Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

For my son, however, I did not wish such a coda, such an infernal gallop . I did not want him sweeping my studio floors, and yet there is no proper occupation for a prince-in-exile, no institutions of government or military to run. Like the sons of other émigrés of his rank, Vova lived with his parents, attended royal family weddings and funerals, supported various charities, and waited in vain for the world he had been groomed to rule to be restored. In anticipation of this, Kyril established his Council for Building Imperial Russia; his grand ducal advisors included Boris and Andrei, as well as Sergei’s two surviving brothers, Sandro and Mikhail, and lest you think the five of them alone were such dreamers, let me tell you that in 1930, in a forest outside Paris, Kyril conducted a review of two thousand former officers of the tsar’s guard regiments, who cheered at the sight of him as they had once cheered for Niki, The day of glory is near . My son, along with Prince Dimitri Pavlovich and other frustrated young men, joined the Union of Young Russia, organized by Alexander Kazem-Bek, a great-nephew of Tolstoy, which envisioned a Russia that embraced both the reforms of the Bolsheviks and the throne of its tsar. Like those old officers in the Paris forest, they, too, had a uniform (a dark blue shirt), a symbol (the cross and the orb), and a motto ( Tsar and the Soviets! ). And they, too, held their rallies and yodeled paeans, theirs to the Red Army, of which most of them were too young to know almost anything, and when Andrei admonished him, Vova bristled— Your council is a council of doddering old men . It was not until Kazem-Bek was discovered in 1937 to be a Soviet agent that Vova finally left the movement, which itself collapsed after the Second World War.

And my son’s tale worsens. With Andrei’s death in 1956 and the closing of my school, I had to sell this house, too, though Vova and I have lived on here as tenants. Without Andrei, I’m afraid the other Romanovs forgot about us—just look how the émigrés ignore my son, the son of the last emperor of all the Russias—and Vova, my prince, had to take on work. He bore the indignity of this as Niki had borne the indignity of imprisonment—with humility and patience. Yes, it is in these last years that I have seen Vova become most like his father, who had been born on the Feast of Job and who perceived his life as a series of struggles and burdens to be endured, of which I am now one for my son. Each day, he delivers wine on his motorized bicycle, receives my visitors, types my correspondence in which I beg for money for us. The benevolent societies of the theater send us their francs only because I am alive, because of what I gave to my art. But when I am gone, they, like the others, will forget my son. I would be gone already but for him, for I see Sergei in his summer whites and his young body waiting for me by the door, and I need only to rise from this bed to join him. But without me, what will Vova do? He has never married. He has devoted himself entirely to me. Why, he sits in a chair beside me, now, wearing one of Andrei’s remade three-piece suits and carrying in his pocket the gold cigarette case Andrei set out on the dinner table fifty years ago when we finally arrived so shabbily in Venice, to reassure the waiters we could pay the bill. Yes, he sits here alone with me, and, yes, he is sixty-nine years old, but this is still young for a Kschessinsky, if not for a Romanov—he may have thirty years more, and what will he do with them? Life must have a purpose.

The world has not forgotten Nicholas II, you know. Why, just last week I received in the mail tickets to the premiere of the film Nicholas and Alexandra . Their lives still have the power to excite the imagination. If Vova had lost his life with them at Ekaterinburg, the world would know his name, too, ponder his place in the tsar’s suite—kitchen boy, playmate of Alexei’s, ward of the tsar? They would search for his bones, weigh them, ponder the contents of his pockets, examine the bits and pieces he left behind in the House of Special Purpose—and perhaps by now the mystery of his birth would have been revealed and the world would know his great place in it.

But because of me he is alive here in Paris, not burned to ash in a forest near Ekaterinburg.

