The True Memoirs of Little K Page 21
And that was how Sergei came back to me, out of pity and obligation, and perhaps love, though whether for me or for Niki, I could not fully tell. He would not marry Countess Vorontzov-Dashkov, currently pregnant with his child. Unlike Niki, he could not love two women at once. Or two sons. It was my son, not his own, to whom Sergei would give his attention. And I was not sorry for the countess, did you think I would be?, only grateful that my son, at age three, finally had a father.
And, of course, I had once again a man in my bed, smelling of leather and oranges and horses, and I had missed Sergei. The tsar had his Alix, so why should I be alone?
Yes, the fall of 1905 brought compromises for us all. Nicholas, who had wanted to appoint a military dictator and use martial law to crush the last of the disturbances, instead gave in and granted reforms. With the October Manifesto, written up by his ministers, the tsar managed to retain his throne by agreeing reluctantly to freedom of speech and assembly, to amnesty for all strikers, to a cabinet and a Duma—a parliament, in effect, of elected officials, which he resolved to dissolve as soon as he could.
So for now there was the Duma with its Social Democrats, a tiny number of them Bolsheviks and the majority Mensheviks, with its Constitutional Democrats, its Jewish Bundists, its Ukrainians, Poles, and Tartars—the Duma for which Alix would always blame Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, Niki’s uncle, who commanded the St. Petersburg military district and had refused to be Russia’s military dictator, the fist of the tsar, saying the time for repression had long passed. The Duma now sat in the Tauride Palace, a palace built by Catherine the Great in 1780 for her lover, Prince Grigory Potemkin, in gratitude for his having conquered the Crimea. What would she say to see the Duma in that palace now? The Tauride stood in Shpalernaya Street, out of sight of the Winter Palace, where the Neva wended its way in a great sandy shoehorn around the eastern part of the city. Out of sight, yes, but it was still there, desecrated by the men of the Duma, who stank of the animals they so recently tended, that smell so woven into the fibers of their clothes it could never be scoured out, by men who sucked in vodka and beer and spit out the husks of sunflower seeds sodden with it, until the corridors of the palace, eighteenth-century pictures hanging serenely from long wires, reeked of the peasantry.
Yes, there was a Duma, but Niki was still tsar, still commander of the army and the navy. He alone could declare war or make peace, and he alone could dissolve the Duma at will and make laws by emergency decree, and none of its laws could take effect until the tsar gave his approval, along with that of the State Council, the upper house of the Duma filled with nobles who ensured that no law counter to their interests ever passed. And so there was a Duma, but it had, as you can see, little power, which meant, as Sergei assured me, that little would change. But the Duma, by its very existence, meant, despite Sergei’s assertions, that there had been change—there was now open and legitimized opposition to the regime, and I knew from what happened in my theater that the opposition could be reprimanded, threatened, strangled, but it would eventually have its way. Look at how I always got mine! And so though Niki could dissolve the Duma, as he did seventy-two days after the opening ceremony, hating even the appearance that it could inhibit him as autocrat, by law it had to be reconstituted. You see, the Tauride faced the St. Petersburg Main Waterworks, a big redbrick building where the city’s water ebbed and flowed, forced through various pipes and valves and winches and pools and dams and into drains at will, and so Niki tried to control the will of the Duma—and of the country.
Sometimes, I imagined Niki, burdened with Alix, his fragile son, his roiling country, taking his solitary walks through the palace park from the yellow Alexander Palace to the blue, white, and gold Catherine Palace, its baroque grandeur evoking for him that time when a tsar ruled supreme, giving him strength to go on. Did he walk alone into the Great Hall, walk along its high windows and polished mirrors? I wished I could walk beside his reflection there and slip my little hand in his for comfort, whisper, You will prevail.
