There is something particularly vicious about an acid attack. In January, a masked assailant chased down the Bolshoi Ballet’s artistic director outside his home in Moscow and threw a jar of sulfuric acid in his face, disfiguring him and severely damaging his eyes. “I fell on my face in the snow and began to rub snow in my face and eyes,” the victim, Sergei Filin, later told Russian state television. “I was in terrible, unbearable pain.”

Someone clearly wanted the ballet company’s handsome artistic director to suffer.  (Just today, Moscow police announced that a Bolshoi dancer and two other men have confessed to carrying out the attack.) For his part, Filin insisted that rivals within the company were to blame. News reports portrayed the Bolshoi as a hotbed of uncontrolled ego and tawdry scandal, fascinating both ballet enthusiasts and people who wouldn’t know an arabesque from an assemblé. Before the attack, Filin had been harassed repeatedly, his tires slashed and his email hacked. Before Filin’s tenure as artistic director, a series of directors had left after short, acrimonious stints. Indeed, since its founding in 1776, ambition, political connections, and rivalry have been the other backdrops to the Bolshoi’s productions, preserved in colorful — and bloody — tales of dead cats thrown on stage and broken glass slipped into toeshoes.

It’s tempting to crack Black Swan jokes, but for all its dysfunction the Bolshoi is not unique in the intensity of its artistic jealousies. There is a long history of violent rivalry in the performing arts, and stages in Moscow, London, and New York have seen their share of blood spilt.

In Elizabethan London, quarrels could escalate into swordfights, and the city’s theaters saw some of that action. In 1598,  playwright and poet Ben Jonson, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, killed fellow actor Gabriel Spencer with a rapier in a duel. Jonson was sentenced to hang for the murder, but in a plot twist worthy of an East End play, he escaped the noose through a legal loophole.

One of the art world’s deadliest rivalries came to a head during the 1849 Astor Place Riot in New York City. Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest rose to prominence in the 1830s, becoming one of America’s first theatrical stars, beloved by his working-class fans. Forrest had some success in Britain as well, until 1845, when his melodramatic characterization of Macbeth was met with hisses from the London audience. He was convinced that his rival, English actor William Charles Macready, was behind the mortifying incident. Forrest sealed their enmity by delivering a hiss following Macready’s performance as the Danish prince in an Edinburgh production of Hamlet. (Their childish antics aside, the feud between the two actors epitomized the growing antipathy in the mid-nineteenth century between America’s Anglophile upper class and its patriotic working class, with Macready the representative of aristocratic privilege, and Forrest — who rewrote Shakespearean plays to exemplify democratic themes — a working-class hero.)

A few years later, Macready arrived in New York to play Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House. Forrest’s supporters descended on the theater and rioted. The state militia was called in, and they fired on the crowds, killing about two dozen people. Inside the theater, Macready soldiered on through his performance, then fled immediately after. He never returned to an American stage.

In more recent years, the most violent rivalries can be found in two artistic arenas with seemingly little in common: Russian theater and American hip hop. Clearly, the front lines of the Russian art world’s internecine war have been its storied ballet companies. The Bolshoi’s rival, the Mariinsky Ballet (previously known as the Kirov) in Saint Petersburg, has drawn its own share of notoriety: in 1995, its then artistic director, Oleg Vinogradov, fled to America, claiming he feared for his life. (“I spend half my salary on bodyguards,” he told the Independent.) These days, however, the country’s violent sociopaths seem to be branching out to repertory theaters. Last December, Alexey Malobrodsky, a director at the Gogol Theater in Moscow, was physically attacked. Following Filin’s attack, the Gogol’s new artistic director received a threat via text message: he’d be beaten up “in a grown-up way”  if he didn’t leave the theater.

As sensational as the recent Russian headlines have been, America remains the world leader in artistic violence, thanks to the cumulative body count in the music world. Perhaps hip hop’s best-known, most baleful feud was between rival East and West Coast rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls. Not long after a trio of men robbed and shot Tupac in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio, Biggie came out with a song titled “Who Shot Ya?” that was interpreted as an admission of guilt and a taunt at his nemesis. (Biggie denied it was either.) A few years later, both rappers were killed in drive-by shootings within six months of each other. Both deaths remain unsolved.

As for Filin, he will live, and further operations may eventually restore his vision. But professional jealousy will likely continue to disfigure the Bolshoi’s art, as it does wherever the stage lights shine. It is no small irony that the play that began and ended America’s deadliest artistic rivalry was Macbeth, a tragedy of unchecked ambition and revenge. After his numerous bloody deeds, Macbeth famously observes that using violence for one’s own gain becomes a self-perpetuating act:

I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

So it is in the artistic world, where ambition has a momentum of its own — and woe to those caught in its path.

