The words in Russian...

...the dancing in America…

Mikhail Baryshnikov.

“A highbrow superstar, perhaps the last America will ever see,” wrote the reporter Jason Diamond in a feature on the Russian ballet dancer in The New York Times Magazine on December 22.

I guess Taylor Swift isn’t highbrow, but…really, now…I would not go that far, Jason Diamond…

But, for sure, Baryshnikov is and always was a memorable presence….

The accompanying portrait of Baryshnikov, looking straight ahead, one hand obscuring his mouth, his eyes steady, looks pretty much the way I remember him when he was in Ann Arbor in the late 1970s or early1980s. He sought asylum in the U.S. at the age of 26 in 1974, so he must have come to Ann Arbor not too much later.

I know I did not see him dance in Ann Arbor — I did spy him walking across the Diag with a group of people one morning — I think he walked like a normal person — and I can’t be sure why he had come here from New York City except maybe to visit with the Proffers.

This is what happens when you have lived enough years to have layers of memory settle upon you when you see nothing more than a full-page portrait of a famous dancer…you remember things related and sort of related and maybe unrelated, but still taking up space somewhere among those billions of brain cells that you carry around with you every day.

The story turns into a tragedy, but not because of Mikhail Baryshnikov.

As a reporter, I had gotten to know the Proffer family, and they invited me to come to their party, which must have been to honor Baryshnikov’s visit to town, I am thinking, although when the honored guest got there he retreated to a far darkened corner of the large living room with a solemn, unfriendly look on his face, and even my reporter instincts could not convince me I should go and bother such a famous personage.

I think the Proffers — Carl and Ellendea — must have invited me to the party just because it might prove newsworthy, and I had already written several stories about their great work with Russian writers, which they appreciated. I was thrilled to go, of course, and took along one of my Ann Arbor News editors, Kay Semion.

The Proffers lived in a big house at the top of a big hill up above the ninth hole of the city’s public golf course, Huron Hills. Children used to sled down that long hill on days when snow fell deep. The Proffers needed the big house because it also included their publishing company, Ardis Publishers, which was a huge force for good when it came to publishing Russia authors in the 1960s and 70s.

You could not have made up the dramatic, fairy-tale-like story of the Proffers and Ardis Publishers. Carl had come to the University as a high school basketball player from Bay City. He chose Russian as his required foreign language on a bit of a whim, as I recall him describing the choice. He and Ellendea, both to become serious, highly respected scholars of Russian literature, fell in love at the University of Michigan, somewhat scandalously although the details are lost to history, and then together, deeply in love, founded a publishing house that made a huge difference in the world of Russian literature at the time, including for its then stars like Joseph Brodsky, who was able to come to America from Russia almost solely because of Carl Proffer’s efforts. When Carl got aggressive stomach cancer and died at the age of 46, it was like the saddest, most desperately tragic ending possible to a story — as if it had been written by Leo Tolstoy or Anton Chekhov.

The photo of Baryshnikov still lying on the coffee table under our TV monitor when we watched the film Drive My Car the other evening, I thought again of the great Russian dancer in Ann Arbor and the Proffers on the hilltop and the party, and the last lines from Drive My Car, which are actually Chekhovian lines is a theater scene with Japanese actors doing Uncle Vanya in Japanese in Hiroshima and the English subtitles offering those enduringly hopeful last words of Sonya’s…”We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see evil and all our pain disappear in the great pity that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and gentle and sweet as a caress.”