The dowager empress told Niki to cancel the evening’s ball, but Niki’s uncles insisted he and Alix attend while the corpses lay in piles in makeshift morgues—or lay where they had been stuffed, the ones that could not be carted away in time, beneath the field’s imperial viewing stand. Niki’s mother had a keen political nose—we had that in common, I would have gotten along with her well—but the uncles said their French hosts had trucked in tapestries and chandeliers and fountains and gold plates for the event and France was Russia’s most important ally and sentimentality was useless. At this point in his reign, with only seventeen months as tsar, Niki was still the obedient nephew who heeded the uncles who had been serving the empire for longer than he had been alive. His father might have considered them incompetent fools, but Niki felt there was no one less competent or more foolish than he. He was terrified of making a mistake. Every bureaucratic or ministerial appointment suggested to him by his father’s—and therefore his own—minister of the interior, Sergei Witte, was met with the same response—I shall ask my mother—which had M. Witte laughing up his sleeve at Niki. Still, to make up his own mind and make it up badly was the greater humiliation. He was so young, so young, we have to forgive him. Even at the ball itself, when Sergei Mikhailovich and his brothers took Niki aside and urged him to walk out with them, telling him it was not too late to cancel all the balls and performances and reviews and to hold instead a religious service, Niki, spying the steely faces of his uncles Vladimir, Paul, Alexei, and Sergei Alexandrovich, could not bring himself to do what his own conscience dictated. The hot-tempered Potato Club walked out, minus one, creating a stir Niki was afraid to be part of, the uncles hissing after the young men, Traitors. Sergei abandoned him to those uncles, whose conservative policies Niki would follow, to his detriment, for the next two decades. Better Sergei should have linked arms with Niki and reasoned with him in the soft way Sergei reasoned with me when I was wrongheaded. But, no, Sergei left him, and Niki stayed to dance for three hours that night in the foyer of the Sheremetiev Palace sweetened by one hundred thousand fresh roses from the South of France. Niki held a luncheon the next day at the Petrovsky Palace. He attended a state dinner that night at the Hall of the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky. He danced again at the governor-general’s ball. And then he led the military review of sixty thousand men from the cavalry, artillery, and infantry. The review was held on Khodynka Field.
Nicholas had longed to model himself after his favorite tsar, Alexei I, Alexei the Peaceful. But by the time he returned to Petersburg, the people were already calling him Nicholas the Bloody.
Have you seen the coronation Easter egg Fabergé made that year for the wife of Nicholas the Bloody? Its golden shell, wrapped in gold netting, opens up, and a miniature of a gold and red imperial coach slides gently from its nest of gold velvet. Fabergé made fifty-six Easter eggs for the tsars before he fled Russia in 1918. Alexander III ordered one each year for his empress beginning in 1884, and after his death, Niki ordered two a year, one for his mother and one for Alix, each egg reflective of a momentous occasion of the reign—a coronation, the canonizing of a saint, the completion of the Trans-Siberian railroad, the Romanov tercentenary—and if there was no great event to commemorate, then an egg full of whimsy and delight. The Easter egg of 1916 during the war looked like death—the gray steel shell, a grenade more than an egg, was elevated by four bullet casings, the sheen of the egg embellished with the double headed eagle in gold, the tsar’s miter-shaped crown fixed at the top where the grenade’s pin sat. Inside, a miniature portrait on a miniature easel depicted the tsar and the tsarevich at the front consulting with the commanders of the army, a bleak leafless tree in the background, the sky gray and cloudy. The Easter eggs Fabergé made for the year 1917 were undeliverable: by then Niki had abdicated and was imprisoned with his family at Tsarskoye Selo. But Fabergé still sent him the bill.
