"I don’t want to be a slave. I don’t want people I don’t know to decide my fate. I don’t want a collar around my neck. I don’t want a cage, even if it’s made of platinum. When I’m invited to visit and I’m interested, I want to go, to travel, to fly. I want to be equal to others. If my theater goes on tour, I want to go with it. I don’t want to be an outcast, a leper, a pariah. When people scatter from you, avoid you, are afraid to speak to you—I can’t come to terms with that. I want to speak my mind. It’s shameful to fear denunciations. I can’t stand being spied on. I don’t want to bow my head, and I won’t. That’s not why I was born…”
Gulenko's SHS notably typed Maya Plisetskaya (1925–2015) into ESI, which is quite intriguing for a school that generally does not give celebrities this type out of principle. Indeed, someone who, as a ballerina, showed some diva flamboyance and combativeness, while rising to international fame, is a bit off-base even for a Talanov-ESI, much less for a SHS one. Still, her stable fifty-seven-year marriage to Rodion Shchedrin, the patriotic refusal to defect (despite having reasons to), the score-settling autobiography written from a moral ledger kept for forty years, and the perfectionist craftsmanship do point to a "static", IJ temperament. The base is ESI. The SEE accent is quite strong, and is what made her internationally famous rather than locally respected.
Pure ESI is indeed rarely famous: the type's natural shape is a small, intensely curated life: a strong moral framework applied to specific people, a high degree of risk avoidance. Famous ESI's are usually somewhat "off-base" for this description, and at least have a strong accent towards a more public type (see William Gladstone or Leo Tolstoy — both almost intermediate ESI/EIE's, with it being difficult to decide which accent dominates). Pure ESI in Plisetskaya's place would more likely have ended up as a respected-by-those-who-know-her dancer who never toured much and lived a full but obscure professional life. The SEE accent is what generated the international career, on top of an ESI base that kept the legend "morally serious" in ways an SEE wouldn't have managed.
The score-settling memory is the cleanest ESI marker in her record. Reviewers consistently described the autobiography as "frank and revealing," "brutally honest," "a searing indictment." She catalogued petty harassments from the 1940s in detail, naming individual Bolshoi colleagues and Party officials who had slighted her thirty and forty years earlier. SEE settles scores when they're useful and tends to drop them when they're not, EIE is also above-average in vindictiveness, but creates a mini-vengeance drama out of it, ESI maintains grudges indefinitely not as a motivation for a "roaring rampage of revenge" (not really an ESI thing at all), but as a matter of moral accounting. Her thirty-year relationship with the Bolshoi balletmeister, Yuri Grigorovich, was a quiet, decades-long enmity in which she never softened her position. “The lust for power drains the creator…,” she wrote, giving him a harsh moral diagnosis. “It destroys the gift of creativity and diminishes one’s spirit. That is what befell Grigorovich!”
The marriage to Shchedrin is one of the most important factors in the typing. They met in 1955, fell in love over three years, married in 1958, stayed married for fifty-seven years until her death. He composed her Anna Karenina, Lady with the Lapdog, Seagull, and Carmen. Pure SEE marriages tend to be more turbulent or more transactional; the type values variety in romantic life and tends to reject the surrender-of-self-possession that long monogamy requires.
The patriotic refusal to defect is the third strong ESI marker. She was banned from international tours for sixteen years on grounds of being politically suspect (later she even signed a letter against public rehabilitation of Stalin's image). She stubbornly fought through the bans by appealing to every bureaucrat she knew, contacting the British ambassador John Morgan when nothing else worked, and eventually writing Khrushchev directly. Pure SEE would have defected when the opportunity came. ESI's loyalty to homeland is much more durable. Plisetskaya stayed because Russia was her place and leaving would have meant becoming a different person.
The moral seriousness about her family's history fits the same pattern. Her father was executed in 1938; her mother spent years in the Gulag with an infant son. Plisetskaya carried this knowledge as one of the central facts of her existence. The autobiography's title — I, Maya Plisetskaya — is an assertion of a person insisting on remaining herself.