Nicole Cipri

When my mom went into labor, my father’s reaction was to be annoyed. He didn’t want a baby born on Friday night when it was busiest at the small-town pizza parlor they co-owned. My mom waited another day to go to the hospital; I was born at half past midnight on Sunday. After I was born, he composed a poem for me called “To My Child (II).” It hung on the wall of my childhood bedroom.

When I was six, my father crashed his car into one of Vermont’s many maple trees. In his hospital bed, in his months-long coma, he quickly became frail. The man who had once lifted me and swung me around and carried me on his shoulders was reduced to a sleeping phantom that grew more sunken and pale with each day. My mother took us to see the car, a black Lincoln Towncar, after the crash. I’d seen his denim jacket, dark spatters of blood on it, the smell of gasoline and alcohol imprinted in the fabric.

The twisted car was scrapped and shipped to a junkyard. His denim jacket disappeared from our house. The tree he’d hit continued to grow, undaunted, bearing a small scar on its trunk. My sister and I went back to school. Eventually my father woke up. I don’t remember much more of that year than that.

My parents divorced about two years after the accident. The restaurant they had owned together went bankrupt and closed. My sister and I stayed with my mother, and saw my father irregularly. Mostly, he served as a chauffeur, picking us up from school and driving us to art lessons and softball practice.

One day my father arrived early to pick me up from softball. He watched as my team wrapped up practice. He stood alone, away from the other parents. In the car he told me that winning wasn’t important; playing the game was. I nodded, embarrassed because he seemed so proud of himself, of us both. This was supposed to be one of those father-daughter moments. He thought he had imparted some life wisdom. To me, it sounded hollow, a sound bite from an after-school special, a line from a self-help book. Winning wasn’t important to me. Playing wasn’t particularly important, either. Strength was important to me. Smashing the hell out of a ball, watching it fly into the field, or even when it flew past first base and fouled — that was important to me. That brutal connection, that outlet for all my anger.

When I was ten, I started going to poetry readings and open mics with my dad. I would read his poetry. Middle-aged hippie men would come up to me afterwards, praising me for my courage in reading. I’d point them toward my dad, telling them that he was the author, and maybe they’d go to his table and try to talk to him. The conversations wouldn’t last long. My dad’s lasting speech impediment made it hard for others to understand him. More than that, it made him reluctant to talk.

That was also the first year I started keeping a journal. I mostly wrote lists: of things to do before I died, of secret crushes, of places I wanted to see. I wrote a series of packing lists for the day I would run away, editing them endlessly.

When I was thirteen, my father drove me to a film-writing seminar for teens. The seminar took place over four weekends in June, in a town an hour and a half away. That summer was full of thunderstorms. We would drive in the rain, listening to Ani DiFranco or Neil Young or Led Zeppelin or Bob Dylan, music we shared a common love for. He told me he’d always loved extreme weather; when he was a teenager, he’d drop acid and go stand outside in the rain. I’d roll down the window a crack, just to catch the smell of lightning and wet tarmac. When I hear Neil Young’s Harvest or Ani DiFranco’s Dilate, I think first of watery green fields and black skies, then imagine my dad as a teenager, staring up into dark clouds with dilated pupils, letting the rain pour down his face and beard.

When I was fourteen, my father dropped me off at school for the last time. He was leaving Vermont. He had decided to move to Oklahoma to live with his mother, who needed help around the house after a recent accident. At least, that’s what he told me. After he drove away, I walked into the softball field and cried. The tears surprised me. So did the lightness I felt afterward, as if I had let go of something.

When I was eighteen, I left my boyfriend to go traveling in Europe. I cried when I drove away from him for the last time, then felt that same lightness I had four years before. Life had become simple. I was running away, and it was the most freeing thing I had ever done. The first thing I put in my travel journal was a packing list.

When I left home, the poem my father had written for me stayed on the wall of my empty bedroom. I kept moving, further and further away, taking longer to return each time.

My dad and I rarely talk. He sends birthday cards, maybe a little bit of money when he can. My grandmother relays to him what I tell her in my emails — news about jobs, lovers, school, travel. Of my dad, she always says the same thing: “Oh, he’s the same as always.”

The smashed car rusted into the ground. The tree lived, and grew, and still stands by Route 118. My father chose exile. I chose movement.

Nicole Cipri