The New Yorker:

At fifty, Mikhail Baryshnikov reflects on how ballet saved him.

By Joan Acocella

It is raining, and Mikhail Baryshnikov is standing in a courtyard in Riga, the capital of Latvia, pointing up at two corner windows of an old stucco building that was probably yellow once. With him are his companion, Lisa Rinehart, a former dancer with American Ballet Theatre, and two of his children—Peter, eight, and Aleksandra, or Shura, sixteen. He is showing them the house where he grew up. “It’s Soviet communal apartment,” he says to the children. “In one apartment, five families. Mother and Father have room at corner. See? Big window. Mother and Father sleep there, we eat there, table there. Then other little room, mostly just two beds, for half brother, Vladimir, and me. In other rooms, other people. For fifteen, sixteen people, one kitchen, one toilet, one bathroom, room with bathtub. But no hot water for bath. On Tuesday and Saturday, Vladimir and I go with Father to public bath.”

I open the front door of the building and peer into the dark hallway. “Let’s go up,” I suggest. “No,” he says. “I can’t.” It is more than a quarter century since he was here last.

After his defection to the West, in 1974, Baryshnikov said again and again that he had no wish to return to the Soviet Union, or even to the former Soviet Union. Then, late last year, he accepted an invitation to dance at the Latvian National Opera, the stage on which he first set foot as a ballet dancer. Why he changed his mind is something of a mystery. Perhaps he just felt that it was time. (He will turn fifty next week.) Perhaps he wanted to show his children what he came from. To me all he said was “I am going to visit my mother’s grave.”

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