The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  But Niki had no intention of hearing the pleas of the striking ironworkers and the workers of the electrical plants, had no intention of receiving this crowd. And why should he? Walking in the wilds of Sarov with his Rus peasants, his humble little brothers, he would allow them to touch his hands or kiss his shadow or tell him their troubles, but why should he have to receive angry rabble at the doors of the palace, especially rabble corrupted by socialists and intellectuals who cared nothing for the peasants and used them as tools for their own ends, ends the peasants knew nothing about?

  Vova called me to his balcony when he heard the first of what sounded to him like a big parade, and I joined him there to watch the procession cross the Troitsky Bridge toward the palace. I pointed out to Vova how the men and women and children carried icons and portraits of the tsar and flags and banners, including one that stated, disconcertingly, Soldiers, Do Not Shoot at the People!, which the children at the front of the column gripped in their small hands. Do Not Shoot at the People. Posters had been pasted up around Petersburg inveighing against the march, and cannons had been placed in the palace square and cavalry assembled in front of the palace and in the Alexandrovsky Gardens, and twelve thousand soldiers had been posted along the streets, on Nevsky Prospekt, on the Troitsky Bridge, at the Neva Gate. The line of people marched as solemnly as a church processional of Holy First Communicants, past the soldiers and the Cossacks stationed along the bridge, while my skin began to tingle with foreboding. The Cossacks liked to kill and to kill at close range. Why do you think the tsar used them for his personal bodyguards? Bystanders at the edges of the bridge and the curbs of the street just beyond pulled their hats peaceably from their heads or crossed themselves as the column plowed past—after all, a priest carried a large cross at the head of the parade. The workers’ petition had been sent ahead to their tsar and was later printed in the papers: Sire, we come to thee to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished; we are oppressed, overburdened with excessive toil, contemptuously treated. We have reached that frightful moment when death is better than the prolongation of our unbearable sufferings. Batiushka, hear our plea.

  As Vova and I stood there, Vova dancing from the cold, I heard shots, the sounds faint but a fat number of them, and Vova began to pantomime the firing of an imaginary gun. I thought, Surely no one would be firing on those women and children, these men holding portraits of the tsar, but I called to my maid anyway to bring Vova inside, and he went off wailing that he hated me, that he wanted to stay and see, he wanted to see the people. I learned later that as the marchers approached the Narva Gates, a squadron of cavalry charged through that green arch that bore the figures of medieval Russian knights in their helmets, boots, and armor. And when the marchers still continued to press their way forward—for how easily can a crowd turn itself back?—remember Khodynka Field—the infantry pointed its rifles at the marchers, fired off warning shots, and then aimed into the crowd, suddenly, without any further delay. And who ordered this shooting of the people? Grand Duke Vladimir, Emperor Vladimir, monitoring the situation in his tall polished boots, brother of Alexander III, commander in chief of the Preobrazhensky Guards and of the St. Petersburg military district, father-disciplinarian of wayward dancers. To such a monarchist no demonstration by the people was permissible, no dissent tolerated. Hadn’t I learned that myself? Though the crowd began to scatter and stampede in confusion, the cavalry continued firing and like a shock wave from a bomb, the disorder spread outward from the gates toward the Troitsky Bridge. From Vova’s balcony, I watched the excitable Cossacks drive their horses right into the crowd stalled there and bring their whips and sabers down upon the hats of the men and the kerchiefs of the women and the blades split the face of one man into two faces and he fell with his faces onto the street. At that I bolted into the house where my son was waiting to flail at me with his fists and cry as if he had missed the sight of a pack of Siberian wolves skulking past his door. I held him, a small angry puddle, in my arms while outside in the pandemonium, people tried to flee back the way they came, back down Nevsky Prospekt, pressing themselves into the Alexandrovsky Gardens as if to hide among the trees or lose their pursuers on the garden paths, and the Cossacks and the mounted Guards cut through the procession and then back again, shooting so wildly that children, who, like Vova, had found themselves some high perch by which to view the parade, some tree or garden statue or top of fence, were felled like small beasts. In the middle of this chaos, Father Gapon, that yourodivi, that idiot, stood in the palace square in disbelief, his big crucifix at his feet, hundreds of bodies bleeding into the snow that stretched white and wide into the distance all around him, and cried out, There is no God. There is no tsar.

