Perhaps because of his height, Nikolai Sergeevich seemed to have limited potential as an exclusively classical dancer and was better known as a mime-actor and a general ballet régisseur than as an agile executor of entrechats and tours fouéttés. Apart from the title role in Pharaoh’s Daughter and Claude Frollo, his principal stage personae were those of the Grand Duke in Giselle and other characterizations in which he had little to do but swagger imperiously about the stage in ornate regalia, striking a variety of commandeering poses and miming orders to his assembled peons (“Unleash the slaves!” or “Let our warring parties come to peace!”). In sum, Nikolai Sergeevich strikes me as a performer who mostly got by in his chosen vocation—as did a few other members of my family—through his charm and staggering good looks, his imposing presence, and his shrewd capacity for just plain hustling. He may well have been a protégé of Marius Petipa, the French choreographer who for decades was the chief ballet master of the Marinsky, where Nikolai Sergeevich served for a few years as principal director. For they retired from the Marinsky in the same year, 1903, when a new administration took over.
It was on her father’s side of the family that Tatiana claimed descendance from Genghis Khan, and this contention, too, might have been based on a minuscule ground of fact. Her paternal grandmother, Sofia Petrovna Iacovleff, née Kuzmin, the cherished babushka who was the great love of my first eight years, was born in the province of Samara, just northeast of the Caspian Sea and due west of Kazakhstan. Having belonged until the sixteenth century to the Genghisid Dynasty, it is an area which still bears such strongly Oriental, un-Russian names as Sagiz, Makat, Chelkar—names that display a powerful influence of the Tartar culture. “Very noble family,” “direct descendants of Genghis Khan”: That was my mother all over—to desire both the aristocratic pedigree and the freedom to be a barbarian. So, yes, there is a chance in a million that we were descended from the Khan, and my great-grandmother’s brother, Piotr Kuzmin, did serve for a few brief years as Marshall of the Nobility in the nearby province of Riazan.
My great-grandmother—Babushka—who seems to have been a powerhouse of a girl, showed great promise in her studies and was given far more latitude in her choice of vocation than most nineteenth-century young women in the eastern Russian provinces. Having displayed a particular aptitude in mathematics, she attended university at St. Petersburg. Family legend has it that she was the first woman in Russia ever to receive a Ph.D. in math and that as she came down from the podium at her graduation ceremony, degree in hand, angry male academics protesting her intrusion into their ranks pelted her with tomatoes. Reserving her mathematical talent for domestic purposes, Sofia Petrovna soon married an architect and engineer named Evgeny Alexeevitch Iacovleff and bore him the following children:
St. Petersburg, early 1890s, the Iacovleff children with their parents. Right to left: Alexis, Tatiana’s father; Alexandre, the future painter; Alexandra (Sandra); Vera.
My grandfather, Alexis, who followed in his father’s footsteps, also becoming an architect-engineer, and a prizewinning designer of state theaters;
My great-aunt Alexandra (Aunt Sandra), a gifted contralto who made her operatic debut in 1916 singing the role of the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades and whose nurturing affection, like Babushka’s, was one of the treasures of my early childhood;
My great-uncle Alexandre (Uncle Sasha), a legendary explorer who after the revolution became one of the two or three most eminent artists to emerge in Paris’s Russian émigré community and who played a central role in my mother’s life;
My great-aunt Vera, the second born, was the only one of the siblings who never accomplished anything of note, having married, at the age of twenty-two, a German fertilizer tycoon whom she had met while vacationing with her parents in the French Alps in 1906.
The four Iacovleff children were all born and brought up in their parents’ spacious apartment on Gagarinskaya Embankment, off Nevsky Prospect. And it is precisely there, in her beloved grandmother’s living room, that my mother’s earliest memory is set. She is about five, and she is—guess what—posing for her portrait. Uncle Sasha is the artist, and she is wearing a flouncy white lace dress of Paquin design. He is telling her to sit still, and she remembers hearing those words while seeing the Neva glimmering through her grandmother’s windows.
