the times | Monday May 23 2022 9
arts
Ambitious and curious, Zelensky
wanted to widen his horizons,
and headed off for a guest
season in Berlin, where — he
told me — he met Nureyev,
who advised him to go to dance
in New York. He did just that,
becoming a principal at New
York City Ballet from 1992 to- He continued to dance in
Russia and abroad until 2013.
He brought everything he had
learnt and seen back to Russia, first at
the Novosibirsk State Ballet and then
at the Stanislavsky. I found him
courteous and gentle, but he had a
ferocious reputation; his military
background meant that he was a
taskmaster of the old-school, his
demands peppered with profanities.
On the other hand, he was capable of
inspiring much loyalty. When he left
the Stanislavsky a number of his
dancers went to Munich with him.
But Zelensky’s position in the
Russian ballet world changed when his
relationship with Putin’s daughter was
first rumoured. Simon Morrison, a
professor of music at Princeton
University and the author of Bolshoi
Confidential, a history of Russia’s
biggest ballet company, says: “Zelensky
is a professional. He’s not one of the
cultural oligarchs. He’s not interested
in largesse. He’s not part of ‘Z-World’,
as liberal Russians deride Putin’s
apparatus, in the sense that the
conductor Valery Gergiev is.”
Katerina Tikhonova in- Above: Igor
Zelensky; with Darcey
Bussell in Le Jeune
Homme et la Mort at
Sadler’s Wells in
London in 2006
He is part
of the
political
matrix due
to this
personal
connection
However, Zelensky is still
close enough to the centre of power
for it to taint him. He is on the board
of the national and cultural institutes
that Putin has promised to develop
throughout Russia, including one
promised for Sevastopol, in Crimea.
Zelensky has appointed his protégé,
Polunin, as acting director, in charge
of raising funds for it.
“He is involved in a national cultural
fund that is very soon going to go into
places like Mariupol — if Z-World
holds on to it — and start rebuilding
theatres as Russian, and that’s not
tolerable in the current climate,”
Morrison says. “He was always
internationalist, and is more dancer
than he is politician. But he is part of
the political matrix and the cultural
elite because of this personal
connection. It’s a mess.”
When the story of their relationship
broke last week, neither Zelensky nor
Tikhonova, who runs a start-up
incubator at Moscow State University
that is worth £1.3 billion, could be
found. Rumours suggest that Zelensky
plans to return to Russia at her
insistence. Others say that the
Sevastopol theatre will become his to
run once it is built. There will be a
profound irony if a man who did so
much to build a career in the west ends
up as a symbol of Russian cultural
nationalism. “Let us live day by day,” he
told me all those years ago. “You never
know what is going to happen.”The day I met the dancer lover
of Putin’s daughter in Moscow
Igor Zelensky was
always far too
enigmatic to be a
real ballet star, says
Sarah Crompton
A
s a dancer, Igor
Zelensky was an
international star.
After rising in
Russia to become a
principal with the
Mariinsky in St
Petersburg, he
danced with New York City Ballet for
five years, made guest appearances at
the Royal Ballet and partnered Darcey
Bussell. He was tall, blond and strong,
with a jump that seemed to hang in
the air like an eagle, and a landing as
soft as a cat’s. However arresting his
performances, he was also curiously
blank. There was something
unknowable about Zelensky; a sense
of dramatic power suppressed, of
personality hidden.
When last week he made headlines
again as the lover of Vladimir Putin’s
daughter Katerina Tikhonova and the
father of her child, that sense of
enigma returned. This is not a new
relationship. Investigative journalists
from Important Stories and Der Spiegel
unearthed a paper trail that showed
that 35-year-old Tikhonova, the
younger of Vladimir Putin’s two
daughters from his marriage to
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna
Ocheretnaya, travelled to Munich
more than 50 times between 2017 and
- She was reportedly there to see
Zelensky, who was based in the city.
Their findings also suggested that
Zelensky and Tikhonova have a
daughter born in 2017 — about the
time she split from her husband, the
billionaire businessman Kirill
Shamalov, who is close to the Kremlin.
The revelation cast light on
Zelensky’s resignation in early April
from his artistic directorship of the
Bavarian State Ballet, a job he has held
since 2016 with great success. He
issued a statement saying: “At present
... private family circumstances require
my full attention.” But Zelensky, 52,
had failed to condemn the war in
Ukraine and the suspicion is that he
had been asked to leave because of
this refusal. His wife, the former
dancer Yana Serebryakova, with whom
he has two daughters and a son, has
stayed in Munich, working as a coach.
At one level the story is a sideline; a
tiny glimpse into the secretive private
life of President Putin and his family.
At another, it offers an insight into the
way that culture and politics are
intricately bound together inside
Putin’s Russia.
Tikhonova and Zelensky seem to
have become close when he was the
artistic director of the Stanislavsky
and Nemirovich-Danchenko
Moscow Academic Music Theatre
between 2011 and 2016.
Tikhonova, a former acrobatic
dancer, was seen with Zelensky
after performances.
In his time in charge Zelensky
was generally judged to have done
well. He broadened the repertory,
bringing in ballets such as Kenneth
MacMillan’s Mayerling and works by
George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins
and Twyla Tharp. He also recruited
Sergei Polunin, taking the dancer
under his wing after he left the Royal
Ballet in troubled circumstances.
I met Zelensky during that period.
In early 2013 I flew to Moscow to
interview Polunin — only to discover
that he was on a plane back from Los
Angeles. As I waited for him to arrive,
I went to a matinee at the
Stanislavsky, and Zelensky invited me
to his office. We discussed Polunin, but
also his own career and the way that
Rudolf Nureyev had shaped it. “I was
from Georgia, I came to St Petersburg,
I danced in 14 companies. You have to
go step by step.”
Zelensky was born to a military
family in Labinsk in 1969 and studied
at the Tbilisi School of Ballet and then
at the world-famous Vaganova
Academy in St Petersburg. He joined
the Mariinsky in 1988 and became
a principal in 1991, famous for the
elevation of his jump and his
old-fashioned princely presence.Am Zl k HoweverZelenskyisstill
wa
an
se
to
w
in
be
Yo
1997
Russi
He br
learnt a
the Nov
tth Sth
by
ns
dlTOBIAS HASE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; ALASTAIR MUIR/SHUTTERSTOCK/REX FEATURES