Mr. B

Chapter 1

Happy Families

When Georgi was born one cold January day in 1904, he was his mother s first illegitimate son. It was official: he was number 160 on the list of newborns at the Church of the Nativity on the Sands in St. Petersburg, where Maria Nikolaevna Vasil eva had dutifully registered his arrival. On this critical document establishing Balanchine s existence in the eyes of God and the Russian state, his father was absent, and his mother, the authorities noted in a neat hand, was Orthodox but unwed. The problem was not only that Balanchine came into the world in a half-fallen bastard state, somehow discredited from the start; it was also that without a father, Georgi had no patronymic, and without a patronymic his entire genealogy was in doubt. Who was he, even?

His older sister, Tamara, born two years earlier, was illegitimate too. Ditto his brother, Andrei, who came a year after Georgi, in 1905. On Tamara s document, ILLEGITIMATE was even scrawled like a scarlet letter in bold capitals under her name. Had Maria s children been born in Western Europe, they might have held some rights through their mother, but this was Russia, and children automatically took the legal status of their father. The sad fact was that without a paterfamilias none of them had any legal standing at all. They hardly existed. There was only one way back into the social and political fold: in special cases, usually with influence and money changing hands, a child might be legitimized ex post facto by imperial consent and the word of the czar himself.

A cramped note in new ink amending Tamara s, Georgi s, and Andrei s birth documents tells us that this is exactly what happened. On March 18, 1906, the district court legitimized the birth of each of Maria s three children, and on September 23, the Church recognized this change in status too. It was all verified, for anyone who cared to look, in document no. 13025. When Georgi was later asked for his birth

Jennifer Homans

It was one of the highlights of my life to know George Balanchine personally and professionally. I truly loved this man, but he certainly wasn t perfect. Jennifer Homans's meticulously researched Mr. B gives us an artist who is as complicated, and even flawed, as he was groundbreaking and brilliant. It is a fascinating read about a true genius and his unrelenting thirst for beauty in art and in life. Mikhail Baryshnikov

A truly great work that changes everything, Mr. B has, in addition to superlative history and reporting, some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read felt about an art form that s notoriously difficult to capture. Hilton Als

A magisterial biography . . . sensitive, stately, and often thrilling . . . serious act of cultural retrieval. New York Times

A riveting portrait of a genius whose life spanned the 20th century. Wall Street Journal 

Gorgeous . . . Balanchine may have been a genius on an Olympian scale, but in Mr. B he s relentlessly, alluringly human. Oprah Daily

[A] gorgeous biography. People

Monumental. The New York Review of Books

An intricate, meticulously researched biography of the revered and controversial dance icon . . . the definitive account. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Jennifer Homans has not only resurrected George Balanchine, she has restored the Russia that disappeared out from behind him. The result is lyrical and commanding, among the most electrifying pas de deux you re likely to find on the biography shelf. Stacy Schiff 

This isn t dutiful biography, this is literature as vibrant and alive as Balanchine s art. Gary Shteyngart

[R]evelatory . . . Homans, an ex-ballerina who trained at Balanchine s School of American Ballet, knows this world well. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

An extraordinary biography by one of America s most prominent