Adrienne Sharp: The True Memoirs of Little K

And then Sokolov told us this was not all. He had also learned that Sergei’s brothers George and Nicholas had been shot in the courtyard of the Shpaterraia Prison and their corpses thrown into a mass grave. Niki’s brother Mikhail had been shot in the woods outside Perm while smoking a cigarette. Sokolov had gone also to Alapayevsk, and there in his account he paused and cleared his throat. In Alapayevsk he had discovered that Sergei, Alix’s sister, and the three Konstantin princes had been taken from their schoolhouse prison on July 17, 1918, Sergei’s name day—not long after Sergei had sent his birthday wishes to Vova—put into peasant carts, and driven to an abandoned mine shaft, and I knew then that his story would not end well. Sergei, Ella, and the three princes had been thrown into the shaft, Sergei with a bullet in his head. Sokolov had surmised that Sergei alone must have resisted his captors (and I thought, Of course you would resist them, my fierce Georgian ), and therefore he had been shot before the long fall down, while the others had landed at the bottom still alive, to die a slow death of broken bones and starvation, and after them their murderers threw down pieces of timber to conceal their crime. And at this I put a napkin to my mouth. Sokolov had pictures of the bodies, which had been winched back up, laid out on sheets, and photographed, and Andrei, pulling out his reading glasses, inspected these, as I could not look at them. While Andrei did so, Sokolov passed to me across the table other evidence: a small envelope that contained two items, Sergei’s gold potato charm and the kopek medallion I had given him thirty years before. Both pieces, he said, Grand Duchess Xenia had asked him to give to me. Eventually I would give them to Vova, for had Sergei not planned to leave all that was his to my son? In 1914 that was an annual appanage of 280,000 rubles along with the income from the vast family estates in northern, central, and southern Russia, and houses in every city and resort where the court traveled. By 1920, this was all that was left.

That night I dreamed I was returned to Petersburg, to the Imperial Ballet School, and as I headed down the long corridor to the little student theater where I had once danced at my graduation, someone behind me I could not see cried out, The imperial family, the imperial family is coming! And I asked, But how can they come? They are all dead , and the voice answered, Their souls are coming , and all around me voices began to sing,

and I ran down the passage to fling open the door to the little theater, but there was no room beyond the door, no room with its small stage and its wooden chairs lined up in rows. The door opened instead into nothing at all, into a dark abyss where it was raining great sheets of rain and where a great wind moaned and sent the rain in all directions, and I stood there on the threshold, my skirts blowing, calling out into the wild dark, Christ is risen from the dead , and though I stood there a long time until I was quite wet, no one answered me at all.

What do the dead occupy themselves with, do you think, when they aren’t haunting us? Do they find in the grave a pocket of the past? I know some souls rest in peace, but I don’t think the souls of émigrés do, nor do the souls of the murdered. The souls of the Romanovs probably march west across the churning soil of Russia, through Omik, Ekaterinburg, Life, Kazan, Tambov, Tula, Moscow, all the way back to what is now called Leningrad, looking for what they have lost.

With Sokolov’s report disseminated, Kyril declared himself emperor in exile and thus forever alienated the dowager empress and the Nikolaevichi. What did he care? The dowager empress was in Denmark, he was here in the heart of Russian Paris, where one’s worth among the émigrés was still measured by one’s old rank and where to be received by a grand duke was still considered a social triumph. On Easter, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, the émigrés crowded the grand ducal houses to sign the guest books, to sip a bit of vodka, to be in the company of the men who once ruled Russia. And I? I did better than that. Why, I married Andrei as soon as Miechen was snapped shut in her vault in the chapel she built for herself at Contrexéville. Are you surprised? Then you have not been paying attention. I didn’t have long to wait—she was dead within six months of her arrival in France, having decided to spare herself the diminution of stature served up like a stale pastry to any refugee. Before Andrei and I took our vows in the Church of St. George in Cannes, Andrei, ever obedient, wrote to warn the dowager empress of what was to come and petitioned his brother Kyril, as head of the family, for permission; and this deference to the old protocol had its rewards. Grand Duchess Olga sent us her mother’s best wishes and Kyril issued a ukase whereby I, Mathilde-Maria Felixovna Kschessinska, became Her Serene Highness the Princess Romanovsky-Krassinsky. My son was ennobled, too, after my marriage, when I pressured Andrei to adopt him, and he became Miechen’s grandson rather than her husband’s son, if this makes any difference to her. After our wedding, Andrei took me to be formally presented to Emperor Kyril and his wife, to Queen Alexandrine of Denmark, to Queen Marie of Romania, to Queen Olga of Greece. And in time I came to be received by King Gustav V of Sweden, King Alexander of Yugoslavia, the Shah of Persia, the old king Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the new king Boris, his son, not only by all the Russian grand dukes, but also by Grand Duchess Xenia, by Prince Dimitri Pavlovich and his sister Princess Marie Pavlovna, by the princesses Radziwill and Golitzin, by Prince Volkonsky, my old enemy, if you remember, as director of the Imperial Theaters, by the dukes of Coburg, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and Leuchtenberg. Yes, by all these people my son and I were now received.

My name is in all the genealogy charts, you know, the ones that trace the lines of European and Russian royalty. I sit on the page below Queen Victoria of England, King Christian IX of Denmark, and Tsar Alexander II of Russia, though to be frank I am not positioned where I had hoped, next to Niki but beneath Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, who as his first wife would be listed above, or even next to Sergei, off to the side with the Mikhailovichi branch of the family. No. I am a Vladimirichi, and perhaps, after all, that is where I belong, with the wily and the cunning, the schemers, the plotters, the intriguers, the Machiavellians. But my son, Prince Romanov, is not on the genealogy charts at all, for the line to the throne runs through Kyril, you see, so it is through Kyril’s issue that the line is traced. You will see the name of his son Vladimir there, not mine. Tant pis .

We lived in style on the Riviera for nine years off the sale of the magnificent rubies Miechen bequeathed Andrei—she left her daughter, Elena, her diamonds, Boris her emeralds, and Kyril her pearls—but the huge price the rubies brought, twenty million francs, is not, after all, so much money for a Romanov; and when those francs were gone, I was forced to sell, stone by stone, my own gems, which did not bring me the price they should have, as the market was by then, of course, flooded with the imperial jewels of the impoverished Russian court-in-exile. At last, in 1929, we had to sell our villa at Cap d’Ail and purchase a home in Paris, where real estate was not so dear, a modest house with a long front garden at 10 Villa Molitor in the 16th Arrondissement and, additionally, a maisonette at 6 avenue Vion-Whitcomb to serve as my ballet school, the Studio of the Princess Krassinsky, for once again, it appeared, I would have to work for a living. Andrei was reluctant to lend his name to the sale of champagne, caviar, or cigars, feeling it beneath him, and, anyway, such an endorsement paid only a pittance, otherwise I would have insisted. Instead, I put out my placard and hired the wife of a former tsarist general as my pianist and employed Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirich to keep my books and sweep my studio floors, which he did daily, in his three-piece suits.