  Ah, but there was a Tsar. He was at Tsarskoye Selo, playing dominoes. And I thought, Perhaps Niki will not do as well with all this as I had believed.

  This day came to be known as Bloody Sunday, and the bleeding from it lasted all that year of 1905, the blood being all the loudly expressed dissatisfactions of the entire country—not only the factory laborers who requested decent hours and housing, but also the citizens angered by the costly war with Japan, the peasants who had survived the famine of the last decade and now claimed a right to the land they tenanted, the intelligenty who demanded civil rights and who, along with a few liberal noblemen, called for a national parliament, a national zemstvo in which they all, not only the tsar, had a voice. It seemed the whole country began holding meetings and coming up with manifestos to send to the tsar and his ministers, and to the Winter Palace were sent sixty thousand petitions, like the cahiers, the letters of grievance, sent by the French people to King Louis XVI in 1789, and all these letters asked the tsar for reform. The petitions for a cabinet of ministers and a Land Assembly of representatives of all the tsar’s subjects came from the tsar’s own ministers; the petitions for the redistribution of land from the squires to the peasants came from, of course, the peasants; and the petition for a Union of Unions in which every worker would belong to an association concerned with political freedom—lawyers, professors, clerks, bookkeepers, teachers, Jews, women, railroad employees, peasants—came from the liberals, the intelligenty. And these petitions were followed by action. More than a hundred thousand ironworkers and electrical workers struck spontaneously later in January, and once again I watched men march over the Troitsky Bridge, ten abreast, and for a few days we had no light. The schools had to be closed in February. In September the printers struck and so for weeks there were no newspapers, rail workers struck and there were no trains and no telegraph. So many of the previous revolutionary troublemakers had already been sent or had fled abroad to avoid arrest that a new cadre of leaders had emerged—the writer Gorky and the nobleman Prince Lvov and others like him who had long sought to help the peasantry and advocated reform. They wrote articles and gave speeches, and soon the agitation in the cities spread to the countryside. In Russia’s provinces, in Tomsk, Simteropol, Tver, and Odessa, the great agricultural swath, the peasants cut down their squires’ forests, took their hay, destroyed whatever machinery they couldn’t load onto their carts, and stole their squires’ crystal and porcelain and paintings and statues. The peasants of one village hacked a piano to bits and divided among themselves its ivory keys. Other manor houses were burned, their libraries and tapestries and grand pianos and oriental carpets turned to ash—and the houses they didn’t burn, they desecrated, squatting to leave piles of excrement on the carpets and floors, smearing the wallpaper with their filthy hands. We were here in your house. The squires fled to the cities to petition the court for help, while in the countryside the skies turned ocher from the fires and the peasants like plowhorses pulled their loaded wooden carts of stolen goods across the fields. In Moscow the students at the university burned portraits of the tsar and hung red flags from the roofs of the buildings. Even in Latvia, in Finland, in Georgia, in my own Poland, there were strikes and barricades and street fighting from the people who had never enjoyed, but had s
imply endured, Russia’s dominion. Yes, Russia’s old unrest of the 1820s had returned, suddenly, and with a vengeance.

