by Coryne Hall
In the summer of 2001 a rumour circulated that before her flight in 1917 Kschessinska had hidden a cache of treasure underneath the house. A fabulous fortune was said to have been concealed there, estimated by experts to be valued at approximately $2 million.
The house had already been searched several times. The Bolsheviks looked for German gold and German money with which to finance their revolution. They did not find it. Over the years the house was repeatedly altered by the Soviets and according to one rumour, during these alterations the building was thoroughly searched for hidden treasure. In the 1930s the parquet floors were torn up, the space between the storeys was opened and walls knocked down. The attic and cellar were searched and the garden dug up on the pretext of equipping the place with ‘services’. Constantine Yurievich Sevenard, great-great-nephew of Mathilde, told the media that a hoard of treasure was buried about 10 to 20 metres below the house in a network of hiding places underneath the building. Gold, silver, jewels and porcelain were among the items said by Russian émigrés to be concealed. ‘The authority of my sources is beyond question,’ Mr Sevenard stated and he expected the hoard to include both ‘Kschessinska’s own possessions and valuables from the Romanovs.’10 He believed that the hiding of valuables took place between July and October 1917 and claimed to have confirmation from people who knew Mathilde in Paris, and from old photographs taken in the summer of 1917. Yet it would have been impossible to hide anything in the house at that time without being seen. A more plausible explanation, given that the house was completed just after the 1905 Revolution and designed so that its entrance did not face the street, would be that items were hidden soon after the house was built, in case of another revolution. This has never been proved.
With a small-scale dig expected to begin ‘within weeks’ staff at the mansion were sceptical about the claim. ‘There have been all sorts of myths, legends and different versions about this house,’ said the museum’s director Yevgeny Artemev. ‘This is just another one.’11
A few days later the Daily Telegraph reported that ‘jewellery, old coins, banknotes and rare books’ had been discovered in a box hidden 18 feet below the house. It proved to be a hoax perpetrated by local television, the Museum’s management and the Agency of Investigative Journalism.12
Although the idea of a cache hidden beneath the house is alluring, no more has been heard of Kschessinska’s treasure in the St Petersburg mansion.
However, there still remains Strelna. There are those who believe it would have been possible to hide something at the dacha because the enclosed fence surrounding the property and the dense bushes and shrubs provided perfect cover. They say that when Grand Duke Sergei Michaelovich returned from Stavka in June 1917 he could have organised a sympathetic guard and used the burial of Mathilde’s dog as a cover for the hiding of her treasure.13
Mathilde loved to build and it has been suggested that after the unsuccessful 1905 revolution she began to make plans to hide her valuables, just in case. Then, in the summer of 1917, she used the drives in Sergei’s car as an excuse to take things to Strelna, a distance of about 12 miles from the capital. Sergei and the Command of the Military Engineers of the Imperial Army would have been well placed to organise the concealment of valuables (some of which had been put in boxes at the beginning of the war). According to this theory, Sergei’s resolve to remain in Petrograd to finish hiding Mathilde’s valuables probably cost him his life. By the time he was ready to leave it was too late.14
Although the Constantine Palace was set alight during the Second World War and its park severely damaged, contrary to the impression given in Mathilde’s memoirs her dacha survived the war. In it were established communal flats, which were eventually resettled. In 1953 an administrative building of the Architectural School was built close by with, in 1956, a sports ground attached. The fence passed straight through the base of Kschessinska’s fountain. Larch beams were stripped from Kschessinska’s dacha around this time and, according to stories told by old residents, they were used to build one of the new houses in Strelna. The dacha was finally demolished because the military institute which was built next door needed the grounds for training purposes. The military building has now become a four-star hotel.15 On 4 December 1996, just before the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mathilde’s death, the remaining lamp-post of the first street lighting in Strelna was transported from Kschessinska’s dacha to the museum Maritime Strelna and there were rumours that the dacha would be reconstructed as part of a new complex.