I know I dream of a Russia that has disappeared, a Russia that exists not / On the map, nor yet in space, as wrote Marina Tsvetaeva in exile here, a prominent poet in Moscow, but who, like me, lost both her country and her audience after the revolution. I saw her last at the funeral for Prince Volkonsky in 1938 at the Orthodox Church on the rue François Gérard, standing off to the side, speaking to no one, no one speaking to her. She had rallied behind the Provisional Government that deposed the tsar and no monarchist in Paris would ever forget it. After that, she returned with her family to Moscow. There were those of us who did this—who found our loss of purpose and place here so great that it overpowered our fear and distrust of a Russia under Lenin or Stalin. Yes, she returned, as did others—the composer Prokofiev, the writer Gorky—Stalin loved those artists, gave them apartments and dachas and prizes: the Stalin Prize! But Tsvetaeva found herself a pariah there, her poetry too sympathetic to the old regime and to the Provisional Government that had briefly replaced it. It was as if she had been tainted, as well, by her time in the West. Without Stalin’s protective embrace, people were afraid to be seen with her, to speak to her there. Her husband, who had fought for the Whites, was arrested and shot shortly after their return on suspicion of spying for the West. Her daughter, Alya, was sent to serve seven years in a labor camp for the same reason. Eventually, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. She had found the answer to her own question, the one she asked in “Poems to a Son”: Can one return to a / House which has been razed?
No, one cannot return, except in dream or memory.
So let’s return, by memory.
The Scepter and the Orb
By 1897 Niki and Alix had two children, Olga and Tatiana. You would think, after witnessing such a spectacle of consummation, I would have given up loving Niki, but though the country had twice celebrated the birth of daughters, with hundred-and-one-gun salutes, the country was only as happy as the birth of a daughter could make it, and therein lay my hope. What if Alix could give Niki only daughters? The country had reacted with disappointment, as Niki must have, especially the second time, when the guns stopped firing just past one hundred instead of going on to a glorious three hundred that announced a son and heir had been born. Niki needed an heir, but in lieu of one, the family used its daughters’ beauty as bait to secure the love of the people, distributing photographs, postcards, and calendars with images of Niki’s daughters dressed in their petticoats, in bonnets trimmed with fur, and jackets buttoned up to fur collars, and as they grew older, photographs of them dressed in pearls and lace, their long hair partly tied up with ribbons, partly hanging down their backs and shoulders. The beautiful faces of these children who had been born in the purple inspired worship: the Cossacks who guarded them saved as holy icons each flower or stone the girls offered them as little gifts. But pretty as those children were, they were not boys. And though Elizabeth Petrovna had been empress, as had two Catherines, and though Victoria sat on England’s throne, none of Niki’s daughters could be heir. For the past one hundred years in Russia only men had inherited the scepter and the orb. Paul I had decreed this, his laws born out of hatred for his mother, Catherine the Great, the German princess who married Tsar Peter III and then had him murdered, seized the throne for herself, and sidelined her son by sending him to a provincial palace from which he was not liberated until her death in 1796 on the way to the toilet. Then she left him a letter that told him the tsar had not even been his father, that he was the son of her lover, an officer—a letter of dubious veracity, for Catherine had shared her husband’s bed for a while before denying it to him, this letter designed as a final stratagem to undermine her son even after her death. And it did rattle him: Was he not even a Romanov? For in a country with a king, birth is everything. Paul resealed his mother’s letter and kept it with instructions that it was to be read only by each new emperor over the next hundred years. So Niki knew he needed a son. Alix’s sisters had all had boys. Niki’s sister Xenia would have six of them. And yet Alix could bear the tsar only daughters.
