Imperial Dancer: Mathilde Kschessinska and the Romanovs (25 page)

Yet Sergei continued to look after Mathilde. In 1909 he built a small private power plant and installed electricity in her dacha and the surrounding park because she was afraid of the dark. This was something that even the neighbouring Constantine Palace or the Tsar’s palace at Peterhof did not have and it was the envy of all her guests. Above the electricity station Sergei built comfortable accommodation for the electrician and his family. Mathilde’s neighbours wanted to tap into her power lines but she told them that there was barely enough power for her own house.
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At the end of 1909 Grand Duke Michael Nicolaievich died in Cannes. Sergei and his brothers now became extremely wealthy. It was certainly in Mathilde’s interests to keep him dangling.

During her long holidays from the stage Mathilde gave herself up to the pursuit of pleasure and completely abandoned regular ballet practice. ‘Fond of parties, cards, ever laughing, amazingly bright; late hours never impeded either her looks or her temper,’ recalled Karsavina. ‘She possessed a marvellous vitality and a quite exceptional will power.’
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The longer a ballerina delayed her return each season, the higher her status. Mathilde characteristically delayed her return to the stage that winter, making her first appearance as the Sugar Plum Fairy in
The Nutcracker
on 13 December 1909 for the
corps de ballet
’s benefit performance. Mathilde’s participation ensured maximum ticket sales.

Her performances usually coincided with the height of the Maryinsky season and because she only danced a limited number of times they were always an event. She had an established routine to regain full fitness and followed it strictly. From a month before her first appearance Mathilde’s work ruled everything. Every morning she checked her weight (Mathilde had a tendency to put on weight easily) and if she had gained even slightly her frugal diet was cut down even more. She trained for hours, did not receive visitors or go out and was in bed by 10 o’clock every night. Before a performance she remained in bed for 24 hours, taking only a light midday meal, often caviar sandwiches. By 6 o’clock Mathilde was in the theatre, allowing herself two hours to make up and practise. In the theatre she was just as strict. ‘I have been simply dying for a drop of water the whole day,’ she told Tamara Karsavina, ‘but I won’t drink before dancing.’
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Karsavina found this fortitude very impressive.

In the autumn of 1909 Legat revived Petipa’s
Le Talisman
, about a goddess who sacrifices her immortality for love of a mortal, for the farewell benefit of Olga Preobrajenska. Mathilde was due to take over the role early in the following year. According to Mathilde, Legat was disappointed with Preobrajenska’s performance and begged her to take over the ballet to keep it in the repertoire. She omitted to say that she had ceded the role to Preobrajenska, but claimed the next performance was cancelled while she learnt the role. Mathilde recorded that she naturally scored her usual triumph.

With the success of Fokine’s ballets in Paris (and the consequent success of Pavlova and Karsavina), Mathilde had begun to hate Fokine. The ballet artists had now divided into two camps – the Innovators,
who backed the new ballets of Diaghilev and Fokine, and the Imperialists like Kschessinska, who supported the strong traditions of the old Imperial Ballet and considered Fokine their principal enemy.

The day before Mathilde’s première in
Le Talisman
, Fokine staged
Carnival
for a charity performance at a hall in Troitsky Street. Although he had a great success, Teliakovsky recorded that Mathilde was going round telling people that the audience had been hissing during the performance. She and Legat were reputedly doing all they could to ruin Fokine’s reputation and make out that he was ‘harmful’ to the ballet, and that it was Legat who possessed all the talent. Grand Duke Andrei, said Teliakovsky, told everyone in advance that
Le Talisman
was ‘wonderfully produced’ in the old tradition, it was ‘just like the good old days’, and the Empress ‘liked it very much’. Teliakovsky sided with the Innovators (to many of whom Mathilde was now the ‘black-eyed she-devil of the ballet’) but he did not find it easy to achieve his objectives.
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Le Talisman
became another of Mathilde’s favourite ballets, even though there was little scope for drama. The Dowager Empress attended nearly every performance of this work, in which Mathilde danced a particularly difficult sequence to display her brilliant technique. Normally there were no restrictions on the number of encores a dancer could perform but when the Emperor, Empress or Dowager Empress were present Mathilde had to wait for permission from the Imperial Box before she could continue. The Dowager Empress always consulted Grand Duke Sergei, who invariably replied that the very fact Mathilde was waiting for the consent indicated that she was strong enough to perform another encore. On one such evening, Mathilde threw her leg up with such brio during the performance that it hit her head.