On 26 September 2001 a television crew arrived to film a programme about Kschessinska’s dacha. Suddenly a guard appeared from the Constantine Palace and stopped them. He had to obtain authorisation from the highest level before filming was allowed to continue. The documentary was screened on 10 October 2001.16
Most of the site of the dacha has now been swept away for the guest houses built when the Constantine Palace was restored and the whole of the area now forms part of the state complex of the Constantine Palace. Bereozoviya Alleya is still there and until a few years ago the foundations, the base of the fountain and the concrete foundations of the mooring could still be seen. The fountain has now disappeared. The former area occupied by Mathilde Kschessinska’s dacha has passed into the jurisdiction of the President of the Russian Federation. This very fact has made at least one Russian author wonder whether there is any truth in the story of the treasure hidden at Strelna.17
Nothing has apparently been found.
Although Mathilde Kschessinska was the last great pre-Revolutionary Russian ballerina her name was taboo in Russia during Soviet times. Her connections with the Romanovs and the Imperial Court ensured that her name did not even merit a mention in the Soviet Encyclopaedia and she was denigrated by Soviet ballet historians. Since the fall of Communism, interest has grown in Kschessinska, both as the Tsar’s one-time mistress and as a ballerina.
At the request of the Ardent Supporters of the History of Strelna, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death a Panikhida was said for Mathilde for the first time by monks of the Holy Trinity Maritime Monastery at Strelna.
In 1997, to mark the 125th anniversary of her birth, a memorial column was erected at Strelna opposite the fountain in her garden, with an inscription: ‘Seaside Dacha of M.F. Kschessinska, 1894–1917’. Also at the request of the Ardent Supporters of the History of Strelna, a life-sized model of Mathilde was sculpted, which from 1 September 2001 was exhibited in the museum Maritime Strelna. On Mathilde’s birthday that year the model was temporarily placed on the seashore near the site of the dacha.
The Kirov Ballet, successor to the old Imperial Ballet, has begun to revive some of the original productions in which Mathilde starred, including The Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadère. Among the thousands of old costumes discovered in the Maryinsky Theatre’s attics is one of Felix Kschessinsky’s mazurka costumes. In 2004 the Bolshoi Ballet performed one of Mathilde’s favourite ballets, Pharaoh’s Daughter, at Covent Garden for the first time. It had been removed from the repertoire in Soviet times and largely forgotten. The choreographer, Pierre Lacotte, recorded his indebtedness to the great Russian ballerinas still living in Paris when he began researching the project, and who had given their blessing to his reconstruction of the work. Among them was Kschessinska.
Today Mathilde even appears as a character in a ballet. In 1971 Kenneth MacMillan choreographed the three-act ballet Anastasia. In the second act the Tsar gives a ball to celebrate Anastasia’s debut into society and he invites his favourite ballerina and one-time mistress Mathilde Kschessinska to dance for his guests. Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell danced the resulting classical pas-de-deux in the original production, and more recently it has been performed by Darcey Bussell among others. In keeping with Mathilde’s somewhat racy reputation one of the costumes for the role of Kschessinska is a stunning long black number complete with diamonds.
About a year after Mathilde’s death Irina Klyagin discovered the Russian manuscript of Mat
hilde’s memoirs, written in her ‘lively, slightly vulgar style’, in the Lenin Library in Moscow. This was the manuscript which Mathilde thought had been sent to the Tchaikovsky Museum in Klin. The ‘diplomat’ she entrusted it to seems to have had no intention of delivering it and the manuscript ended up in Moscow. The memoirs were finally published in Russia in 1992.18
Mathilde Kschessinska continues to fascinate. She could be scheming and manipulative but generous to a fault to those she did not consider a threat. Courageous, unhurt by scandal, ‘a woman of infinite charm, wit and intelligence’, she was also a fighter.19
Perhaps Mathilde’s greatest fault in the eyes of others was that she always won.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
de Angelis = information from Dr Stephen de Angelis
DIP = Kschessinska, Mathilde, Dancing in Petersburg
GARF = State Archives of the Russian Federation, Moscow
Harvard = The Howard D. Rothschild Collection, Harvard Theatre Collection
MK = Mathilde Kschessinska
Krasovskaya = Russkii baletnii teatr nachala XX veka
Montpensier = Archives of the Fundación Infantes Duques de Montpensier
NM = Grand Duke Nicholas Michaelovich
NYPL = The New York Public Library Dance Division
Scholl = ‘My Usual Triumph’: Mathilde Kschessinska and the Artist’s Memoir, AATSEEL Conference Paper
SM = Grand Duke Sergei Michaelovich
Vospominaniia = Kschessinska, Mathilde, Vospominaniia (2002)
Introduction
1. Radzinsky, 22
2. Matilda Malya, video
3. Scholl
Chapter One
1. Scholl
2. Scholl
3. DIP, 28
4. Scholl
5. DIP, 28
6. DIP, 28; Scholl
7. Vospominaniia, 10; Peterbyrgskaya Zhizn, 1888. No date
8. Karsavina, 61
9. Fokine, 11
10. Legat, 30–1
11. GARF. Fond 616. Op. 1, D3, L3
12. Roné, 28
13. Krasovskaya, Nijinsky, 37
14. Scholl
15. Krasovskaya, 374
16. Benois, 90
17. Scholl
18. DIP, 29. There are so many revisions and corrections to the unpublished account that, according to Professor Scholl, it is impossible to establish quite how Mathilde came to be seated next to the Tsarevich.
