The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  Ah, and here’s the thing. I fear he did not. He was already in love with someone else and had been for years.

  His beloved? Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. Niki had met her when he was sixteen and she twelve. Twelve! Alix was all I was not—a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, a princess who was the daughter of a princess, though the house of Hesse-Darmstadt into which she had been born was not grand. She had first come to Petersburg in 1884, while I was still a student at the Theater Schools, to attend the wedding of her sister Ella to another of Niki’s many uncles—in fact, there were so many Romanov brothers and uncles and sons that Niki’s father was forced to reconfigure and reduce the appanages and titles, making some sons grand dukes and others merely princes so that the treasury would not run out of money. At her sister’s wedding, Alix in a white muslin dress stood beside her sister the bride in a magnificent brocaded court gown. Alix’s blonde, blonde hair was almost as pale as her skin, and Niki’s soul bound itself to her pristine purity. And, I think, as well, to her sorrow, the black that saturated her at age six, when her mother and her little sister died of diphtheria in the same week, and she was left alone in a nursery with a set of new dolls staring at her with their black-pupiled eyes. Her old dolls had been thrown out for fear of contagion, their bodies and dresses and shoes burned to ash, her mother and sister abruptly buried, the house a tornado that left her untouched in the corner. Her nickname, Sunny, never suited her again, and this reserve tugged at Nicholas, answered a reserve in him, born of his grandfather’s violent death and the domineering personality of his father.

  Later that week they would use her tiny diamond ring to etch their names side by side onto a window at Alexander Palace at Peterhof, and when he asked his mother for a token to give her, his mother handed him a twelve-carat diamond brooch. This is Russia—for the imperial family, that was a token. He presented the brooch to Alix—a child giving a gift to a child. At a children’s party the next day, she gave the brooch back to him. She was English and German and very proper, and she felt she had not behaved correctly in accepting it. He did not see Alix again until 1889, when she came at seventeen once more to visit her sister in Petersburg. Alix would not age well, but at seventeen she was a beauty—the cinched waist, bracelets at her right wrist, her face more European, almost English, save for that long German nose with its extra daub of flesh at the end that in later years would make a hook. I understood why Niki desired her so in 1889, though the court itself was not so taken with her. At public appearances she stood breathless and unsmiling, her face covered with blotches. Devoid of charm, cold eyes, holds herself as if she’d swallowed a yardstick, the court said of her. His parents liked her no better. That year Niki pasted her picture into his diary and silently determined to marry her.

  How do I know this? Because he would read to me on occasion from his diaries, from the entries about me and from the ones about her, to flatter me, at first—to caution me, later. He kept a diary for thirty-six years, his first one begun at fourteen when the empress gave him a book of souvenirs. The edges of that first book’s pages were gilt, the binding made of inlaid wood. Only that was good enough for the heir, though later he wrote in plain lined journals, the pages numbered by hand in the upper right corner in advance and pasted up with pictures and mementos. In this first book he recorded the murder of his grandfather on the street alongside the Ekaterininsky Canal. After this, his father became tsar, moved the family to Gatchina outside Petersburg, surrounded the palace park with sentries. Alexander III had crushed the revolutionaries, or so he thought. The young terrorists from the People’s Will who had assassinated Alexander II—after seven unsuccessful attempts!—had been hanged, signs that read tsar killer pinned to their chests, and their bodies had dangled from their nooses for hours so all could see, and after their hanging, Alexander III rescinded almost every one of his father’s liberal ukazy, the Great Reforms that freed the serfs, loosened censorship, reformed schools, allowed local self-government, the ones he thought had led, so inadmissibly, to his father’s assassination. The revolutionaries who wanted to rid the country of Alexander II were afraid his reforms and his proposed constitution would satisfy the people so much that there would be no revolution, no abolition of the throne. Alexander III meant to ensure there would be neither reform nor revolution. He was a tsar of the old school, the father who ruled by the whip. He thought he was preventing a revolution, though he actually induced one, but he never lived to see this or the murder of his brother, his cousins, his sons, his nephews, his grandchildren. No, the revolutionaries never disappeared, no matter how Alexander III squeezed them. Why, he even hanged Lenin’s older brother in 1887 for plotting to kill him as he made one of those processionals from the Winter Palace to the cathedral with a phalanx of royalty, the smaller parade called the Maly Vykhod, and the larger the Bolshoi Vykhod, with which the Romanovs reminded the court and Petersburg at large of their power. Yes, to be a tsar was to be the preordained victim of a regicide—killed eventually by revolutionaries, by your guards, by your own family. Perhaps Niki had a premonition of this. On the inside front cover of his very first journal, in his angular hand, Niki wrote out the lyrics to an old folk song, one where the ancient gnarled hag uses a comb on the hair of a young dead man who sprawls in her lap. Youth and Death. Yes, in his first notebook he recorded the murder of his grandfather, and his last notebook, the fifty-first, from 1918, was only half filled, the numbers floating in the corners of the empty pages.