New costumes had been designed by Prince Alexander Schervashidze for
Le Talisman
and, at Mathilde’s request, for
Pharaoh’s Daughter
. Accessories for the latter included a pretty gilt diadem in the fashionable bandeau style. Mathilde also commissioned Prince Schervashidze to design a tutu to disguise her short legs. The frills on tutus in that era were gathered in at the waist, which was not flattering to a short figure. ‘Prince Schervashidze invented a tutu with a short yoke, slightly lower in the waist,’ recalled Alexandra Danilova.
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Le Talisman
was frequently revived, said Bronislava Nijinska, so that Mathilde, undisputedly talented but no longer young, could continue to dazzle the audience. Nijinska praised her technique, especially on
pointe
, but criticised her lack of elevation. Like Teliakovsky, she was no admirer of Mathilde.

Teliakovsky continued to rant against Mathilde in his diary. ‘Kschessinska was in good form, the Imperial box was filled with young Grand Dukes and Kschessinska was endeavouring to do the same vulgar number in the third act encored four times.’ That same evening Volinsky wrote that she danced with unusual
élan
, saying ‘The artist displayed absolute wonders of choreographic technique.’ The ballet critic Plestscheev, writing in the
St Petersburg Gazette
in 1910, said: ‘She never danced so well! Her technique was wonderful. Never dull technique, it is bold art.’
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It is difficult to know what to make of Mathilde’s reviews. In her memoirs she quotes the most enthusiastic reviews in full (modesty was never Mathilde’s strong point) but it is a fact that many of the critics praised her out of fear because of her influential connections. There is no doubt that she was a powerful technician but she was also human, and by 1910 was well into her thirties when most dancers were on the verge of retirement. The critics’ praise has to be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt.

Bronislava Nijinska called Mathilde’s dancing ‘vulgar and brusque’, the opposite of the ethereal Pavlova. Yet when Pavlova left to dance abroad, Mathilde ‘demanded’ her roles in the Romantic ballets. Mathilde did not perform
Chopiniana
(later
Les Sylphides
) until 1911 and
Giselle
until 1916.
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She was angry when Agrippina Vaganova attempted it.

Kschessinska had many admirers among the old balletomanes but the students and younger balletomanes who frequented the ‘gods’ – the balcony and the gallery high up in the Maryinsky – were supporters of Fokine, Pavlova and Nijinsky. In 1910 they declared ‘war’ on Kschessinska and refused to applaud her, to which she allegedly said, ‘I spit on the gods.’ This brought forth a collective letter from the enraged gods – ‘for us up here, it is much easier to spit down on you than for you to spit up at us’.
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Astruc had fallen out with Diaghilev and was using every means at his disposal to discredit him. ‘Certainly at least Kschessinska never played us such a dirty trick as you have done over this negotiation,’ Diaghilev told him. ‘Kschessinska never obliged us to abandon anything we had undertaken.’ Not only did Astruc send a full report about Diaghilev’s 1909 monetary losses to the Tsar, he also spoke to both Grand Duke Nicholas Michaelovich and Andrei when they visited Paris. Andrei,
another enemy of Diaghilev, may have influenced Mathilde against him.
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Although Astruc and Diaghilev soon settled their differences, Diaghilev’s reputation at the Imperial Court was destroyed.

Although Diaghilev realised that Mathilde’s participation in his 1910 season was essential, both for prestige and any chance of obtaining an Imperial subsidy, he also realised she would have to dance one of her old roles. Fokine still refused to allow her to perform any of his new ballets, but did not want any of the old Maryinsky works to be shown either. Nevertheless, when Pavlova announced that she could not appear in Paris, Diaghilev pencilled Mathilde in to dance
Sleeping Beauty
and
Coppelia
. In early February Astruc was insisting on the participation of Kschessinska, Pavlova and Karsavina but Mathilde refused to appear and only Karsavina danced in Paris.

