The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  The tsarevich and me and our fortunes together after that troika ride, yes, those details I can remember, but not so the names of the little girls I taught at my ballet school just seven years ago.

  To the Taste of the Court

  When we returned from Krasnoye Selo, the tsarevich called on me for the very first time, at my parents’ house. My sister and I had a little sitting room adjacent to our bedroom, with a second door that opened directly into the central hall, which gave us some privacy for entertaining. As we were now eighteen and twenty-four, we could receive our own visitors, though we could not feed them, it still being our parents’ house and the cook subject only to their orders! We both, like our father, enjoyed a party, and as my sister was six years older than I, my parents allowed her to serve as both hostess and chaperone while they retired out of earshot for the night. Some of the young officers of the Guards who saw us at the theater became our admirers and would visit us the evenings we were not performing. We were grownups now and did not have to shout our names from a carriage as we left the dormitories. The men could now ogle us at the theater and call on us at home. And so, you see, my sister had set the precedent for me with Ali—Baron Alexander Zeddeler, an officer in the Preobrazhensky Regiment whose family had been in service to the crown for a hundred years—who courted her and later became her official protector. She had not chosen a fellow dancer to love, and I, who copied her in all matters, would copy her in this. I would do better than copy her. In this, as in all things, I determined to trump her: I was prettier, my promotions came quicker, and so if she had a baron to court her, I would have a tsarevich. There is no greater pleasure than winning a competition with one’s sister and no greater sorrow than to see her suffer because of it. In my journal that year I wrote of Nicholas, He will be mine! Yes, I used an exclamation point.

  One evening in March the maid opened the sitting-room door to announce the officer Eugene Volkoff, but it was Nicholas Romanov who stepped through the threshold in his long gray overcoat, and the maid knew no difference. She had never seen the face of the tsarevich. But even those who had could mistake others for him. Niki’s friends Volkoff and Volodia Svetschin looked so much like him, they were often taken for the tsarevich. Svetschin wore his hair and even his beard like Niki’s and loved the moments of mistaken identity when Petersburgers stood straight and gave the eyes right as he passed—one was not supposed to look directly into the sovereign’s eyes, you know—thinking Svetschin the heir. Yes, sometimes Niki was able to travel about unrecognized. If the tsar were to appear before you without introduction, would you know he was the tsar? At the head of a Bolshoi Vykhod from the Winter Palace, surrounded by carriages and Cossacks and uniformed grand dukes, yes. But without such a production, perhaps not. Niki’s own guards did not, on occasion, recognize him. On his march in the Crimea years later to test out the army private’s new uniform, he was stopped by a sentry at the gate of his own estate. You can’t go through here, he was told. And so the tsar of All the Russias turned without complaint and retreated.

  Hard perhaps, now, to believe that the face of the tsar or the heir might be unknown to his subjects. The camera was not used to the extent that it is today. I have few pictures of myself before the age of thirty, and though the imperial family all had camera boxes and pasted pictures of each other in their scrapbooks at night, those photographs were private. The tsar almost never appeared in public. The official portraits issued in lieu of his presence were often painted photographs or colored lithographs, but those were idealized images. So my maid did not know this was the tsarevich, who did not want himself known as his intentions were not—and would never be—honorable. But at that time I did not care about this, and this “M. Volkoff” and I spent the evening in the type of light chatter I had learned so well by age fourteen. My first flirtation had been with an English boy, McPherson, I can no longer recall his full name, who had visited our dacha one summer and whose engagement my determined pursuit of him compromised. I must have entertained the tsarevich very well. For the next day, on ivory palace stationery with its gold crown floating above his blue-green monogram, Niki wrote me, Since our meeting I have been in the clouds. I had snared him as I had snared McPherson. Niki was always more expressive in letters than in person, though one could not know this from his journals, as terse and dull as a detective’s report.

  Once he had actually come to my house—which he told me he had feared would make him uncomfortable, as I lived with my parents—he came back again and again. My parents did not interrupt us in our sitting room. Could one tell the tsarevich that the hour grew late? That the frivolity grew too loud? For though Niki came sometimes alone, he came also at times with his fellow officers, Count André Chouvalov or the real Eugene Volkoff or Baron Zeddeler, or sometimes with his young cousins, the children of his grandfather’s brother Mikhail Nikolaevich, the handsome Mikhailovichi—for that is how we refer to each branch of the Romanov family, as a group through the patronymic—the grand dukes George, Sandro, and Sergei. These last three and Niki constituted the Potato Club, their private joke. Out riding one day, some of them turned their horses into a potato field and the others, losing sight of them, called out to a peasant farmer, Where did they go?—to which the man replied, They turned into potatoes! And so to commemorate their brotherhood each man wore around his neck a golden charm in the shape of a potato.