  Later, in Paris, after the revolution, when his journals were published, I read all the entries, glossing for the private matters of his heart. I know. Of all the great events recorded in those books, the coronation, two wars, the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Bloody Sunday, I was seeking only mention of me. Some of those earlier entries, I had, of course, already seen. It was a Russian custom for the bridegroom to share his diaries with his bride on the eve of their wedding, to reveal to her his life previous and whatever attachments and liaisons it contained. Tolstoy did this with his wife, Sonya, and Niki did this with Alix, who began to write in the pages, who wrote on their wedding night, At last united, bound for life. And so, there was some significance, yes, to the fact that Niki shared his journals with me? He did not give them to me, I did not take a pen and write in them for all of posterity to see, but he read to me from them. At my first appearance, in 1890, he read me just a few notes: Gossiped at her window with little Kschessinska or I like Kschessinska II very much, but later in 1892 he read, It is over three years I have loved Alix H. and I constantly cherish the thought that God might let me marry her one day…But ever since camp in 1890 I have loved Little K passionately.

  She was the someday. I was the here and now and perhaps beyond. But it was not until 1893, when Alix refused Niki’s first proposal of marriage, that I truly triumphed. In his journal of that year, Niki recorded the tale of his failed endeavor and included in his entry a few lines from Alix’s letter in which she proclaimed it a sin to change the belief in which I have been brought up and which I love. To marry the heir to the Russian throne she must convert to the Russian Orthodox Church and this she would not do—though I would have done so in the snap of a finger. Where do I sign? To whom do I bow? What statue do I kiss? But Alix was a Lutheran, the entire religion a reaction against the Roman Catholic Church with its spectacle, its idols, its fancy vestments, and its insistence on the necessity of a priest’s intercession to reach God. Alix could speak to God on her own in her own plain church, danke schön, in which she had just two years ago been confirmed, that sacrament as important to her as the one of marriage. How could she now, suddenly, renounce this? But she could not be Lutheran and be the future empress of Russia—the emperor stood as head of the Orthodox Church and any heir to the throne must be born of an Orthodox mother. The calendar of the Russian court year was ruled by Orthodox observances. It was impossible for the empress to be Lutheran. So Niki’s parents, who didn’t much like Alix anyway and who had been withholdin
g their permission for the match, were pleased by Alix’s refusal to convert, although their pleasure could not approach mine, and they began suggesting instead this alliance and that, perhaps to Princess Hélène of France or to Princess Margaret of Prussia. But all this was to be considered eventually, and eventually is a long day’s ride from immediately. For now, at least, the long-haired phantom of Alix that had stood sentry over Nicholas at my bedroom window receded, whisked into the distance, and, in despair at her disappearance, Nicholas bedded the little Polish princess instead of the German one. That happened January 25, 1893. I could tell you the hour.

  I cannot, of course, describe to you what it was like to make love to the tsarevich because such things are private. But his naked body impressed even the Bolsheviks who dragged it from the cold water of the mine shaft twelve miles from Ekaterinburg the day after his murder. Before they chopped him up and burned him, they marveled at how fit he was, his cheeks so red from the icy water that he looked alive. That January night with me he was alive, his body whole and warm beneath my fingers and my mouth, his limbs all stitched to their proper places, after which he recorded in his diary, Flew to my MK…am still under her spell—the pen is shaking in my hand. He was not a Pushkin, not a Lermontov, I grant you, but he was the tsarevich, and so he did not have to be.