Vera Trefilova made her last appearance at the Maryinsky in January 1910 and retired shortly afterwards at the height of her fame. Some blamed her reluctance to accept Fokine’s triumph, others cited the jealous intrigues of Kschessinska, who was alleged to have led a campaign against her.

On 6 February 1910 Mathilde danced in a charity performance at the French Embassy in aid of flood victims in France. She refused the Sevrès vases proffered by the French government (an action amounting almost to an insult to Russia’s ally) and insisted on having the Academic Palms in gold instead. Even though she was not entitled to receive these for another three years, the French gave in.
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Mathilde’s friends put a spoke in Diaghilev’s wheel at every turn. When his Paris season was finally arranged, the Minister of Finance advised the Tsar to grant a small subsidy to pay for the artists’ travel tickets. Diaghilev, using the Tsar’s draft as security, borrowed the money and bought the tickets. Then Grand Duke Sergei persuaded the Tsar that the ballets Diaghilev was showing were decadent. The subsidy was withdrawn and the banker had to be repaid.

On 1 July 1910 Marius Petipa died at Gurzuf in the Crimea at the age of eighty-eight. His passing marked the end of an era in the Imperial ballet.

In May 1910 Mathilde, Julie and Ali, Baron Gotsch, Claudia Kulichevskaya and three other friends joined Andrei for a weekend in Louga, where he was stationed with the Artillery Officers’ School for the summer. Andrei was living in a lovely dacha deep in the pine forest, on the banks of a small river. They spent most of the time
playing poker, punctuated by strolls in the forest, returning for a lunch of
kulebyaka
(a Russian pie).

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the night they became lovers, 22 July, Andrei gave Mathilde a brooch/pendant with a 100-carat sapphire, from which was suspended a smaller sapphire of 83 carats on a platinum chain. Fabergé later told Mathilde that the sapphires had come from the famous jewellery belonging to Zinaida de Leuchtenberg, who was married to a grandson of Empress Josephine. For many years Zinaida had lived in a kind of
ménage à trois
with her husband and the Tsar’s uncle Grand Duke Alexei. One wonders if Andrei was aware of the irony.

During 1910 Prince Paul Troubetzkoy, who had sculpted the monument to Alexander III in St Petersburg, began work on a half life-sized statuette of Mathilde, showing her wearing a pleated gown and balancing on one foot. Mathilde thought the likeness diminished as the work progressed. When the balletomanes proposed to present it to mark her twentieth anniversary on the stage she declined the offer. Her half-brother Fili was full of praise for Troubetzkoy’s work, ‘not like that ghastly statue of Alexander III which some useless man has put up!’, he added, with no idea that both statues were by the same man. Mathilde fled, convulsed with laughter. The statuette was brought out of Russia after the Revolution and stood in Prince Troubetzkoy’s Paris studio, alongside one of Andrei which Mathilde considered much more successful.
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By this time Mathilde was widely believed to be a political power with great influence over the Tsar. One night in December 1910 the police arrived at her mansion. According to the wealthy socialite and diarist Count Alexei Bobrinsky, when the Okhrana searched Mathilde’s palace they found ‘secret artillery documents and underground revolutionary literature’ in the cellar. She claimed that the artillery contracts had been given to her by Grand Duke Sergei, who had placed them in her custody. She offered to wake him so that he could confirm her story. The angry Grand Duke corroborated Mathilde’s statement but gave no explanation for the presence of the revolutionary literature. ‘One version was that Kschessinska had wheedled the documents out of her patron for purposes of selling them to foreign intelligence agents.’ A member of the Duma even claimed to have ‘irrefutable evidence’ that Mathilde was selling state secrets abroad. Yet another account says that the house was searched again on 15 February 1911. The search continued for five hours,
during which papers and some cases of jewels were confiscated. The police hoped that by tracing these back to the jewellers they could incriminate certain businessmen and government officials who, it was inferred, had given Mathilde the jewels as an inducement to intervene on their behalf with the Tsar.
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