  During this terrible year, Niki took Alix, Alexei, and the girls and retreated into the routine of the imperial year—winter at Tsarskoye, spring at Livadia, summer at Peterhof, Poland in autumn for the hunt, back to Tsarskoye for the long Russian winter. But in retreating from his people, he also retreated from me. He had not been seen in the capital since the Feast of the Epiphany. Might he not forget I existed, and as long as Alix’s son remained healthy, forget my son’s existence, as well? For not all hemophiliacs died young. Prince Leopold of England had lived to thirty-one. It was possible my son and I might wait here for thirty years or more before Niki turned his head toward us again. By then Niki and Vova would be strangers! Niki and I would be strangers and I an old woman! Away from the theater, sequestered in this palace and by social position, Vova and I were invisible to the court and therefore to the tsar. And I had never been invisible. And so, in February 1905, I determined to return to the Maryinsky stage. As I had already completed my obligatory ten-year term as dancer and therefore had repaid the treasury my debt of free schooling, I could now negotiate a better contract for myself with the court minister, asking fees per performance in addition to an annual salary. And I knew the tsar would approve any fee I asked. As my father had said, from my art came my power, though this is not exactly what he meant.

  In my short absence, though, I had gotten out of shape and put on weight, and so I began to fast and to practice, which I did privately, at home. One trick I had was to set four chairs about me and test my precision and my nerve by executing grand battements without tipping over a chair or breaking a leg—and when I thought I was ready, I met my sister at Liteiny Prospekt, in my father’s ballroom, where I danced for her the variations from all the ballets in my repertoire and where she pronounced me fit, for of course, that was what I wanted to hear. But I returned to the theater in triumph only to find that life there had gone on without me—the curtain rose, the stagehands lowered and raised the scenery, old dancers retired and younger students graduated from the school to take their places, Pavlova, Karsavina, Fokine, and Nijinsky, who would all eventually make their names with Les Ballets Russes. You’ve heard of them because they danced in the West—but my name, perhaps, is a mystery, for I always preferred to dance in Russia, in Peter, for the tsar. But worst of all, my rivals had been assigned to what had been my roles alone in my ballets. At the Imperial Theaters, a ballerina did not share roles. Once a dancer had made her debut in a ballet retired by another, that ballet belonged to her until she retired. While I was gone measuring my head for my crown, my old rival Olga Preobrajenska had inherited my part of Lise in La Fille mal gardée, and upon my homecoming, I, of course, demanded back my old role. But Colonel Teliakovsky, a rather straitlaced boob who had never really liked me for my debauchery with the Romanovs, and who once walked in on me as I sat chatting with Sergei Mikhailovich in my dressing room, wearing only a robe, and who raised his upper lip as if he had seen a pile of offal, and who in 1924, like the rest of the exiles, would write his memoirs and in those pages would slander me unforgivably not only as a woman, but also as a dancer, calling me vulgar and trite and describing my beautifully formed legs as fat—yes, we had all lost our country, our tsar, our theater, and yet we continued our ridiculous rivalries about which no one cared but ourselves—this Colonel Teliakovsky refused to let me reclaim my role. I suppose he thought with the loss of the tsar and Grand Duke Sergei, I had become powerless, a puff-ball of tulle easily blown about by his hoary breath. He might have to let me back into the theater but he thought he did not have to schedule me to dance. I could have gone to the tsar but I did not wish him to see me as a supplicant but as his equal, his consort! So I took matters into my own duplicitous hands. Literally. Before the first scene of Fille one night, I, descending from my artists’ box and chatting gaily with the dancers backstage, surreptitiously unlatched the door of the chicken cage. You know the ballet Fille? Set in a provincial French village of the 1750s, it opens in the barnyard of Madame Simone and her daughter Lise. The use of live animals on the stage is gone now, but in the early 1900s in Russia we often used the furred, feathered, and hooved. Painted backdrops were not enough enchantment for the tsar and his court. We employed horses for Sleeping Beauty, a goat in Esmeralda, chickens in Fille—horses decked out in embroidered blankets and plumed bridles, a goat led about by a braided rope with a bell on its collar, chickens pecking at seeds in their cages in a French barnyard. For animals more difficult to obtain—like monkeys—we used children in costume from the school. Why, the great choreographer George Balanchine, then little Georgy Balanchivadze, swung from tree to tree in a monkey suit in La Fille du Pharaon while I took aim at him with my pretty bow.