  I’m afraid for a while at the theater I became intolerable. I received my own diamond brooch from him, and to mark the delight of our consummation, a necklace of large diamonds—each diamond as big as a walnut—which I wore showily onstage with the brooch, whether I played a peasant girl or a princess. It was not unusual for a dancer to do this, to wear on the stage the jewels her protector had given her, but no one else had ever been given a necklace like that. The Romanovs knew their jewels, mined from the rich earth of the Urals in Siberia since the seventeenth century, and the tsars had first pick of the best of them. Alix, age twelve, may have returned her diamond brooch to Niki, but I kept my brooch and my necklace, which all came to know as the tsar’s necklace and which I valued most and for years refused to sell. With that around my neck, I was untouchable at the theater. When I did not get what I wanted, they at the theater called my fits of pique Her Imperial Indignation.

  Our idyll. Let me tell you about our idyll. Niki often left his parents at Anichkov Palace in the evenings and made my house on English Prospekt his second home. I can still recall my excitement at returning from the theater to see his coat already in the front hall and the way my body flushed as I moved from the violet-scented warmth—for the violet was my flower—of my carriage to, for a brief moment, the frigid Petersburg air and from there into my house, my own house, where my lover waited, when all the other girls my age lived still with their parents. What a triumph! And in my house, on the marble-topped table of the front hall, lay the dark greatcoat of the heir to the Russian throne. Some nights we ate a late supper alone; other nights we had suppers together after the theater with friends from the ballet or opera companies or with his cousins, the Mikhailovichi, or with his fellow officers. I served zakuski—mushrooms in cream sauce, little sausages, eggs, and onions—sturgeon, and then kuropatka, partridge, and we toasted our health with the eight gold-painted vodka glasses encrusted with semiprecious stones the tsarevich had brought me as a housewarming present. No more plain drinking glasses for me! The meals were followed by games of charades, where Niki would hold his cigarette between his teeth and pretend to conduct an orchestra that spread above us across the ceiling, while we had to guess at the symphony, the plaster lifting away to accommodate the musicians and instruments. I can still see the set of his jaw, the way he threw down the cigarette to grab me up and kiss me, while his cousins pounded the table in approval. Or there were games of baccarat, the beginning, I suppose, of my nasty infatuation with cards and gambling. Later in life I would become a habitué of the gaming tables at Monte Carlo. They called me Madame 17, for I always bet that number. Can you guess why? After all this Nicholas and I would climb into the bed, which I had made so comfortable—not at all like his camp bed at Anichkov Palace. Yes, the emperor, so as not to cosset his children, had them sleep on camp beds and wash in the morning with cold water. Niki’s cousins all did this, as well, some odd imperial tradition of deprivation for those children who would grow up to have so much, as if a hard bed and a cold bath could bring with them humility and strength of character. Nor was my bed like a bed in the Winter Palace, sheathed with a comforter that bore the monogram of Catherine the Great, the coverlet so stiff and slippery it slid to the floor if one shifted position. No, I had a coverlet of sable, which we lay under or upon, and Niki stayed with me some nights all the way until the morning. I slept with my arms around him or his around me and sometimes in the hour before he left, we would study one another in the winter light, where naked we were a different color than we had been the night before by oil lamp, this paler version of ourselves no less pleasing. He called me Mala, Maletchka, Panni—short for Pannochka, the endearment for a young Polish girl—or my M.K. I called him my Niki and this interlude in the months before he became tsar and assumed the responsibilities that governing demanded were the last days of his youth. Why, he played like a boy up until a month before his father’s death that next autumn, when he and his cousin Georgie pitched a great chestnut-throwing battle out at Gatchina and a few days later fought another match with pinecones. Chestnuts, pinecones, theatricals, cards, a few imperial duties, and me—that was how Nicholas II, before he became Nicholas II, spent the year 1893. That year the tsarevich visited me almost every week, and some weeks twice, and between visits we wrote one another our love letters. His to me I lost in the revolution, but mine to him are preserved—they sit today in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow. He had saved my letters as I had saved his, and they, along with every other bit of his property, were confiscated after his arrest and death. My letters are now testament: the last tsar once lived and loved—loved me!