  The most handsome of the brothers was Sandro, with his quicksilver tongue and his solid gold ambition that had him pursuing Niki’s sister Xenia, his second cousin. The dullest was George, who was quiet and who collected coins, of all things, and who grew quite bald at a young age; and there was another one at home, Nicholas, who preferred the bodies of men and who became renowned as a historian and whom later Lenin had murdered, saying, The revolution does not need historians. Of them I liked Sergei the best. He had a fine enough face, blond hair, his light eyes set far apart, and though he could be moody, a temperament I recognized well from the theater, he could also be the most fun—the first with a prank, the first to propose a caper. His favorite expression in those days was tant pis, so much the worse, but there was no sorrow to be had at my house. Together, I and the Potato Club laughed, talked, played baccarat, clapped to the Georgian songs from the Caucasus which the Mikhailovichi sang for us and which they knew so well from the twenty years their father served in Tiflis as governor-general. This province of Russia was so close to Turkey and Persia that the boys had only to look out a window of the white Italianate governor-general’s palace onto Golovinsky Prospekt to see mules and camels, men with black fezzes and sheathed sabers coming to market or to consult with Sergei’s father, and women in tall velvet headdresses adorned with scarves, their hair dyed a brilliant red and their necks hung with as many as two dozen necklaces of silver and gold. They came from straw huts laid with carpets or whitewashed zindans of mud to the palace where Sergei’s father laid supper every night for forty. His father also had a two-hundred-thousand-acre estate in the countryside, in Borjomi, that a man could ride over all day and still not travel from one boundary to the next. The great white Kazbek mountain stood like the Buddha at the end of the big steppe and by its scale let men know their place.

  As if the Romanovs ever knew their place until the revolution showed it to them.

  The rest of the family looked slightly askance at the Mikhailovichi, as if their time in the Caucasus might have made them too much like the untamed Georgians they oversaw. Niki’s father tried hard to Russify that part of the country, denying its residents their language, forcing even young students to speak only Russian at school or be punished, as the young Stalin was, by standing all morning in the corner, holding up a heavy plank of wood, but the Georgian language survived—and the Mikhailovichi learned it. I remember one song they sang, so haunting with its oriental sound, about a queen whose mellifluous voice drew lovers to her like a mythological siren’s, though she sat not on ocean rocks but in her cushioned bedroom, in a castle by the Terek Ri
ver. And when she had sated herself with the beauty of these men, she murdered them and threw their bodies down into the swift-running water.

  Of the three brothers Sergei had the richest voice, and when he took the lead on that song he looked directly at me as if I were the coldhearted siren! Niki had told me Sergei loved his sister Xenia, but had stood aside for Sandro, who pursued her so aggressively and whom she seemed to prefer. I should say Sergei was the least handsome of his very handsome brothers and Sandro the most, probably why the butterfly Xenia had chosen Sandro. Sergei was teased sometimes by women who, like schoolboy bullies, would ask, Why are you so ugly?—which he was not—to which he would reply to cover his hurt, In that lies my charm. Had Sergei now fallen in love with another girl who could not belong to him?

  For it was Niki who was pursuing me, and this was clear; this was the reason he and they were in my house and sometimes the reason they came to the theater: Niki wanted to see me in my little roles—as a tiny shepherdess who rode on a cart about the stage in the opera La Dame de pique or as Little Red Riding Hood running from the Wolf in Sleeping Beauty. One night, with a basket in his hand and a kerchief on his head, the tsarevich entertained us by dancing my role of Little Red Riding Hood and then the role of the Wolf, pawing at the carpet with the toe of his boots, turning his head and looking at us from the side of his eye. He knew all the roles, little and big, from the opera and the ballet—he had a direct telephone line to the theater installed in his villa at Krasnoye Selo so he could hear the operas performed on the Maryinsky stage even when he was at camp. Niki mimed the wolf grabbing up the little girl and folding her over his shoulder, using one arm to still her imaginary petticoats, her imaginary kicking legs. Sometimes he called me Miss Riding Hood, looking down his nose at me with a long, serious face. What, Miss, he would say, have you been up to in those woods?

