Adrienne Sharp: The True Memoirs of Little K

After my father died, I found the leather journal where he wrote in his distinct hand the complete list of his partners. The last name at the bottom of the page was my own, underlined. At the sight of that black-inked mark I wept, for it told me he was still proud of me despite the disgrace of my personal circumstances. Yes, I was aware that while I considered my life a great triumph, to my parents it was a disgrace. My parents’ friends were all, like them, Polish Catholics, and none of the daughters of their acquaintances became the mistress of anyone—before the revolution. After the revolution, of course, girls from the best families walked the Petersburg streets, selling themselves for pieces of soap. But we are not there yet. That is later. No, my private life was not what my father wanted for me. We were a proud family of artists—my grandfather was a tenor at the Warsaw Opera, his voice so beautiful the king of Poland called him my nightingale , and my father had hoped we would be a theatrical dynasty like the Petipas or the Gerdts, all of whom, fathers and children, worked at the Maryinsky and married fellow dancers. My brother Josef had already married a coryphée , Sima Astafieva, and he and my sister, Julia, and I had all graduated from the Imperial Theater Schools. We had all performed the children’s roles in the company’s ballets, as marionettes, cupids, nymphs, and pages. When we were cupids we wore headwear embroidered with gold thread, when we were nymphs we wore garlands of roses, when we were sylphs we were made to fly, a ring at the back of our costumes hooked onto a line by the machinist, smiles on our faces to conceal our terror as we were cranked into the air and tried to pitch our arms into the required poses. We watched the afternoon rehearsals at the great Maryinsky Theater from a box until it was our turn to rehearse on the stage, a little timid in the face of the theater so empty and so hushed, the great chandeliers and the velvet seats covered with brown canvas against the dust. Before the performance we were dressed, and then the lady chaperones used cotton wool to make circles of rouge on our cheeks. And then we were pushed onto the stage, where we tried hard not to stare out at the house, at the gold and white and blue of the four tiers, the parterres, the loges, the high-up gallery, tried not to breathe in the smell of chocolates and leather and tobacco, but attempted instead to focus on our little world on the stage. When we graduated, we all danced with the Imperial Ballet, my brother as a character dancer, my sister as a classical one. Julia was six years ahead of me; we were called Kschessinska I and Kschessinska II, until, of course, I surpassed her and was then simply M. Kschessinska. Our family’s talents were our diamonds, our rubies, our pearls, and my father’s talent was so abundant, the heap of it toppled off the stage and into our home.

In his spare time, he made a model of the St. Petersburg Bolshoi Theater, that building now demolished, though my father’s model still survives, I hear, in the Bakhrushin Theatrical Museum in Moscow. It stands in a display case by the one that holds the little shoes I wore in my first performance in the undersea bacchanal of Le Petit Cheval bossu , though I have not seen either for eighty years. The little model my father built had real oil footlights and a velvet curtain and miniature canvas scenery that went up and down when you turned the handle, which my sister, Julia, never let me do, slapping my hands away if I reached for the crank. She thought she was the mistress of everything in the house. My father built, too, a big glass aquarium that stood by the windows in the parlor. Stone ornaments, like garden ornaments in miniature, decorated the vast bottom of the tank and fish swam like women moving in colorful dresses through the pillars of the watery estate. It was my father who designed the rooms of our large apartment at No. 38, Liteiny Prospekt in Petersburg and of our dacha on our country estate, Krasnitzky. There he tore down the walls of the dining room to enlarge it and built a bathhouse on the river. We had a farm there, an orchard, a vegetable garden, and beyond that, a forest thick with mushrooms. And I remember how each time we arrived at the country from the city, my father and my mother knelt down and kissed the land of our estate. We were not rich, but the money my father earned as principal character dancer and from his private ballroom lessons in the waltz and the mazurka, lessons given to the children of the nobility, even the children of the imperial family, gave us a comfortable life.

Christmas and Easter he turned into pageants and feasts. Christmas Eve day we fasted until the first star appeared in the evening sky, after which we gorged ourselves on the thirteen fish dishes my father himself had prepared—we, of course, had a cook, but this was a special day and my father a real culinary artist, with a secret recipe for fish soup made with cream, a Polish dish. He labored in the kitchen while we children played games— rucheyok , like London Bridge, and chekharla , leapfrog. Candles and glass pears shone in our tree, which was showered all over with silver tinsel that tangled with the gold paper stars and angels. On New Year’s we drank hot Swedish punch and ate apple pies. For Easter my father baked a dozen kulichi , one for each apostle. Tall as a man’s top hat, each cake was iced in a different manner and adorned with fruits or candies, and I would walk the length of the banquet table to admire their distinct beauty: a fleur-de-lis of sliced strawberries on this one, the crest of an ocean wave made of white icing on that, tiny toothpick flags a fence at the border of another. In France, the old Russian immigrants bake their kulichi in coffee cans to make them rise tall.

All the world was a theater to my father, and for my birthday in August no production was more grand. We were inevitably at our dacha in that month and the feast he prepared was followed by fireworks of his own invention. At the dessert table I sat in the place of honor; one year, my father hung a wreath of flowers on a string run though a hook in the ceiling and when my dessert was served, he lowered the petaled crown by pulley until it settled gently onto my head, while my big brother and sister and half-brothers clapped. Russian girls love to weave themselves crowns of flowers, and so my father wove one for me. Even the peasants in the nearby villages who did our haymaking and took care of our cows brought birthday gifts, baskets of eggs nestled in napkins, each linen embroidered with a small red cross, and they bowed low from the waist as they presented their treats. Some of the peasants had been serfs just ten years earlier, before they had been emancipated by Niki’s grandfather Alexander II, and they kept still their serf manners, bowing low like that to their masters.

During those long days of haymaking and rye threshing and mushroom and berry picking, the lives of peasant and master were stitched tightly together in a single seam. Peasant children became the playmates of the noble ones, if only for the summer, and who does not remember playing gorodki with wooden blocks or bat and ball, babki , with any scrap of metal to be found, or bory , the game of tag, our bare feet brown with dirt. I remember the littlest ones bathed naked in what remained of our old bathhouse. The peasants joined us for lunch or for tea on Sunday, but when we returned to Petersburg, of course, they remained by the river Orlinka at their harvests to work the fields while I learned my art. I put on so much weight one summer from all the big meals that when I returned to school my teacher scolded I had become regrettably fat . But what is there to do in the country but play and eat? But wait, I’ve lost myself. That happens often to me now. It was the peasant women who as wet nurses and nannies raised the noble children, taught them folklore and fairy stories, played with them cards and lotto, put them to bed at night, accompanied them from country to city back to country again, wept when they went off to the lycée or joined the Guards, and then were cared for by the families as aging relations. Why, Sergei Diaghilev brought his nanny with him when he moved to Petersburg as a grown man!