俄首席芭蕾女伶悲离祖国：我每丝每缕灵魂都反战

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莫斯科大剧院波修瓦芭蕾舞团首席女伶斯米尔诺娃（Olga Smirnova），9日发言反战，如今证实离开波修瓦芭蕾舞团，加入荷兰国家芭蕾舞团。俄国芭蕾舞界多名舞者公开反战，其中又以她份量最重、国际知名度最高，她也是因俄乌战争而离开殿堂级芭蕾舞团的第一人。

荷兰国家芭蕾舞团16日发声明表示：”斯米尔诺娃近日直言不讳批评俄罗斯侵略乌克兰，这让她难以继续在她的祖国工作。”斯米尔诺娃则表示荷兰国家芭蕾舞团很适合她，在俄乌冲突前就考虑加入。该团艺术总监布兰德森（Ted Brandsen）表示：”非常荣幸她加入荷兰的舞团，尽管这是在难以想象的悲伤情况下作出的决定。”

30岁的斯米尔诺娃出生于俄罗斯圣彼得堡，外媒9日报导她在社群app Telegram写道：”我每一丝每一缕灵魂都反战”，”不仅因为每个俄罗斯人可能都有亲朋友好有住在乌克兰，或者因为我的祖父是乌克兰人”，”我们一直活在20世纪，虽然名义上现在是21世纪了”。

“我从未想过我会为俄罗斯感到羞愧，我总是为才华洋溢的俄罗斯人感到骄傲，我们的文化、体育成就，但那是以前的事了”，”人们死去，令人心痛，另外有些人失去遮风避雨的屋顶，有些人被迫离开家园”，”对这全球灾难，我们不能麻木不仁”。

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You would notice her on any street, in any room in the world. Even here, in downtown Moscow, where half the women look like supermodels and the other half are merely very pretty; even here, in the gilded lobby of the offices of the Bolshoi Ballet, where dancers drift weightlessly across the inlaid marble floors. When Olga Smirnova appears, you know that she’s quite unlike anyone else. It isn’t just that she’s beautiful, though she is; with her long thin limbs, wide and raking cheekbones, and huge almond eyes, she looks like a runaway from Roswell, N.M., a lovely extraterrestrial who landed among us. But more than that, she carries the mysterious self-possession of someone who’s simply better at what she does than anyone else, a sense that she’s wrapped in her own dimension.

Smirnova is better at ballet, and one day soon she may be the best. At 22, she’s been dancing more than half of her life, and it shows, in her bearing, in her quiet (“dancing is a silent profession,” our translator told me), and in the bruises visible beneath the straps of her shoes. On Oct. 18th, she’ll be performing at the Stars of the 21st Century in New York, and New Yorkers can see what the Russians saw, a skill and grace and soulfulness for which they very quickly cleared a path.

She was scouted at her graduation from St. Petersburg’s Vaganova school and coaxed down to Moscow, where she spent exactly one day in the corps de ballet before being offered a series of high-profile solos. Within the year she’d been promoted to dancing leads, first in “La Bayadère,” then in Balanchine’s “Diamonds,” then in “Pharaoh’s Daughter.” This sort of thing doesn’t happen outside of movies about princesses in disguise.

You might think the speed of her ascent would leave Smirnova slightly breathless and giddy, but of course ballerinas are nothing if not poised. Instead, she offers a muted expressiveness that’s like watching water ripple over the face of a pond, and an almost spooky responsiveness. Though she speaks very little English, she reacted to my questions before they were translated, in some cases before I’d finished, and once or twice before I was sure what I was going to ask. Above all she is focused, and takes nothing for granted: “I wasn’t prepared to make the move to Moscow; it was very unexpected,” she said. “As a matter of fact I was preparing myself for something much worse, getting used the idea that bad things might happen to you. It’s been quite the opposite.”

I suggested that she was living out the fantasy of half the world’s little girls and asked her how she felt about it: she averted her eyes and laughed. “It never occurred to me,” she said. “As for myself, I have my own ballet idols, who I hope to become someday myself.” An example? “Diana Vishneva,” she said promptly, referring to the last Vaganova prodigy. “She is my favorite. But as a matter fact you can always find something to learn from any ballerina. Especially when you’re at the very beginning of your professional life.”

Smirnova’s trip to New York will be very brief — three days to get halfway around the world, perform and get home again, with no time off for sightseeing. It doesn’t seem quite fair. Perhaps, I suggested, she should play the diva, just this once, and demand an extra day. She laughed again. “I wouldn’t mind that at all!” she said. “But one of my dreams is being fulfilled: I always dreamed of seeing New York, and even more of performing there.”




It seems likely that a lot of her dreams are being fulfilled, and very quickly. Someday, I said, people are going to want to know what it was like. Is she keeping a diary? She turned her head away and smiled privately. “Yes, I’m keeping a diary,” she said. “But it’s for myself.”

Correction: October 16, 2012
The name of Smirnova's favorite ballerina was misspelled in an earlier version of the post. Her name is Diana Vishneva, not Diana Vishnova.