In her next recollected memory, Mother and her younger sister, Ludmila or “Lila,” are in Vologda, 170 kilometers or so east of St. Petersburg, where their father has been sent to supervise the construction of a government theater. She remembers a particular place in her parents’ majestic house, a long hall with waxed floors on which she liked to fall down and slide. She also recalls streets covered with snowdrifts, pigeons on the snow, the family driving in their own carriage, the freezing temperatures, the winter coat with matching chinchilla-trimmed muff she was bundled into when taken outside—all the Iacovleff girls’ clothes, like their mother’s, were sent for from Paris. Tatiana described her mother, Lyubov Nikolaevna, as coquettish, elegant, prodigiously talented in languages and music and particularly in dancing, a gift she’d inherited from her father, Nikolai Sergeevich Aistov. She also recalled her mother, more warily, as being very flirtatious and charming with her admirers but aloof with her own family, and this maternal coolness may well have affected, eventually, Tatiana’s relations with me.
Then in 1913, when Mother was seven years old, her father won an architectural competition, and the family—attended, as ever, by a German governess, a maid, a cook, a coachman—made a big move to the town of Penza, some three hundred kilometers southeast of Moscow, where my grandfather was assigned to build another theater. My grandfather seemed to have loved the most up-to-date technology. He was the first person in Penza to own an automobile, and in 1914 he even bought his own airplane, which he named Mademoiselle. “He had a pilot’s license and flew over meadows, frightening cows,” my mother recollected seven decades later. Peasants protested to the local authorities that my grandfather’s flights so terrified the cows that they didn’t produce any milk. But the governor of the province, who was smitten with my grandmother, settled the incident, and my grandfather continued his flights. “One of these days the Master is going to fall,” peasants would say when they saw him flying.
Tatiana, center, with her sister, Ludmila, and her father, Alexis Iacovleff, in 1915. Penza, Russia.
Life soon grew difficult for Tatiana and her sister. In 1915—they were then nine and seven years old—their parents were divorced. Their father left for America, allegedly because he had invented a new brand of rubber for automobile tires that failed to obtain a patent in Russia but that he was promised in the United States. Soon thereafter, my grandmother married, en deuxième noces, a prosperous pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Vassily Kirillovich Bartmer, who lost all his money at the onset of the 1917 revolution. The family was left destitute, and their survival grew all the more precarious in 1921, when the famine affected southeastern Russia with particular savagery and Bartmer died of tuberculosis and malnutrition. Lyubov Nikolaevna tried to eke out a tiny income by opening a dancing school. The family apartment was requisitioned. The three women lived in one room, burning precious books for fuel. My mother remembered spending those days doing the rounds of open-air markets and thrift shops to sell whatever furniture and linens remained to them. Notwithstanding her extremely limited formal education—due to the revolution she had little schooling after the age of twelve—she had developed a very special gift that helped her to survive: she had a phenomenal talent for memorizing poetry, a skill much exalted in Russia, the honored status of which the revolution never altered. By the age of fourteen, she could recite literally hundreds of lines of Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok, and Mayakovsky, by heart. And upon the great famine of 1921, she helped her mother and sister survive by standing on street corners to recite poetry for groups of Red Army soldiers, receiving precious hunks of bread from them in return.
Tatiana’s mother, Lyubov Nikolaevna Ais
tova, the year of her marriage to Alexei Iacovleff, 1904.
The famine took its toll. In 1922, Tatiana contracted tuberculosis, probably caught from her stepfather. Her mother was soon remarried (“She wasn’t one to stay unmarried very long,” Tatiana commented acerbically) to a kind lawyer named Nikolai Alexandrovich Orlov, whom her daughters seemed to be very fond of and referred to in their letters as père. But Tatiana’s TB grew worse, and those of her relatives who had already settled in France—her uncle Alexandre, her Aunt Sandra, and Babushka—soon began the negotiations needed to obtain her a visa for France. Uncle Sasha finally obtained the proper papers with the help of the powerful industrialist André Citroën, and Lyubov Nikolaevna accompanied her daughter to Moscow to see her off on the train to Paris. I’ve often tried to imagine the two women’s states of mind upon this departure: brought up since the age of nine by an aloof, narcissistic single mother who twice in recent years had been on the prowl for a new husband, Tatiana does not seem to have been offered much maternal affection. I once asked her what she thought her mother’s feelings might have been when she stood at the train station in 1925, sending her daughter on to a new life in France: was it sorrow, I asked? Sorrow mingled with relief at knowing her child would be safe? Shrugging her shoulders, my mother looked at me coolly. “Nothing as complex as that,” she said. “Just one less mouth to feed.”
Tatiana with her grandmother, Babushka, upon her first Christmas in Paris, 1925.