  When we grew thirsty from laughter, I crept from the sitting room and, using glasses pilfered from my parents’ pantry, I served champagne. These evenings sometimes lasted until five in the morning—we Russians love a party that lasts hours and then we sleep until noon—though one night our evening was cut short when the prefect of police came to tell us the emperor was enraged at having discovered his son’s absence. A policeman followed Niki everywhere, to Niki’s eternal irritation, and reported on him to his father. Apparently, Niki had metamorphosed from the effeminate child the emperor called girlie into a bit too much of the libertine for Alexander III, a libertine who nonetheless wrote in his journal, What is wrong with me? when he slept until noon and beyond each day. And at my own metamorphosis from child to flirt, my father was not enraged so much as worried. What risk would I take, what impetuous action would I regret?

  But as yet there was no real intimacy between Niki and me, except for one brief moment in the entrance hall when, as he put on his woolen greatcoat one night, as a joke he drew me inside the flaps of the coat as if to button me within it close to him. He smelled of cologne—bergamot, rosemary, and leather—and I of my violet perfume, and the temperature inside the coat made those scents blossom. I bit at a thread on his shirt. Niki stopped my teeth with a kiss. I would have swallowed all the buttons of his greatcoat one by one if I thought that would keep me this close to him even a minute longer. Our real courtship had begun! But to my great frustration, Niki continued to feel his way toward me through letters rather than touch—Forgive me, divine creature, for having disturbed your rest. Pushkin’s lines, I knew, because Pushkin I read, every Russian read Pushkin, his verse so accessible even a poorly educated girl like me could enjoy it. The words were not Niki’s, but I treasured them anyway, though I was certainly too much a fool to understand that when Niki wrote to me one night after the opera Taras Bulba, in which the hero’s passion for his beloved made him give up his father and his country, Think of what André did for love of a young Polish girl, that Nicholas himself would never be allowed to turn his back on his throne or on Russia for love of the young Polish dancer Kschessinska II. These were tantalizing words, but still, they were just words. For me, so used to the animating force of dance, the touch of two bodies, words, no matter what sentiments they expressed, seemed as flat as the paper they lay on. How to make them stand up?

  That I had not yet figured out, but the tsarevich’s attentions to me, such as they were, had not gone unnoticed by the theater administration, which saw fit to display me in larger and larger roles. In 1890 I was a coryphée dancing the part of the Fairy Candide in Sleeping Beauty, but with the flowering of my talent and the tsarevich’s interest in me, I was quickly promoted to second soloist, and then to prima ballerina. By 1893, one year after the tsarevich’s first visit to me, I would no longer dance the role of a fairy in Sleeping Beauty, but make my debut as Aurora herself, the first Russian ballerina ever to dance the role. Yes, the director of theaters Vzevolozhsky and the ballet master Petipa were eager to please the court, for the pleasure of the Romanovs was all that mattered. Why, when Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich did not like the way a galop was performed in rehearsal, what we dancers called the galop infernal, which always closes the season at Krasnoye Selo, he came up onto the stage himself to demonstrate it to the company, and the dancers performed the galop as the grand duke wished. All was done to the taste of the court, and I had suddenly become its taste.

  Let us be frank. I did not jump well, I was not ethereal. My feet were flat. My legs were too short—to disguise this last defect I had special tutus made with short waists and long skirts—but my audience did not notice my deficits. They saw only that I was bold, that I was fast, that I was brilliant. I was what was called a terre-à-terre dancer—I attacked the floor with my sharp, hard pointes. Diamantine, I was described. I gave off light. And I was dancing for a court that loved nothing more than diamonds, glitter, gold. In addition to my formidable technique, I had the ineffable something that makes a dancer a star. When I stepped onto the stage, one could look nowhere but at me until I left it. Scenery, stage business, the divertissements of soloists or corps de ballet—none of it could distract from the impact of my presence. And I could act, if that is the word for what happens when one opens the door to a role and steps completely within it, the canvas backdrop, the painted face of one’s partner, more real than the walls of the auditorium and the men and women seated there. No one who has seen me as the tragic, bewitched Swan Queen Odette or the jilted Gypsy girl Esmeralda could ever forget it. When, as Esmeralda, I looked to heaven in the last act, my pain and my jealousy at Phoebus’s betrayal changing to resignation, there was no one in the theater immune to my pathos. And while pining, I was glamorous. I pinned to my hair a wig styled by the most fashionable hairdresser of the time, Delacroix, I fastened jewels, at first just glass but later the real precious stones given me by my admirers, at my wrists and my neck, and I cinched beneath my costume one of the whalebone corsets I had made especially for me in a Petersburg shop. One could not bend much so laced, but a straight stiff back was the vogue then on the stage and off. They laughed at me later, Mikhail Fokine and the newer choreographers, when they pioneered a newer, free-flowing dance style at the turn of the century. In his Petrouchka, the stiff-bodied ballerina doll with the whipping legs was a caricature of me invented by Fokine, with his beak of a nose, and his little friend, with her nose in the air, Bronislava Nijinska—a Polish girl like me with a brother, Vaslav, who would become much more famous than she ever would, despite her airs. When she later joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes along with her brother, she persuaded the older dancers not to wear their jewels on the stage, that it did not suit the character or costume to be so adorned. But that was the way we danced then in the 1890s—in corsets, in nineteenth-century three-act ballets, for emperors and kaisers and kings.