  The ballets I danced that season teased me with possibilities.

  That winter I danced Paquita, a new role for me in the ballet of the same name, wearing a fetching costume with one big white flower on my breast and another in my hair. The ballet was set during Napoleon’s occupation of Spain. Paquita saves the life of a French officer, Lucien, but the two, though in love, cannot marry: she’s a Gypsy, of no birth at all. Only when she shows Lucien a medallion she’s owned since infancy does she learn she is really of noble family after all, abducted as a baby by the Gypsies she thought were her kin. And so the lovers can now wed, for in this ballet, as in all of Petipa’s ballets, the series of scenes and acts culminated in a celebration, usually a wedding, at which a variety of classical and character dances could be performed. All talents must be accommodated, you remember. Paquita’s story is a bit like my own, you know. Imperial blood runs in my veins from my Polish ancestors on my father’s side. My great-grandfather was the son of Count Krassinsky. He was orphaned at age twelve and entrusted into the care of his French tutor. Apparently the count did not trust his brother to be guardian and with good reason—in 1748, this brother sent assassins for the boy, and the tutor had to flee with him to Neuilly. This uncle usurped his birthright and his property and all that was left to my father was a ring with the arms of Count Krassinsky: a silver horseshoe, a gold cross, a crow with a gold ring clasped in its beak, the crown of a count, all set against a background of azure. I had a ring, Paquita had a medallion. Perhaps this would make me imperial enough for Niki. I determined to ask my father for that ring, to show it to Niki, and to tell him the story behind it. Once he knew that I, too, was from a ruling house, or almost a ruling house, he might speak of it to his father, and who could predict the effect of that on the tsar? But there was no hurry then, and so I wastefully dreamed my way through that winter and spring, summer and fall, until early 1894, when Niki’s father suddenly took ill.

  My Life, at Twenty-One Years, Is Over

  That winter of 1894 Niki came to see me less and less, as
his father’s intractable illness drew him back to his mother and father, to his brothers and sisters. A cough the doctors could not cure, weakness, and pain in the kidneys, which rendered the tsar unable to stand, brought with it concerns about the succession and made urgent what had been put aside—the matter of an appropriate bride for Niki. How many times have I thought—has every Russian thought—that if only the tsar had not sickened and died at age forty-nine, how different the future might have been. If we had even one more year together, I thought then, like a simpleton, perhaps Niki would have gone to the tsar with my name instead of Alix’s. The doctors had diagnosed Alexander III with nephritis, brought on by the injuries sustained in that train wreck six years before that had almost enthroned his brother Vladimir and made Vladimir’s wife croon, So close, so close. Alexander III had, like Atlas, held up the world, or in this case, the heavy ceiling of the dining car to keep it from crushing his children, and was now paying the price of a mortal trying to do the job of a Titan.

  It seemed even the days shortened themselves in mourning. I remember how, at a certain hour, the shadows seemed to race across the streets and canals toward my house and then engulf it. All the soft white spokes of the blossoms and the green leaves had long fallen from the beech trees, and they lay sodden and rotting beneath the snow. The heavy white branches of the trees crept so close to my bedroom window the ends of them scratched against the glass as if a woman were perched out there, clawing to get in. One night, waiting for the tsarevich, I sat at the table in the long narrow dining room and stared at the oak paneling that ran from floor to ceiling. The nicks and swirls and grain of it seemed to assemble themselves into the features of my father’s face, and once I had seen it as such I could not unsee it, could not dismantle his likeness from the striations of the wood. I stood and still I saw him. I moved left and right and his eyes followed me, and then, as I stood in the dining-room doorway, it seemed the full figure of my father emerged from the paneled wall, and grained just like the wood, but diaphanous, stood there, gazing at me sadly. But when I jumped up to touch him, running my hands over the paneling, I couldn’t find his shape—all was smooth.