Decidedly Bessmertnova

"That's quite a name you've got there," Bolshoi Ballet Master Leonid Lavrovsky told the young ballerina. "If you turn out to be a good dancer you can keep it." The dancer's name was Natalia Bessmertnova, and since in Russian that means Natalie the Immortal, its owner seemed destined to carry it awkwardly--like a steamer trunk with fancy labels. Last week, with barely two months as a Bolshoi soloist behind her, Bessmertnova was established in Moscow's excited ballet world as decidedly bessmertnova--even more so, said her teachers, than the immortal Ulanova.

Such talk is perhaps a bit excessive. Bessmertnova has appeared in only one solo role--Giselle--and that only five times. But each time she dances she stirs up a storm of acclaim such as the staid old Bolshoi has not seen in years. Even Ulanova raves about her. Lithe, dark, and only 22, Bessmertnova seems the very ideal of ballet--the disembodied spirit choreographers dream of, the ethereal figure that explains the whole logic of the dance.

Bessmertnova studied for ten years at the Bolshoi Ballet School, then spent two seasons in the corps de ballet before her first Giselle last November. At the highly conservative Bolshoi, even this long tour is hardly a complete apprenticeship, and Lavrovsky is sternly resisting the demand for her dancing by allowing her only one or two performances a month. Battling off other Bolshoi ballet masters who plead for her presence, he says: "I don't want them destroying at night what I teach by day."

Bessmertnova is now learning the classic repertory--last week she began rehearsing for her first Odette in a spring production of Swan Lake. She is dutiful and quiet and so devoted to the regime of rigorous training ahead of her that she told the relieved Lieteraturnaya Gazeta that she wouldn't dream of marriage, even to a cosmonaut.

Lavrovsky sees in his great pupil "a body of very beautiful and tender and expressive lines" and a soul of "great content." Beyond that, he has to struggle to praise her enough. "She is a lyric-dramatic dancer," he says, searching for words. "When I speak of lyric-dramatic, I soften the contours of lyric by adding dramatic and soften the contours of dramatic by adding lyric. But in this instance I wouldn't want them softened.

She has both talents in full, and in her future years she should be able to reach the stature of an artist of tragedy."

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