After he left the Ballets Russes, the behaviour of Vaslav Nijinsky became more and more bizarre. His career ended in 1919 at the age of twenty-nine. Schizophrenia – then a newly named condition – was diagnosed. His wife and friends made ceaseless but unsuccessful attempts to cure his madness; he died in London in 1950.
Olga Spessitseva, perhaps the most brilliant ballerina of her generation, in fact did not graduate until 1912 – for the sake of including this fascinating figure in the novel’s background I have taken the liberty of adding a few years to her age. With her powerful poetic style, her perfect legs and feet, her steps which ‘unfolded like a flower’, she became the star of the company after the Revolution, as well as a favourite guest artist with the Ballets Russes.
Lifar reports that Spessitseva became the mistress of a senior official in the Communist government; the traditions of the dancers’ world at first continued under the new regime, but instead of jewels her lover offered her the honour of choosing the first corpse to inaugurate the city’s new crematorium. Spessitseva left Russia in 1923. With her intriguing but neurotic personality, she found it hard to settle in exile and during World War Two was confined to a mental institution in the United States, from which friends released her in 1963.
Fortunately for posterity, Mathilde Kchessinskaya seems to have kept exhaustive diaries. Her memoirs are an assembly of titles and honours, performance dates, rave reviews and lists of jewellery. During the Revolution her palatial home was commandeered by the Bolsheviks; Lenin made speeches from her balcony while she went into hiding in Petrograd, at first unable to understand that her days as ‘the most powerful woman in Russia’were over.
With her lover, the Grand Duke André, and their young son, Kchessinskaya fled southwards and left Russia for ever in 1920, sailing from the port of Novorosisysk to Venice with a party of dispossessed nobility. All were virtually penniless; Kchessinskaya had only two dresses, and Andre’s mother, the Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, paid their fares with a diamond brooch.
The couple first lived at their villa in the South of France, and married the next year, when the head of the Imperial family in exile gave his permission for morganatic alliances among the Tsar’s kindred. By 1928 all the funds raised by selling jewellery and mortgaging the villa were gone, and Kchessinskaya opened a dance studio in Paris. Her pupils went on to dance and teach throughout the world; those from England included Margot Fonteyn, Pamela May and Pearl Argyle. Her last stage appearance, at the age of sixty-three, was at a gala in London, for which she danced a Russian folk piece which she had last performed for the Tsar.
Copyright
First published in 1993 by Viking
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © Celia Brayfield, 1993
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