When the country quieted, so did the theater. Everyone who had opposed the regime and who had formed unions and committees and who had written up resolutions and had otherwise run about stirring up trouble was required to swear fealty once again to the tsar in writing before being granted amnesty as part of the larger general amnesty being offered to all in Russia who had taken part in strikes and protests. Dancers are not workers from the streets and they were easily intimidated. Most signed immediately. Fokine, Pavlova, Karsavina, and my brother, though, all refused to sign the loyalty oath, and when Josef slapped the face of a dancer who had signed and who Josef felt was a particular traitor, Josef was dismissed from the theater, and his wife, the princess, divorced him. Ironical, no, that it would be my imperial connections that saved his pension, my connections that would quietly find him a position with the court in charge of the tsar’s hunting lodges—far from the stage, it’s true, but the salary kept him alive. It was eight years, though, before I could arrange to have him reinstated at the theater, that’s how deep the feelings ran over these matters. Sergei Legat, the brother of my beautiful partner Kolinka, signed the declaration and then, feeling himself a traitor who had betrayed his friends, sliced his throat open with a razor. There were other consequences—two of the dancers who led the strikes were dismissed along with my brother; another was sent to a psychiatric hospital; others were not promoted, were given poor roles, went abroad to dance, to Berlin, to London, to Paris. These disasters, like the hangings and rapes and deportations that subdued the peasants and intellectuals, subdued the dancers, though there was, for several months, resentment between the two factions, between the dancers who, like me, were regime loyalists and those who had acted against it. The simmering resentment would eventually lead to a bleeding of talent from the tsar’s stages.
Ballets Russes
It was just a few years later, in 1909, that Fokine, along with Diaghilev and Benois and Bakst—the three free artists who had come to the theater—obtained the tsar’s permission to prepare a season of Russian exports to take to Paris. They would present some of the tsar’s greatest singers and dancers abroad, mounting a few operas mixed in with a few scènes des ballets.
Of these men, Diaghilev I loved the best. We called him Chinchilla because of the white streak that lay at the front of his hair on the right side and because his little white teeth looked exactly like those of a small animal. As a member of the theater staff—though briefly tenured, for he was dismissed within a few years after a dispute with Volkonsky—he came to all the performances at the Maryinsky, and though he prized music first and art second, he soon developed a great enthusiasm for the ballet. The dancers would sing under their breath whenever he arrived at the theater and took his seat in the administration’s box:
Ya tolko shto uznal,
Shto u nevo v korobkye shinshillah.
Ya ochen boyus oshibitsya!
I’ve just heard
That Chinchilla is in his box
And I’m terribly afraid to make a mistake!
Fokine I liked less. Why, he complained when I wore a tutu to rehearsal instead of the regulation practice clothes, as if I should be bound by some regulation. And when I had my maid bring Vova to a rehearsal, which I interrupted when Vova called for a kiss, Fokine erupted in rage. But what child does not deserve a kiss? We were only rehearsing Fokine’s ballet Le Pavilon d’Armide, a pale copy of a ballet Petipa could have done three times better. As for Pavlova—why, she wasn’t happy until she had the whole stage to herself, as she did in that mawkish solo The Dying Swan Fokine later made for her to that sugary music by Saint-Saëns, a solo she danced over and over again all around the world—even in Japan and India and South America to brown men with bones in their noses. Can you imagine? You’ve heard the legend of her death, the way she called for her swan costume to be brought to her and laid across her body, a pall of white feathers and gauze, a woman of the theater even to her last moment, mindful of the great s
tory it would make from beyond the grave.
I’ve outlived her, you know.
Well, I was invited, very reluctantly, by Fokine to dance in Paris not in Giselle or Les Sylphides or Prince Igor, but in only one forgettable ballet, his Le Pavilon d’Armide, three acts set during the time of Louis XIV with a libretto of counts, roses, fiancées, slaves, dreams, gardens, weddings, and deaths, which Petipa himself would have loved and which I suppose Fokine thought I couldn’t ruin with my old-fashioned talents. He had invited me only because, based on my participation, the tsar had committed one hundred thousand rubles to the project. But I was barely participating at all! It was clearly a Paris season of strikers and dissidents. Why, my brother Josef had been specifically invited by Fokine to join them—my brother, who had been dismissed from the Imperial Ballet!—to link arms with Pavlova and Karsavina, his fellow dissidents. To raise our art to its highest level, they had claimed was their cause. Yet even the mother of one of them, Karsavina, had said to her, Be a great artist—that’s how you raise your art to its highest level. A great artist. Even the definition of that was changing.