  I was safely ensconced in my box for Act I when one of the chickens thumped against his wire door and open it flew, followed a moment after by an eruption of squawks, feathers, and claws, while the stagehands and some of the dancers dressed as village boys chased the birds in circles and then, snatching them up by the neck or feet, or tucking them under their elbows, attempted to shove the reluctant chickens back into their cages. How the audience laughed! Olga stood flat-footed to watch the chaos, the length of blue ribbon with which she had been ready to rope her beau Colin to her hanging slack in her hands. My little trick had so unnerved her that the next divertissement in which she and Colin make pretty patterns with that ribbon and wind one another up in it was made all a ruin of knots, one from which my old partner Nikolai Legat could not shake himself, and all that while the laughter from the audience continued. Don’t click your teeth. A loose chicken, a snipped thread that held closed a bodice, a small price to pay to ensure the audience saw whom they really wanted to see. By such tricks and capers, I retrieved my old roles one by one, and I waited for Niki to appear in the imperial box to see me perform them, to remember how bright, how lively, how pleasing I was. How loyal.

  But as the season progressed and Niki did not make an appearance at the theater, the revolution did. Inside the theaters, believe it or not, the revolution was also felt in its way. The actors and dancers and musicians began to agitate, just like the feverish workers in the streets, though their demands were different. Students at the music conservatory asked for monthly opera productions and a library, and they wanted M. Auer to stop hitting his students over the head with his bow. Rimsky-Korsakov, my old landlord until the tsar bought his house right out from under him, was dismissed as director of the conservatory for supporting the students, and as if that wasn’t enough, the tsar also barred his music from the Imperial Theaters. From my brother I heard that dancers held furtive meetings in the apartments of their disapproving parents, and these were, of course, the younger dancers, the newest graduates from the school with the least seniority. What these children wanted—to rule the theater by committee—was an absurdity. Petitions circulated all through the schoolrooms and the dressing rooms, calling for freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the printed word. As if they could write! Why, one day a little student from the school, white bow in her hair, proffered a paper for my signature at a rehearsal for Sleeping Beauty, of all ballets, created by Petipa and Tchaikovsky as a paean to the monarchy! The children had prepared a petition demanding lessons in applying theatrical makeup, better instruction in academics—and the older of them wanted to wear their own cuffs and collars with the school uniforms. Ridiculous. Of course, I sent the child off with a pinch. The dancers themselves, rather than the director or the ballet maître, wanted to decide what ballets would be done and who would dance them, what salaries would be paid and how many days they would dance. Of course, I had been for many years deciding those things for myself, but the difference was I had earned that right—I was a decade on the stage and I was La Kschessinska. One could count in months how long these children had been dancing for the tsar. They weren’t electricians like the workers at the Petersburg elec
trical plant and therefore could not, as those workers had, plunge the city into darkness. And they were not laborers at the Moscow waterworks and therefore could not keep water from filling the pipes. But they could try to make the theaters go dark. At the Alexandrinsky Theater the actors threatened to abandon their lines and instead lecture their aristocratic audience about the need for governmental reform before striding offstage. But the revolutionary actors could not get enough of the other actors to agree to this. At the Maryinsky, committee members barged into the dressing rooms before curtain and began haranguing the corps de ballet, busy gluing on their wigs, to refuse to dance the matinee, to answer the obstinacy of the theater administration with an obstinacy of their own—but these new committees did not have the loyalty of the entire company and the dancers yawned and the matinee performance of La Dame de pique went on as usual. Even my brother Josef, radicalized by all the strikes and marches and all those pamphlets and petitions, took part in these actions, at great embarrassment to my father and me. And when I heard that the imperial family planned to remain at Tsarskoye Selo for the entire social season, I decided I myself had had enough of this strange and desolate season and of the theater to which I had returned with such great hopes. I took Vova and, with my parents, retreated to our family estate, Krasnitzky, for the summer. My brother, of course, stayed in the capital.