So that is how Tatiana came to arrive in Paris, at the age of nineteen, “a gorgeous, unwashed savage,” as one of her kin described her when she stepped off the train, voicing her craving for the best clothes, the most brilliant parties and literary salons, and—a particular fixation that marks Russians to this day—a title of nobility. “All the communist garbage and en plus she already wanted to be a countess,” my great-aunt Sandra would comment when recalling her niece’s arrival.
After the frugality of postrevolutionary Soviet Russia, after her years of hunger and deprivation and of living in tiny communal rooms, even her grandmother’s modest three-bedroom apartment in Montmartre struck Tatiana as the dernier cri of luxury and comfort. “Babushka is so kind and tender, and fusses over me a great deal,” she wrote to her mother in her first ecstatic letter home.
She brings me cocoa in bed, and doesn’t let me get up until 11 o’clock…. The apartment is wonderful. French doors open onto the balcony. There are silk hangings in all the rooms—orange in my room, coffee-colored in the guest room, and golden, in aunt Sandra’s; there are marble fireplaces, and windows to the ceiling; the bathroom has hot water, and there’s a telephone. The kitchen has a gas stove, on which everything cooks in half an hour…. They had underwear ready for me, as well as linen, silk, and batiste dresses, an overcoat, and a white silk hat…. From my balcony I can see the Eiffel tower, which lights up at dusk. There are splendid fireworks, and advertisements spelling out whole phrases. I am very struck by Auntie. She’s really very beautiful, she clearly has a splendid voice, I’ve never heard another like it.
I’ve recently come to believe that those families that function most richly—those whose members draw most mutual inspiration from one another—are united by the memory of a radiantly benevolent forebear. Our family was blessed to have three such models: The relatives waiting for Tatiana in Paris were extraordinary human beings.
Babushka, the icon of our tribe! Her picture always stood within sight of my mother’s bed, as it still stands within sight of mine: firm, square jaw, crown of thick silver hair, eyes as determined as they were gentle. Throughout her life, she emanated an aura of goodness and serene optimism. The happiness of her marriage had been legendary in her St. Petersburg circles—whenever she went out to a dinner party with my great-grandfather, the couple dropped a note to the hostess ahead of time, asking to be seated next to each other. But beneath Babushka’s veneer of elegance and genteelness there was a seething energy, a will of iron. Widowed in her thirties—my great-grandfather died young of congestive heart failure, which for several generations has been a family curse—she had assumed the male role in a family of sybaritic men and single-handedly managed the family’s foundry business. Benevolence, keen intelligence and deep mysticism blended more harmoniously in her character than in that of any human being I have known. From the age of four on I spent at least one night per week at the flat she shared with her daughter, my great-aunt Sandra, delighting in the flutter of Babushka’s silks and mended laces, in the smells of verbena and rose water, dried apricots and steaming kasha, that imbued her rooms. I tyrannized her for hours into games of Durachki, “Little Idiots,” the simplistic diversion that is the first card game learned by any Russian child. Released from my governess’s tyrannical taboos, I ate kisel—the cranberry jelly that is a staple of the Russian diet—by the bowlful, tracing my initials on the gelatinous red surface with dribbles of thick, sweet condensed milk. I was also allowed to read my Jules Verne into the wee hours, relishing the fragrant triple benediction with which Babushka blessed me as she put me to sleep. Over the decades, the memory of her profound goodness and grace was perhaps the strongest bond that united me to my mother: whenever we had an argument, one of us would suddenly look up and exclaim, “What would Babushka say?” and the very recall of our revered mentor led us to fall into each other’s arms.
Tatiana’s aunt, the opera singer Alexandra (Sandra) Yakovleva, in the late 1920s.
I knew Babushka’s daughter, my equally cherished great-aunt Sandra, even better; for whereas my great-grandmother died in 1939, when I was eight, Sandra lived well into the 1970s. At the time Tatiana arrived in Paris, Sandra, a large, handsome woman of angelic disposition then in her early forties, had already had a tragic life. Her first husband, the father of her only daughter, Masha, was killed in action in the first year of World War I. She remarried a few years later and lost that second husband, also an officer with the czarist troops, during the revolution, when a group of Communist sailors threw him off the fortress of Kronstadt into the sea, feet tied with heavy weights. Shortly thereafter, in 1920, when she sought exile in Constantinople with Babushka and Masha, the latter died of scarlet fever. Having just received their visas for Paris, Babushka and Sandra wound their way alone to Paris via Dessau, Germany, where Sandra’s sister, my great-aunt Vera, had settled a few decades before. Their visit there was corroborated for me recently by Vera’s daughter, now eighty-seven, who reported that one of her earliest childhood memories concerns Sandra’s deep mourning for her daughter, the hours-long, uncontrollable bouts of weeping that overtook her during her stay.