For me, these young dancers were taller than I and my contemporaries, with long limbs and gorgeous feet. In the past, we didn’t care so much about height or supple arched feet (Pavlova’s were so high they spilled, absurdly, out of her shoes). We liked dancers who moved quickly and small dancers can move more quickly than tall ones—and faces didn’t matter to us; one couldn’t look like a monster, but it was the body that mattered, and that body was corseted, like the bodies of the women in the audience. Now these young dancers’ bodies rippled like water. And their faces—Pavlova, well, she had the beak nose and the disconcerting habit of standing in the wings and gulping down meat sandwiches shortly before curtain, the smell of roast beef and ham all over her fingers and breath, but Karsavina was a real beauty, dark-eyed, with a pleasing nose and delicate lips. These girls wore their real hair in smooth chignons, none of these elaborate, curled wigs I preferred. Why, when I finally did dance for Diaghilev in 1911 as part of his season, the European critics’ tastes had so changed, being fed this diet of new dancers, that they called me fat, passé, stereotyped, and worst of all, competent, and they speculated in print, If one did not know she wore the tsar’s jewels and was the wealthiest woman on the stage, would one notice her at all?
But in 1909 I was otherwise insulted—if Diaghilev and Fokine did not really want me to dance for them, then this was not really a season of the tsar’s dancers—for who was more of a tsar’s dancer than I? And in that case, why should the tsar pay the bill? So I whispered this thought to Sergei, who whispered it to the tsar, who abruptly withdrew his palm full of rubles. Though the tsar had withdrawn his person from me, he would keep secure my place at the theater. One week the dancers were rehearsing in the Hermitage Theater, served tea and chocolates by the palace servants in full livery. The next week they had to find rehearsal space in a small rented theater on the Ekaterinsky Canal, leaning big flats of scenery for other productions up against the walls to give themselves room to move. Yes, I almost foiled that first season of Les Ballets Russes, but Diaghilev scraped together a few rubles anyway, running sweatily about with his top hat in his hand, begging, collecting enough money even to refurbish the Châtelet Theater in Paris, which he had cleaned and repainted and laid with new ruby-red carpets, the better to present his Russian jewels, his own unofficial season not sanctioned by the crown.
But to Diaghilev’s surprise, his confections of Pavillon, Giselle, Sylphides, ballets that reflected the European court life the French themselves had perfected, were not the ones that seized the imagination of the Parisians. They stood on their seats to cheer the ancient Tartar Polovtsian dances from Prince Igor, its male warriors outfitted with bows, whirling savagely about the stage, arms raised, their bright costumes flowing, crisscrossing one another, mouths open, heads flung back. Diaghilev stood agog in the wings, and from then on he pursued a new tack. Why show the French the watercolored echoes of their own court? Show them instead a smattering of old Russian fairy tales about Ivan Tsarevich and Kashchei the Immortal and firebirds. Show them peasant life from the provinces. Yes, after his first cautious season in Paris, Diaghilev began to create ballets to showcase the Rus: Petrouchka, its puppets hanging in the peasants’ stalls at a Shrovetide Fair by day, but at night, left to their own devices, they fought and loved; Firebird, a pastiche of Russian tales about a monster, a maiden princess, a tsarevich, and a golden bird, set in a sumptuously exotic garden; Rite of Spring, the depiction of an old peasant ritual sacrifice. Eventually the creators moved even farther afield to the vast curtained harem of Persia for Schéhérazade, to the Hindu rock temple of Le Dieu bleu, with the dancers’ limbs and hands posed in imitation of Hindu sculpture, to the great columns and hieroglyphics of Cléopâtre, all the dancers bewigged and turned sideways as if they were painted on the walls of an Egyptian pyramid. Diaghilev and Benois and Fokine created ballet after ballet with folk tales for the libretto, with folk music mixed into the score, with peasant motifs of stars and animals painted on the canvas of the sets, with costumes dyed the bright reds and blues and yellows of peasant clothing.