You understand that by keeping his paternity secret, I kept him alive? Lenin feared us so much he murdered as many Romanovs as he could grab in his fists. Stalin chased down anyone who had ever been touched by so much as the shadow of the tsars, and then he sent his agents abroad to ferret out the monarchists among us. Why, in the thirties his agents kidnapped two White Army generals right off the streets of Paris! Yes, as far away as Paris we still made Stalin shake. Khrushchev told the West, My ves pokhoronim— We will bury you. Ha. He died three months ago. I buried him . I have outlived all of them, even poor Kerensky. So whatever you think of me, don’t pity me. I had a beautiful life. I was loved, admired, feted, copied, mocked, treasured, and feared. I am one hundred years old and I am no longer afraid of anything and I say to the Bolsheviks, You will not last one hundred years, and when Soviet Russia falls, then the Russian people will come looking once again for their tsar, seeking the last link in the imperial line, and who stands closer to Nicholas II than his son, his one living son? Emperor Vladimir. Yes, it is time to say now what I could not say in 1954 when I wrote my first memoirs, full of fiction and lies. This time I will write for my son and these will be my true memoirs. I will dictate and he will put my words to the page. He thinks he has nothing, but in a moment, I will open my eyes and give him everything. I will tell him a story. I will start this way. I was the lover of two grand dukes, the mistress of the tsar. The last tsar. He called me Little K .

White Swan, Black Swan

The Sleeping Beauty

In creating my concoction of fiction and lies, I have, of course, twisted the details of Kschessinska’s life, conflating rumor into fact, excising inconvenient truths, and reconfiguring events and relationships to suit dramatic purpose; though conversations are imagined, I have used excerpts from the letters and journals of the principal characters when so indicated, with the exception of Little K herself, who, when it comes to her epistles, as with everything else, serves mostly at the pleasure of my imagination.

For details of Russian history, Russian culture, and the court of the Romanovs, I am indebted to works by Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 ; Richard Pipes’s Russia Under the Old Regime and The Russian Revolution ; Solomon Volkov’s The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn , St. Petersburg: A Cultural History , and Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky: Interviews with George Balanchine ; Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra and The Romanovs: The Final Chapter ; Suzanne Massie’s Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia and Pavlovsk: The Life of a Russian Palace ; Andrei Maylunas and Sergei Mironenko’s A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra, Their Own Story ; Maurice Paléologue’s An Ambassador’s Memoirs ; John Curtis Perry and Constantine Pleshakov’s The Flight of the Romanovs: A Family Saga ; Edvard Radzinsky’s trio of books The Rasputin File , Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar , and The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II ; Thomas Berry’s Memoirs of the Pages to the Tsars ; Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin ; James P. Duffy and Vincent L. Ricci’s Czars: Russia’s Rulers for Over One Thousand Years ; Peter Kurth’s Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra ; Charlotte Zeepvat’s The Camera and the Tsars: A Romanov Family Album ; the exhibition catalog Czars: 400 Years of Imperial Grandeur: The Splendor of Russia , for a traveling exhibit from the State Historical and Cultural Museum and Preserve of the Moscow Kremlin; the State Hermitage Museum and the State Archive of the Russian Federation’s Nicholas and Alexandra: The Last Imperial Family of Tsarist Russia ; Greg King’s The Court of the Last Tsar: Pomp, Power, and Pageantry in the Reign of Nicholas II ; Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History ; John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World ; Alexander Mikhailovich’s Once a Grand Duke ; Meriel Buchanan’s The Dissolution of an Empire and Recollections of Imperial Russia ; Pierre Gilliard’s Thirteen Years at the Russian Court ; Felix Youssupoff ’s Lost Splendour: The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who Killed Rasputin ; John van der Kiste and Coryne Hall’s Once a Grand Duchess: Xenia, Sister of Nicholas II ; Pauline Gray’s The Grand Duke’s Woman: The Story of the Morganatic Marriage of Michael Romanoff, the Tsar Nicholas II’s Brother, and Nathalia Cheremetevskaya ; Tatyana Tolstaya’s Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians ; Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them: A Memoir of Parents ; Marina Tsve taeva’s Selected Poems ; Anna Akhmatova’s The Complete Poems ; Ivan Bunin’s Collected Stories ; Tolstoy’s novels, in particular Anna Karenina ; Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory ; the photographs and historical documents on Bob Atchison’s website, the Alexander Palace Time Machine; and Alexander Sokurov’s film Russian Ark .