"In Carmen it is very important to know why you're on stage and what the gestures, eyes, legs, looks mean. It is not obligatory to tear the legs apart," she wrote. She spent years rethinking individual roles. SEE and even most EIE's (except the very "rational" ones) in performance are more spontaneously charismatic and catching-the-current audience vibes; ESI perfectionism is about the moral-aesthetic correctness of every detail. Her autobiography, for the most part, reads like a person who simply tells you what happened, free of dramatic elaborations and theoretical digressions, with fairly low interest in elevating itself to the level of historical-mythic significance — also quite untypical style for an EIE:
"Summoning up my courage, I struck up a conversation with the ballet director—one that was humiliating for me—about a pay raise. My salary had been frozen since 1945. And even though I was dancing the leading roles, I was being paid at the rate of a third-tier soloist. Leafing through my diary entries from those years, I came across a tearful passage: “The Brides”… in the third act of my "Swan Lake"… earn a whole thousand more than I do. Who should I ask?..” And so I made up my mind and asked. The financial aspect was important, but secondary. I still didn’t miss a single chance to participate in grueling concerts. That was the family’s main source of income. But the prestige aspect—the question of my standing in the ballet company’s hierarchy—was clearly the deciding factor.
They smiled at me more now, but they ignored my timid request. “Yes, yes,” they said, “of course, we remember, we haven’t forgotten, we appreciate it, but right now it’s difficult, you understand, we’ll try, we’ll think about it, don’t worry…” That’s how the conversation went. A load of nonsense.
But they gave me the role of Kitri without any fuss. I dove headfirst into the work. My coach was Ilyushenko. I’ve already mentioned her. Sharp-tongued, always imperturbable, meticulous. She usually dressed in something “pea-patterned,” checkered. Elena Mikhailovna referred to me during rehearsals as nothing less than a “force of nature.” She closely monitored the execution of the choreographer’s text. She punished any improvisation with righteous anger. My partner was Yuri Kondratov."
"Upon returning to Moscow, on October 2, 1958, we went to the registry office. To get married. Today I admit that it was my idea. Shchedrin didn’t want to tie the knot officially. But my intuition told me that the authorities would give me less trouble if I were married. They had hinted at this more than once. And Furtsova said it outright: “Get married, and you’ll be trusted more.” They even promised us a new apartment…
The Moscow District Registry Office. A dim, windowless room, a desk covered in felt. A hurried, stern woman hands us application forms.
“Go into the hallway and fill them out. Then come back to me.”
We fill them out. Our hands are used to these forms. And the questions are timeless: father, mother, year of birth, place of work… People haven’t come up with any others yet. We fill them out. We return.
The woman doesn’t even look at us. She’s engrossed in reading our papers. She traces the lines with a pencil.
And suddenly… she looks up:
“Are you the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya? I’ve never been to the Bolshoi Theatre. But I was born in Moscow. How can I get tickets to see you?..”
I promise. I take the lady’s phone number.
The lady gets excited. She steps out from behind the desk. She shakes our hands.
“May you grow old together on the same pillow. Congratulations!”
The publicness of her career and the sheer pleasure she took in performing is more SEE-flavored. Her Carmen made her favorite role into a Bolshoi landmark by introducing a sexual openness the company had not previously accommodated. ESI passion is real but tends to be privately held; the SEE accent is what brought it onto the stage. The combination is what made the performance so memorable: the SEE-flamboyant sensuality channeling the ESI moral intensity, so that the role was, paradoxically, both openly erotic and morally severe.
The quote I inserted in the opening is the moral structure of someone whose deepest organizing concern is human dignity as such — equality, the refusal of degradation, the refusal of being marked or set apart, the refusal of bowed posture. The whole list is about the conditions under which a free person can live among other people without shame, showing why ESI, is, after all, a Socionics "democrat".
Her late life shows the synthesis in mature form. She kept dancing on pointe past sixty-five, kept teaching into her late eighties, and died of a heart attack at eighty-nine while preparing to travel to Lucerne for a performance. The SEE accent supplied the willingness to keep performing publicly, the ESI base supplied the durability and the dutiful attitude towards her students and her profession.
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