When I walked in the Summer Garden and saw the wet nurses stro
lling there in their gold-embroidered sarafans—blue silk or cotton beneath the gold thread if they were nursing a boy—their breasts hung with necklaces of amber beads that kept sickness away, I thought: If only I had given Nicholas a son. And when I saw a little boy play with a hoop and ball or ride the swings in the summer and in the winter take a sled down the great ice hill built at Admiralty Place, I thought: I should not have worn the beeswax cup my sister taught me how to wear to keep my father and mother from dying of shame lest I have a baby. And during the week before Lent, I would have stuffed this son with blini soaked in butter. And just before Easter, I would have baked him little cakes shaped like the larks who bring with them warm weather, planting in the dough raisins for eyes. I would have bought him red-painted eggs and chocolate eggs and wooden toys, a miniature wooden palace with a matching coach of wood, tin, and glass waiting out front. At Christmas he would have had gingerbread cookies and a bear marionette who danced when his string was pulled and a live bird in a cage. Sergei Mikhailovich was a good courier of Niki’s secrets and of mine, but a son would have been better than a courier—a snare. If I had had a son, Niki would feel compelled to see him, and therefore, me. The first Christmas after Niki became engaged to Alix I went between Christmas and New Year’s to have my fortune told, as was the custom: young girls always want to know who their husbands will be. I wanted to know something else. Not, What is his name? But, When will I see him again? And yet all the tricks of the fortune-tellers told me nothing. The candle melted into a bowl of water but formed no discernible shape. The piece of burning paper held up to the wall made not the shadow of a figure, but a blur. The mirrors reflected into one another only empty walls. The passerby in the street was a mute and could not tell me if he was a Sergei, an Alexander, or a Nicholas.
But the portents did not say Niki would not come back to me. They just could not say exactly when. The only way I could keep him thinking of me was by making a commotion at the theater. And so, I made a commotion. Many of them.
Magnificent Mathilde
I had occasion to, as Prince Volkonsky was appointed the new director of the Imperial Theaters. M. Vzevolozhsky had left the post to become director of the Hermitage Museum, to take up residence in a cramped office there with a view of the Neva through his small windows, charged with the care of the statues, objets, paintings created by the great European masters and collected over the centuries by the Romanovs—which left us at the Maryinsky to the abrasive Volkonsky, who immediately suggested I share my role in La Fille mal gardée with one of those imported Italians. I refused. The role was mine and a Maryinsky ballerina did not share her roles with anyone. When Volkonsky insisted that Henrietta Grimaldi dance the role, I complained to Sergei, who first spoke to Volkonsky and then, when he did not get satisfaction, sent him a blistering letter, saying, By wronging Mathilde Felixovna, you insult me! and promptly called the tsar who was visiting his mother’s family in Denmark. Niki had the minister of the court, the all-powerful Baron Freedericks, send a cipher telegram to Volkonsky with his order not to give my role to Grimaldi. What other dancer but me could complain of her treatment to the tsar, for as you remember, it is very high up to the tsar! No other dancer, and that is the truth.
And Volkonsky was from an old Russian family, the grandson of the Decembrist Prince Sergei Volkonsky, one of the guards who confronted the Iron Tsar, Nicholas I, in the Senate Square in 1825 in an effort to unseat him and was sent to Siberia for thirty years for his trouble. The Volkonskys had served the throne for generations, and yet the tsar sided with me, not with him. You would think that the great Volkonsky would have learned his lesson about who was the greater, but he was new to theater and had accepted the position only to please his father, and soon enough we locked horns again. When I balked at wearing a hooped petticoat beneath my skirt for La Camargo, explaining that such a billowing petticoat beneath the Louis XV–style costume would dwarf little me, Volkonsky insisted I wear it. Well, I did not! He even sent the theater manager to my dressing room before the performance to once again demand that I wear the hooped petticoat. I refused! By this time, every dancer in the company and half the audience out front had heard of our battle, l’affair of the hoops! I appeared on the stage in the requisite costume—and who would even know that I had left the petticoat behind had there not been such a fuss? But when Volkonsky fined me a trifling amount of rubles for an unauthorized costume change, a deliberate provocation, posting the notice on the hallway board as if I were some Near the Water girl, I wrote to the tsar myself, and not in French this time, and the tsar canceled the fine, ordering the director to post that notice on the board. At which point Prince Volkonsky resigned his post, and I became known as Magnificent Mathilde.
