Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

At that time I thought, My father will dance forever , but now I could see he would not. In a voice smaller and much less bombastic than my usual one, I told him of my plans, and before he spoke, he took a small towel from the chair by the mirror and carefully wiped at his face, wiping off his smile as well. I knew then what he said would not be good luck and good wishes. No. Mala , he said, your sister, bless her, was a good-enough dancer. Let her play the mother. For you, Mala, you are a different story entirely. Remember, from your art comes your power . Perhaps that was where he garnered his power, but I now had another source, one less ephemeral than art, and I would not give up my son to my sister, no matter how my parents pressed me. As a dancer one must eventually retire, but I could live into an old age greater than my father’s and still die an empress. My father must have seen the obdurate look on my face, for he folded the towel over his shoulder and held out his arms to me. Come, Maletchka , he said, and for a few moments we took on the ballroom for a waltz; in the doorway a few students lingered to watch the tall man and the tiny lady make their slow, graceful circuit around the bare room, where they themselves, just a few minutes before, had struggled to execute the polonaise, the mazurka, the quadrille, this very waltz.

I know you probably would agree with my father that I was far too great a talent to leave the stage, but I must tell you the fashions of the stage were so rapidly changing, so it was not only for my son that I wished to leave it. The new director of the Imperial Theaters was Colonel Vladimir Teliakovsky, who had been director of the Moscow Theaters and an officer in the Household Cavalry. I had hoped he might, being an old-style aristocrat, have, as well, old-fashioned tastes, but unfortunately, when it came to art, Teliakovsky was a modern man, one who proceeded to open his purse to even more free artists—that is, artists not on the imperial payroll—than had his predecessor Volkonsky. And so it was not with a heavy heart that in early 1903 I returned to the theater to dance for one last triumphant time in a ballet mounted in honor of my retirement from the Imperial Theaters, for I could not retire quietly, just slip away after my confinement and the birth of my son. No, I had to first return, and then retire in style, raking my tribute off the tables on the stage.

Petipa had planned the ballet The Magic Mirror while Volkonsky was still director of the Maryinsky, and perhaps if it had been produced under his aegis the ballet would have been a success. But Teliakovsky now hired the modern artist Alexander Golovin, one of those avant-garde painters known as les décadents to create the sets and Teliakovsky allowed his own wife to design the costumes and the modern composer Arsery Koreshchenko to write some of his new symphonic music, and these parties carried with them in their mouths and ears and eyes a taste for the new century, the twentieth century of which we were all so newly, and some of us reluctantly, a part. Yet The Magic Mirror itself was not a modern ballet, but a nineteenth-century féerie , what Petipa did best, what I did best, a ballet of four acts, thirty scenes, and innumerable tableaux, its libretto based on Pushkin’s retelling of the German fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarves , save that in Pushkin’s version the dwarves were gnomes. The ballet was nineteenth century, its audience nineteenth century, our circa-1860 blue and gold theater, named for Alexander II’s first wife, Maria, nineteenth century. Our attendants, standing stiffly at the sides of the aisles and flanking each doorway costumed in their powdered wigs, red livery, and high white stockings, harkened us back a century earlier even than that. And the balletomanes this theater served did not like innovations in music or set design or costume any more than they would like the other innovations of the new century, the political ones that threatened to strip them of their wealth and status.

Petipa himself had complained the costumes made caricatures of the dance artists: his immortals were wrongly costumed as nymphs, his court ladies sported contemporary dress that made them all look like café singers, the gnomes resembled hunchbacked trolls, the prince in his gymnast’s clothes was a dressed-up circus horse. During rehearsals Petipa fretted about the ballet that he should have done instead, Salammbo , which he had wanted to mount before Volkonsky left, but Volkonsky had canceled it, and now Teliakovsky had forced Petipa to use these decadent free artists whose determination to modernize would destroy his creation. Poor Petipa. Teliakovsky endeavored to soothe him. No, no, M. Petipa, the ballet is perfection . Yet Petipa knew that his dryads and flowers and zephyrs and stars and queens and kings and peasants and gnomes must be cushioned in a setting appropriately antiquated, and that, deprived of it, they became absurdities, as did the ballet master himself. Not to mention the ballerina.

I, of course, played Snow White, the Princess by Her Father the King’s Previous Marriage . You see, families were full of previous marriages where the new wives wielded power over the children of the former wives and contrived to put their own children on the throne! The entire imperial family of 1903 Russia, old wives, new wives, recycled wives, and various permutations of children, were assembled in their boxes to witness my last performance on the Maryinsky stage. My father and brother, who were performing with me that night—for my father played Her Father the King and my brother Josef a Polish magnate in full court regalia—crowded at the curtain peephole with me. We did not know whom to look at first—Niki or his mother; Alix or her two oldest daughters, the grand duchesses Olga and Tatiana; Niki’s sisters or their husbands—and the grand ducal boxes were full, as well, of Niki’s uncles and cousins, his father’s brothers and uncles and cousins, the Konstantinovichi, the Vladimirichi, the Alexandrovichi, the Nikolaevichi, the Mikhailovichi—why, even Sergei had come to the theater, though I saw he was there with a woman by his side, Countess Vorontzov-Dashkov, I presumed, an hourglass of jewels, silk, and compensation. Yes, it was a full conflagration of Romanovs gathered here to mark my exit! How astonished they would be—all but Sergei—if they knew of my plan to vault from this stage to their boxes, right to the imperial box! My father could drag me from my post as peephole spy only just before the curtain was raised.

The first act went well enough—a garden tableau in which men and women weave baskets and garlands and present them to the queen, the king, and the courtiers at their entrances—and for this scene, at least, Koreshchenko had composed a traditional and melodious waltz. When I entered, I bowed to the tsar, who nodded to me, and at his nod Alix frowned, and then to the audience at large, and at last to my father, the king, and to my subjects. I had my figure back, which all of Peter could see, and nothing, not even a scandal that would pitch any other dancer off the tsar’s stage, could unmoor Kschessinska from the beautiful trappings of her theater. Act I, Scene I—all was well. But when the scene shifted to the palace park, the laughter began, provoked by the sight of a tall bush painted rather impressionistically on the canvas with wild daubs of green and yellow splotched here and there. The court was accustomed to seeing meticulous depictions of vegetation with decorously overlapping leaves and stems, and it was as if that one bush pricked at the dream of make-believe and the audience did not like one bit being awakened by something so little like a kiss. The snickers began and worsened when Petipa’s daughter, not Marie, but Nadezhda, tant pis , began to mime. The Stepmother Queen is delighted with the magic mirror a merchant displays, a mirror with the power to reveal the image of the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. Petipa’s daughters were character dancers rather than classical ones, but even in that category their talents were more limited than most. Despite their father’s grace, they grew to be big clumsy bosomy girls, and so Nadezhda’s miming was bad enough, but when the wicked queen gazed into the tall mirror and asked her famous question, Who is the fairest of them all? , just as the quicksilver of the mirror held my own image, the mirror abruptly shattered, shards of it making a brittle waterfall, pelting us as we struggled to continue our scene. A piece shaped like an arrowhead attached itself to the silk threading of my pointe shoe, and like a peasant farmer who stepped in manure, I had to shake it off. In their efforts to avoid the glass, the other dancers began to bump into one another and one courtier and then another fell flat on his derriere and the audience, at this point, began to laugh outright and then to talk, which we on the stage perceived only as a buzz that rivaled the discordant music from the orchestra pit.