or less happy, normal Soviet childhood. Her aunts Maria and Tatiana lived in a two-room apartment on Vasilievsky Island, a middle-class neighborhood—albeit prone to flooding—across the Neva from the Winter Palace.
Both aunts worked at the Red Triangle (or Krasny Treugolnik) rubber factory on the outskirts of Leningrad: Tatiana as a chemist, Maria as the foreman of a division that made galoshes. The two women were very close, despite having totally contrasting dispositions. Maria, the eldest, was a powerful personality, a Communist true believer who served years as a Party organizer, but also an avid reader. (She lived to 105, and she and Ratmansky were extremely close.) Tatiana was the opposite, shy, quiet, kind, and soft-spoken. She was the artistic one, who took Valentyna to concerts and ballets and the theater.
A young Valentyna does an arabesque. (Photograph courtesy of Alexei Ratmansky)
Valentyna was musical as well as athletic. She studied ballet at a neighborhood school, where one of the teachers was a former Kirov ballerina. Even later in life she loved to dance and was given to spontaneous singing and dancing at parties. At first Valentyna’s best friend, Lia Serebriannikova (later Lia Fisenko, who would play a crucial role in Ratmansky’s life), took dance classes with her, but Lia, a big personality, soon switched to theater.
Osip was from Kyiv. The Ratmanskys were Jewish, though Osip was brought up in a secular household, in accordance with the official Soviet policy of atheism. (On his passport, however, the spot for “nationality” indicated that he was Jewish, as it did for all Jews in the Soviet Union. Alexei’s passport, in contrast, listed him as Ukrainian.) One thing Osip and Valentyna had in common was that both had grown up without a father. Ieguda Ratmansky, an engineer, was arrested in 1939 after a colleague dispatched a letter to the local authorities accusing him of being an enemy of the state. He was sent to a labor camp in Russia and died not long after his release, felled by tuberculosis, which he had brought back with him from prison.
The Ratmanskys’ secularism, however, would not have protected them from the Nazis, who invaded Kyiv in 1941. Just ahead of the German invasion, Osip’s maternal grandmother convinced her daughter, Osip’s mother, to evacuate with the family to Sverdlovsk (later Yekaterinburg). They lived there as refugees with a Russian family for the duration of the war. His brother, who worked at a local factory, brought back food for them, which was supplemented by packages supplied by the American army, containing egg-white powder and condensed milk. Thus, they were spared the fate of over thirty thousand Kyivan Jews, including most of the Ratmanskys’ extended family, shot by the SS at a ravine on the outskirts of the city called Babi Yar.3
Neither Osip nor Valentyna have ever spoken much about their traumatic experiences during the War. It’s something Ratmansky regrets—he feels he is missing something, a connection to his family’s past, and to part of himself.
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By the time Osip and Valentyna met on the beach in Crimea, both had embarked on careers in their respective fields. Osip, a former gymnast with a positive, happy-go-lucky personality, became an aeronautical engineer specializing in the design of mechanical parts for airplanes and, later, for the Soviet space program. Valentyna became a psychiatrist. For a few years following their marriage, they shared a two-room apartment in Leningrad with Valentyna’s two aunts. Very soon they had a baby, Maria, known as Masha, born in 1964. Around that time, Osip was offered a job in Kyiv that came with a one-bedroom apartment. It was in one of the new developments known as “Khrushchyovkas,” quickly and often shoddily built complexes constructed under the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev for young professional families. This is where the family was living in 1968 when Alexei was born.
Valentyna worked with schizophrenic patients at a psychiatric hospital not far away, a plain white building on the grounds of the twelfth-century St. Cyril’s Monastery. Osip worked for the space program. “We were the so-called middle class of Soviet intelligentsia,” Osip told me when I visited the family in 2018. “The state looked after us.” They worked, took vacations, visited with friends—a normal, happy life.
Though neither Valentyna nor Osip was particularly political, they and their friends were freethinking, skeptical of official news. Osip listened to Voice of America on the radio in the evenings, straining to hear the broadcasts over the scrambled signal. He idolized the dissident nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, whose picture hangs on the Ratmanskys’ living room wall to this day. They read banned literature by Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky. Osip would get into arguments with Ratmansky’s great-aunt Maria, who stubbornly defended the party line. But politics were not central to their lives. They believed that the Soviet system was there to stay, so there was no sense getting too worked up about it. “We had a kind of ironic attitude about things,” Osip told me. “We joked about Brezhnev and his policies, but we weren’t very interested in politics.” Mainly they just got on with life. There was always music in the house. At gatherings, someone would play the piano or sing. Masha and Alexei took piano lessons.
From left to right: Valentyna, Alexei, Masha, and Osip, c. 1973 (Photograph courtesy of Alexei Ratmansky)
They were both good students, though Ratmansky, who found school less than challenging, was easily bored and didn’t like to study. “The teachers had no personality at all,” he remembers. But at school he got his first taste of the pleasure of performing for others. One day in class he made two dolls out of paper and improvised a funny dialogue, creating a little show for his classmates. “I remember the whole class gathered around, and suddenly I realized I was the center of attention. And I loved it.”
Ratmansky as a schoolboy in Kyiv, c. 1972 (Photograph courtesy of Alexei Ratmansky)
Life outside of school was more interesting. Ratmansky collected stamps. He liked to draw. When the family went for walks in the woods, he and his sister picked mushrooms and berries. They read the same books. Both were big fans of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a Russian translation of which I found on the bookshelf when I visited the family apartment in Kyiv in 2018.
They were well-off enough to have a car, and during the summer holidays the family traveled to Crimea and the Baltic countries as well as to Leningrad and Transcarpathia. They swam and camped, gathered mushrooms, visited museums and zoos. Once, on their way to Latvia, they accidentally left a suitcase on the train, containing all the money for their trip. When they returned for it, it was gone. They had to borrow money to get back home. But they took things in stride. They always had fun together. Twice a year, they visited Maria and Tatiana in Leningrad.
With his sister, Masha, and two of her school friends, c. 1972 (Photograph courtesy of Alexei Ratmansky)
Copyright © 2023 by Marina Harss