And I was magnificent—both powerfully connected and powerfully talented. At twenty-seven, I had mastered all the specialties of those Italian ballerinas who had performed in Peter for the last hundred years, even Legnani’s astonishing series of thirty-two fouettés, one leg whipping the body round like a top over and over and over. And so I asked the tsar to clear the theater of Zambelli, Legnani, Grimaldi, and their like. We didn’t need them anymore. The theater had me. And I wanted to be the one onstage when the tsar came to the Maryinsky on his Sunday nights.
Yes, I kept the tsar very busy with matters of the ballet.
And he was also kept very busy, apparently, with matters of the bedroom, for in 1899 the tsar had yet another daughter, his third, Marie. Tant pis. So much the worse. So much the worse for Alix.
In 1900 I was asked to dance at the tsar’s private theater, the Hermitage Theater in the museum attached to the Winter Palace, for the first time. Was the juxtaposition of the birth of Marie and my invitation to the Hermitage a coincidence? I didn’t think so. How many daughters could a tsar endure? This intimate theater had been built by Catherine the Great, who had her gilt and upholstered armchair dragged right up to the rim of the orchestra pit to better enjoy the spectacles her artists had concocted just for her. Tsar Nicholas II and his family sat before the stage in the gilt armchairs now and the court of 1900 sat behind them in the wide semicircular pews to watch the private entertainments created for their pleasure alone. The ballets performed there were always trifles devised for the occasion and danced only by the finest artists in the company, its soloists and ballerinas, never by the corps de ballet. Yet I had never been invited to the Hermitage before. But now, I supposed, with all those Italians sent home, my name stood at the top of the list and Alix could not draw a line through it without looking petty. Or perhaps Niki expressly requested my presence, in which case, she could not say no.
The stage of the Hermitage Theater was a small one, the wings crowded with wooden wheels to raise the scenery and with bellows to blow wind or smoke, but from it I knew I would be able to see the royal family at close range. And then, after the performance, we artists would be invited to sup with the imperial family and their guests in one of the Hermitage picture galleries. It was like being stabbed with a steak knife to hear those dinners described by the dancers lucky enough to have been invited here before: the caviar on shaved ice, the hot stuffed mushroom caps, the smoked salmon and sturgeon, the salted cucumbers, sausages, blini, the lobster bisque, the steaming borscht, the liver pâté of the Lota fish, the filet mignon, suckling pig, roasted partridge and quail with croutons, lamb in cream sauce, venison and veal, the pyramids of pineapples, watermelons, grapes, strawberries and cherries, the Italian fruit cake flavored with violets, frosted bowls of chocolate, vanilla and fruit-flavored ice creams and sorbets, pastries and tortes, the decanters of whiskey, cognac, sherry, champagne, and cassis, the silver jugs of lemonade and milk flavored with almonds and the vodka flavored with lemon peel or cranberries. At the end of the meal, the tsar would dispense a small gift, a gold medallion, the imperial eagle stamped on the back, to each of the artists.
Yes, those close enough to the tsar to hold out their hands found them filled with gold and it had been that way for four hundred year
s, though by the end of the year all the expenses of his court depleted the treasury and the tsar was out of money. But these customs of the old Russia in which the tsar stood absolute and all wealth flowed through him were customs Niki loved. He loved the story of Catherine the Great’s standing order for a sentry perpetually at post in the meadow. He loved that by right he had first pick of the pelts, vodka, timber, and metals hacked from the mines of Siberia. In 1900, he even debated changing court dress to the long caftans of the fourteenth century and changing the spelling of words to that of Old Muscovy. He wanted to turn back the clock even as the world was hurtling forward. In medieval Russia, custom once kept the tsar and his empress shielded from the people, even from their own boyare. They observed court ceremonies from their terem, through secret windows, the mysterious, unseen source of power, and as Niki did not like to be stared at and Alix did not like to appear at court, perhaps a terem would have suited them both. But they came to the little theater at the Hermitage and let us all look.
The True Memoirs of Little K Page 12