But stoicism runs strong in the family. Upon arriving in Paris in 1922, where she and Babushka initially depended on the financial support of her brother Sasha, Sandra was able to resurrect her singing career. She was eventually offered the role of Aïda, in which she made a very successful debut at the Paris Opera in 1925, a few months before Tatiana’s arrival. For the next decade, she appeared in recitals and operas throughout western Europe and South America. A very partial listing of the thirty-nine leading roles in her repertory: La Juive, Tosca, Otello, Carmen, Siegfried, Tannhäuser, The Damnation of Faust, Salambo, Cavalleria Rusticana, Ruslan and Ludmila, Eugene Onegin, Aïda, Les Huguenots, and Die Walküre, the last three of which she could sing in five different languages; and of course Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, in which she had made her debut at the St. Petersburg Opera around 1916 in the role of the aging countess, a demanding contralto part that only a handful of singers in any one generation can handle. Aunt Sandra’s years as a young opera star in Russia yielded an anecdote that I bade her repeat innumerable times throughout my childhood: “I’d just sung Aïda in St. Petersburg, it was after a huge snowstorm,” she’d tell me, “I dressed in a rush to go to a grand bal, and as I waited for my carriage my escort made me laugh so hard that I pee-peed in my pants, the snow underneath me melted, and clouds of steam rose all around me.” Aunt Sandra standing in her finery by the banks of the frozen Neva,
suddenly swathed like a prophet in a tall column of smoke. Magic.
The Sandra who greeted Mother in Paris in 1925 could not have been very different from the Aunt Sandra whom I cherished during my childhood in 1930s Paris. Her most striking feature was her radiant operatic smile, which she claimed to maintain through the use of a pink dentifrice called Toreador. Majestically tall, like most Iacovleffs, and statuesque, she had dazzlingly milky skin, kind and melancholy brown eyes, and jet-black hair pulled back in a simple bun. Her tastes in music were adorably kitschy. She deemed Rimsky-Korsakov to be the greatest composer who ever lived, and her favorite opera was his Tale of the Invisible City of Kitej. She was totally unaffected, generous to a fault, trusting to the point of extreme naïveté, and endlessly affectionate, rechanneling her vast maternal energies toward any emotionally needy person who came along. She was also, like her mother, deeply Puritanical and once exclaimed, when she was told that her brother Sasha was having an affair with the dancer Anna Pavlova, “It can’t be true! Who’s ever heard of anyone having an affair with a married woman?”
The third member of the closely bonded family that welcomed Tatiana to Paris in 1925 was the intrepid, dashing explorer and artist, Uncle Sasha.
TWO
Uncle Sasha
Ever since I can remember, Uncle Sasha Iacovleff glowed in my mind with the aura of legend. For in my mother’s inevitably romanticized accounts he was a superman who had traveled to the most dangerous places on earth, wrestled with wild beasts in distant deserts, explored caves never before entered by any man. Thus the announcement “Uncle Sasha is coming to see you!” was bound to raise intense excitement. What struck me first as he entered my nursery, during the one visit I clearly remember, was his dancelike, feline walk and his exquisitely groomed goatee. There was something disquieting, in fact, about the sleekness of his physical perfection—as I reworked the memory in late adolescence, he reminded me of an inordinately perfect vase or a disturbingly beautiful archaic Greek kouros. His beard was so unfleshly and sculptural. His smell, as he bent down to kiss me, was that of an ethereally dry, dry verbena. It was a hot late-spring day, he had taken off his jacket during this informal family call, and as he chatted in Russian with my governess, inquiring about my course of studies, I marveled over the beauty of his lissome, wondrously muscled arms, a flesh more lustrous than any I’d yet seen. Even then, I realized that the attention he lavished on me did not necessarily signal any quality of mine, that his need to cast his spell over any creature he ever encountered was as innate as a lioness’s instinct to protect her young. In retrospect, I can’t help feeling that there was something dismaying about his impulse to charm others, and the word “Mephistophelean” comes to mind.
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