Ballets Russes? Not really. Petersburg and Moscow had never seen ballets like these before—no one had. And Russia’s prima ballerina assoluta was nowhere to be seen in them, either.
I ask you, Who does Cléopâtre or Firebird now? Who does Rite of Spring? Petrouchka? They are the oddities of the ballet, polished up for an occasion amid great efforts at reconstruction. No, it is the Romanov ballets that survive, Petipa’s ballets—Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Raymonda, Le Corsaire, Coppélia, Nutcracker, La Bayadère. Those are the true ballets russes. Those ballets outlived the regime, will outlive me, will outlive the Soviets.
Enough.
The Twentieth Court
I shall tell you now of my life with Sergei and my son during the great lull after 1905, when the country returned to its senses and the aristocracy to its customary habits. If the tsar, the dowager empress, the grand dukes had their nineteen courts, I decided I would create the twentieth, my own court, equally fabulous, where I stirred together the men from the imperial family with the artists from the imperial theaters. With both the tsar’s money and Sergei’s and with my stupendous new palace, the double-headed eagles glinting on the gates, I could stage entertainments to rival those of Duchess Vladimir, the dowager empress, Princess Radziwill, Countess Schouvaloff, if not in ostentation, for, after all, I didn’t quite have their coffers, then in merriment. I didn’t have to compete with Empress Alexandra because the Winter Palace sat dark ever since the birth of the tsarevich, though the country and the court did not know exactly why. It was the Vladimir Palace that hosted Peter’s most extraordinary receptions now, tables laid for a thousand in her enfilades. When offered congratulations after an especially brilliant ball, Duchess Vladimir responded pridefully, One ought to know one’s job. You may pass that on to the Great Court. Whose court she had, of course, eclipsed. Like all Russians, she spared no expense when it came to playing the host—why, a Russian will knock down a wall of his house to better entertain a large gaggle of guests, will go into a debt he could never in this lifetime climb out of to feed them. But I did not need to go into debt. Invitations to my parties were quite sought after, for, like my father, I made each event into theater.
At Christmas, a tall tree towered at the entrance to my winter garden, the pine boughs heavy with gold tinsel and crystal pears, and tied to the lowest branches swung the toys I had bought from the peasants’ stalls set up on the Champ de Mars and on the quays. For Vova’s fourth birthday I brought in an elephant to distribute the presents with his long curved trunk, and the children climbed his leathery gray skin to sit upon his back and be led about by the clown Dourov, who’d fetched the beast to my house. At my dacha the next summer I transformed my veranda into a stage by hanging a length of velvet cloth at the edge of it and converting my big bedroom into a backstage wing. I c
ajoled Baron Golsch into my Russian costume, and the dancer Misha Alexandrov—the illegitimate nephew of Alexander II’s widow, Ekaterina Dolgorukaya—into a long tutu, and, all moustaches and hairy legs, they played caricatures of myself and Pavlova. On another occasion I sent out invitations summoning my guests to dinner at Félicien, a famous Petersburg restaurant that stood in summer on a raft out on the Neva, only to escort my guests through my lantern-lit alley to the gulf, where I had dinner served out on the jetty in the open air. The lights of Petersburg, of Kronstadt, of Vachta across the green water were mere peeps of light compared to the brilliance of the Milky Way, with its silver stream of flooded light. At dessert the fireworks I ordered spanked their brilliant colors onto that white sky, and after this I hired a special train to ferry my guests back to Peter. And in all this, Sergei indulged me.