19. Scholl; DIP, 29
20. Welch, 45
21. DIP, 29
22. Diary. 23 March 1890, quoted in Radzinsky, 23
23. Scholl
24. Chuparron, ‘Liubovnitsa Poslednego…’, 64
Chapter Two
1. Craine and Mackrell, 368, 145
2. Wiley, Century, 283
3. Karsavina, 140; Danilova, 176
4. GARF. Fond 616. Op. 1. D3, L4a & Op. 1 D4, L2
5. Krasovskaya, 13–14
6. Nicholas II, Journal Intime, 31
7. Radziwill, Nicholas II, 36
8. de Angelis; Maylunas and Mironenko, 22
9. Radzinsky, Nicholas II, 17
10. Bezelianskii, 276
11. Nijinska, 92
12. Wiley, Century, 360–72; Lamsdorff, 11 December 1889, 241
13. Dolgoruky, 152
14. Nicholas II, Journal Intime, 32
15. Bezelianskii, 277
16. Vassili, 77
17. DIP, 33
18. Nicholas II, Dnevnik, 29: 17 July 1890
19. Radzinsky, 24; Nicholas II, Dnevnik, 32: 30 July 1890
20. Nicholas II, Dnevnik, 32: 31 July 1890
21. Nicholas II, Dnevnik, 29: 1 August 1890
22. Dolin, 258
23. Bohanov, Romanovy, 217; Bohanov, Nikolai II, 51
24. Bohanov, Romanovy, 217
25. Alexander, Once a Grand Duke, 80
26. Lifar, My Life, 100
27. Smakov, 56
28. DIP, 37
29. Scholl
30. Scholl
31. Scholl
32. Scholl
33. Nijinska, 92–3
34. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1. D228. C14. 10 March 1892
35. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1. D228. C15–16. 11 March 1892
36. DIP, 38
37. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1. D228. C21. 16 March 1892
38. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D228. C24 & 27. 19, 21 & 22 March 1892
39. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D228. C28. 23 March 1892
40. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D228. C31. 25 March 1892
41. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D228. C37–8. 1 April 1892
42. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D228. C43 & C56. 5 & 16 April 1892
43. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D228. C61–2. 21 April 1892
44. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D228. C60. 20 April 1892
45. 11 April 1892. Net Spokoistviya, 154
46. Harcave, 374
47. DIP, 38–9
48. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D228. C70. 29 April 1892
49. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D228. C70. 30 April 1892
50. Quoted in Bobrov, ‘Zhemchuzhina’
51. Krasovskaya, 13–14
52. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D228. 23 July 1892
53. Matilda Malya, video
54. DIP, 41; GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D228. C188. 27 & 28 July 1892
55. Vassili, 77–8
56. Radziwill, Nicholas II, 40
57. Vassili, 80
58. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D229. C7. 5 August 1892
Chapter Three
1. Morton, 187. Alice Keppel was a mistress of Edward VII
2. DIP, 44
3. Bezelianskii, 275
4. Quoted Smakov, 56; quoted Krasovskaya, 39
5. No. 25, December 1892, quoted Krasovskaya, 39
6. Buckle, Diaghilev, 25
7. Danilova, 37; Buckle, Diaghilev, 25
8. Quoted in Bezelianskii, 275
9. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D229. C170. 4 January 1893
10. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D229. C174. 8 January 1893
11. Scholl; Bezelianskii, 276
12. Quoted in Krasovskaya, 41
