Adrienne Sharp: The True Memoirs of Little K

The most handsome of the brothers was Sandro, with his quicksilver tongue and his solid gold ambition that had him pursuing Niki’s sister Xenia, his second cousin. The dullest was George, who was quiet and who collected coins, of all things, and who grew quite bald at a young age; and there was another one at home, Nicholas, who preferred the bodies of men and who became renowned as a historian and whom later Lenin had murdered, saying, The revolution does not need historians . Of them I liked Sergei the best. He had a fine enough face, blond hair, his light eyes set far apart, and though he could be moody, a temperament I recognized well from the theater, he could also be the most fun—the first with a prank, the first to propose a caper. His favorite expression in those days was tant pis , so much the worse, but there was no sorrow to be had at my house. Together, I and the Potato Club laughed, talked, played baccarat, clapped to the Georgian songs from the Caucasus which the Mikhailovichi sang for us and which they knew so well from the twenty years their father served in Tiflis as governor-general. This province of Russia was so close to Turkey and Persia that the boys had only to look out a window of the white Italianate governor-general’s palace onto Golovinsky Prospekt to see mules and camels, men with black fezzes and sheathed sabers coming to market or to consult with Sergei’s father, and women in tall velvet headdresses adorned with scarves, their hair dyed a brilliant red and their necks hung with as many as two dozen necklaces of silver and gold. They came from straw huts laid with carpets or whitewashed zindans of mud to the palace where Sergei’s father laid supper every night for forty. His father also had a two-hundred-thousand-acre estate in the countryside, in Borjomi, that a man could ride over all day and still not travel from one boundary to the next. The great white Kazbek mountain stood like the Buddha at the end of the big steppe and by its scale let men know their place.

As if the Romanovs ever knew their place until the revolution showed it to them.

The rest of the family looked slightly askance at the Mikhailovichi, as if their time in the Caucasus might have made them too much like the untamed Georgians they oversaw. Niki’s father tried hard to Russify that part of the country, denying its residents their language, forcing even young students to speak only Russian at school or be punished, as the young Stalin was, by standing all morning in the corner, holding up a heavy plank of wood, but the Georgian language survived—and the Mikhailovichi learned it. I remember one song they sang, so haunting with its oriental sound, about a queen whose mellifluous voice drew lovers to her like a mythological siren’s, though she sat not on ocean rocks but in her cushioned bedroom, in a castle by the Terek River. And when she had sated herself with the beauty of these men, she murdered them and threw their bodies down into the swift-running water.

Of the three brothers Sergei had the richest voice, and when he took the lead on that song he looked directly at me as if I were the coldhearted siren! Niki had told me Sergei loved his sister Xenia, but had stood aside for Sandro, who pursued her so aggressively and whom she seemed to prefer. I should say Sergei was the least handsome of his very handsome brothers and Sandro the most, probably why the butterfly Xenia had chosen Sandro. Sergei was teased sometimes by women who, like schoolboy bullies, would ask, Why are you so ugly? —which he was not—to which he would reply to cover his hurt, In that lies my charm . Had Sergei now fallen in love with another girl who could not belong to him?

For it was Niki who was pursuing me, and this was clear; this was the reason he and they were in my house and sometimes the reason they came to the theater: Niki wanted to see me in my little roles—as a tiny shepherdess who rode on a cart about the stage in the opera La Dame de pique or as Little Red Riding Hood running from the Wolf in Sleeping Beauty . One night, with a basket in his hand and a kerchief on his head, the tsarevich entertained us by dancing my role of Little Red Riding Hood and then the role of the Wolf, pawing at the carpet with the toe of his boots, turning his head and looking at us from the side of his eye. He knew all the roles, little and big, from the opera and the ballet—he had a direct telephone line to the theater installed in his villa at Krasnoye Selo so he could hear the operas performed on the Maryinsky stage even when he was at camp. Niki mimed the wolf grabbing up the little girl and folding her over his shoulder, using one arm to still her imaginary petticoats, her imaginary kicking legs. Sometimes he called me Miss Riding Hood , looking down his nose at me with a long, serious face. What, Miss , he would say, have you been up to in those woods?

When we grew thirsty from laughter, I crept from the sitting room and, using glasses pilfered from my parents’ pantry, I served champagne. These evenings sometimes lasted until five in the morning—we Russians love a party that lasts hours and then we sleep until noon—though one night our evening was cut short when the prefect of police came to tell us the emperor was enraged at having discovered his son’s absence. A policeman followed Niki everywhere, to Niki’s eternal irritation, and reported on him to his father. Apparently, Niki had metamorphosed from the effeminate child the emperor called girlie into a bit too much of the libertine for Alexander III, a libertine who nonetheless wrote in his journal, What is wrong with me? when he slept until noon and beyond each day. And at my own metamorphosis from child to flirt, my father was not enraged so much as worried. What risk would I take, what impetuous action would I regret?

But as yet there was no real intimacy between Niki and me, except for one brief moment in the entrance hall when, as he put on his woolen greatcoat one night, as a joke he drew me inside the flaps of the coat as if to button me within it close to him. He smelled of cologne—bergamot, rosemary, and leather—and I of my violet perfume, and the temperature inside the coat made those scents blossom. I bit at a thread on his shirt. Niki stopped my teeth with a kiss. I would have swallowed all the buttons of his greatcoat one by one if I thought that would keep me this close to him even a minute longer. Our real courtship had begun! But to my great frustration, Niki continued to feel his way toward me through letters rather than touch— Forgive me, divine creature, for having disturbed your rest . Pushkin’s lines, I knew, because Pushkin I read, every Russian read Pushkin, his verse so accessible even a poorly educated girl like me could enjoy it. The words were not Niki’s, but I treasured them anyway, though I was certainly too much a fool to understand that when Niki wrote to me one night after the opera Taras Bulba , in which the hero’s passion for his beloved made him give up his father and his country, Think of what André did for love of a young Polish girl , that Nicholas himself would never be allowed to turn his back on his throne or on Russia for love of the young Polish dancer Kschessinska II. These were tantalizing words, but still, they were just words. For me, so used to the animating force of dance, the touch of two bodies, words, no matter what sentiments they expressed, seemed as flat as the paper they lay on. How to make them stand up?

That I had not yet figured out, but the tsarevich’s attentions to me, such as they were, had not gone unnoticed by the theater administration, which saw fit to display me in larger and larger roles. In 1890 I was a coryphée dancing the part of the Fairy Candide in Sleeping Beauty , but with the flowering of my talent and the tsarevich’s interest in me, I was quickly promoted to second soloist, and then to prima ballerina. By 1893, one year after the tsarevich’s first visit to me, I would no longer dance the role of a fairy in Sleeping Beauty , but make my debut as Aurora herself, the first Russian ballerina ever to dance the role. Yes, the director of theaters Vzevolozhsky and the ballet master Petipa were eager to please the court, for the pleasure of the Romanovs was all that mattered. Why, when Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich did not like the way a galop was performed in rehearsal, what we dancers called the galop infernal , which always closes the season at Krasnoye Selo, he came up onto the stage himself to demonstrate it to the company, and the dancers performed the galop as the grand duke wished. All was done to the taste of the court, and I had suddenly become its taste.