  The court had already tired of venerating French, Italian, and German music, opera, literature, languages—where were our own? At the start of the nineteenth century, a parlor game in which the speakers could converse only in Russian became all the rage, and if one spoke, by
mistake, a French word, his fellows would cry, Forfeiture—in French! because there was no word for this in Russian. It took Pushkin in the 1830s to give us our own language. But the Russian ballet of 1890 was still dominated by Europeans: imported Italian dancers and imported French ballet masters—Didelot, Perrot, St. Léon, and Petipa—woe to poor Lev Ivanov, who had the misfortune to be a Russian and therefore to be overlooked and under-paid as second ballet master to a Frenchman! I ask you, who looks to Italy or France for ballet now? It was Russia, under the Romanovs, that perfected the art, and I was its first Russian ballerina, not one of those Italian girls brought in to do the honors in the ballerina roles, while the Svetlanas and the Ekaterinas and the Olgas posed behind them. I was the first to learn the tricks of Zucchi and Grimaldi and Brianza and Legnani, the fouetté, the double tour, the entrechats sept royal. After my debut in January 1893 as Aurora in Sleeping Beauty—I am skipping ahead here again for a moment—Tchaikovsky himself came to my dressing room to tell me he wanted to create a ballet for me. It was like God calling on one. At my doorway, he bowed to me, his face very pink, his beard and hair almost entirely white, his dark-rimmed eyes glittering, his right hand playing with the pince nez he wore always on a black cord, and in his usual mishmash of French and Russian, he praised my dancing of Aurora. He was only fifty-two. We had just last year, on the fiftieth performance of The Sleeping Beauty, presented him on the stage a crown of gold laurel leaves. That’s how we honored our artists in tsarist Russia—with ceremony and treasure. I remember because I myself had been elected to present him the crown and I was late to the backstage ceremony, having been flirting with a trio of grand dukes—and the company, which knew this, seethed at the delay but could do nothing about it! Yes, Tchaikovsky thought he had years ahead of him of making ballets with the great Petipa, many more spectacles and féeries to mount. Tchaikovsky, Vzevolozhsky, and Petipa—and, yes, Ivanov—together created the three masterworks of the ballet repertory—The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, and Swan Lake—now danced by companies all over the world, pieces of that music played on out-of-tune pianos in ballet schools on every continent as young girls practice their battements and tendus. (And Tchaikovsky was so kind to students! After the first performance of his Nutcracker in 1882, he sent two big baskets of sweets to all of us at the school who had performed children’s roles in the ballet.) Petipa would send Tchaikovsky his notes—they each worked alone—then, in rehearsals on the little school theater stage, would have Tchaikovsky shorten or lengthen his music to suit his dances, though Petipa was deferential about it, for what serious composer could stand to work like this, on command take a scissor to his phrases? Tchai kovsky’s reputation suffered at first because he wrote for the ballet. We usually had hacks like Pugni, Drigo, or Minkus—men on the theater payroll as composers or conductors—create the music for our steps. Who listens to them now? No one. But everyone can hum a bar or two of Tchaikovsky. For Sleeping Beauty, Petipa sent Tchaikovsky notes, With a new wave of the fairy’s magic wand Aurora appears and rushes onstage. 6/8 for 24. A voluptuous adagio. Coquettish allegro—3/4 for 48. Variation for Aurora. From these plain details Tchaikovsky dreamed the richly embroidered music. Do you know what Alexander III said to Tchaikovsky about his music after the dress rehearsal of his magisterial Sleeping Beauty, performed before an invited royal audience? Very nice. Perhaps he thought Tchai kovsky was satirizing him in the person of the bumbling King Florestan, who could not properly supervise his courtiers and thereby doomed his court to one hundred years’ sleep. Tchaikovsky moped for days, always believing each of his triumphs to be a failure. Why, after the debut of his opera Queen of Spades, he walked the streets in despair until he heard three young officers singing the lines to one of the arias.