13. Quoted in Bobrov, Zhemchuzhina
14. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D229. 23 January 1893; Quoted in Bezelianskii, 276
15. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D230. C3. 25 January 1893
16. Quoted in Smakov, 56
17. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D230. C32 & 43. 21 February & 3 March 1893
18. Radzinsky, 23
19. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D230. C5 & C8. 27 & 30 January 1893
20. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D230. C16–17 & C9. 31 January & 6 February 1893
21. Document found in Russian Government Historical Archive, St Petersburg by Krista Sigler; quoted in Bohanov, Romanovy, 220
22. Bohanov, Romanovy, 220
23. Buranov and Khrustalev, 51
24. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D230. C54. 15 March 1893
25. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D230. C55. 14 March 1893
26. Radziwill, Those I Remember, 36
27. Vospominaniia, 46
28. Quoted in Bobrov, ‘Zhemchuzhina’
29. Krasovskaya, 14
30. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D230. C17 & C135. 7 February & 17 November 1893; Op. 1, D232. C38. 6 February 1894; Bohanov, Romanovy, 219
31. Legat, 17
32. Legat, 21
33. Lamsdorff, 27: 21 January 1894
34. GARF. Fond 601. Op. 1, D232. 20 February 1894
35. Vassili, 80–1
36. Lamsdorff, 53–4: 4 April 1894
37. Vospominaniia, 46
38. Bohanov, Romanovy, 224
39. Lamsdorff, 57: 8 April 1894
40. Bohanov, Romanovy, 224
41. Vulf, ‘Personazhi Legenda’
42. DIP, 50
43. DIP, 51; Iroshnikov, Protsai and Shelayev, 129
44. Scholl
45. DIP, 51; Scholl
46. DIP, 52; Scholl
47. DIP, 52
Chapter Four
1
. Bohanov, Romanovy, 223
2. 8 July 1894. Maylunas and Mironenko, 80
3. DIP, 53
4. Perry and Pleshakov, 34; Krasni Arkhiv (1934). Dnevnik A.A. Polovtsova, 176
5. Cockfield, 20–1; George, 83
6. Cockfield, 212, 253
7. Chuparron, ‘Liubovnitsa Poslednego…’
8. Varenik, Dacha, 6, 12
9. Gilliard, 48
10. Vospominaniia, 67
11. Krasni Arkhiv (1934). Dnevnik A.A. Polovtsova, 176
12. Edwards, 164–5
13. Cockfield, 21; DIP, 56
14. GARF. Fond 684. Op. 1, D28. L10. 9 July 1915. MK to SM
15. Anonymous poem in Russian, quoted in Varenik, Milaya Strelna, 3. (English translation here by Dr Stephen de Angelis)
16. Stover, ‘Russian Kidnapping’; Vassili, 80–1
17. Bohanov, Romanovy, 219
18. Bohanov, Romanovy, 223–4
19. Dolin, 70
20. Buckle, Diaghilev, 28
21. King, ‘Glory and Adornment’
22. Vospominaniia, 75; Chavchavadze, 235
23. Vospominaniia, 72–3; King, ‘Glory and Adornment’, hereafter ‘Glory…’
24. Vospominaniia, 71
25. Hall, Little Mother, 181
26. Radzinsky, 46
Chapter Five
1. Krasovskaya, 14
2. Perry and Pleshakov, 55–6
3. Krasovskaya, 17; Craine and Mackrell, 180
4. Alexander Palace website: diary, 15 April 1897
5. Vospominaniia, 79–80
6. Karsavina, 63
7. Alexander Palace website: diary, 8 February 1898
8. Vospominaniia, 90
9. Quoted in Roné, 65
10. Krasovskaya, 248, 47–8; Bulycheva, ‘Dark-Eyed Demoness’
11. Various, Costume Ball, II, 26
12. DIP, 73; Krasovskaya, Nijinsky, 64
13. DIP, 72
14. Lifar, Diaghilev, 124–5
15. Teliakovsky, 254–5; King, ‘Glory…’