Imperial Dancer: Mathilde Kschessinska and the Romanovs (45 page)

Joseph’s daughter, young Celina, abandoned the stage. In 1931 she married the engineer Constantine Sevenard (a relative of Sima) and went to live in the Altai region of Siberia. In April 1934 she gave birth to a daughter and on 29 June 1935 to a son, Yuri.

In the autumn of 1930 Mathilde, who had always had such enviable health, began to suffer great pain in her right hip and was told to stop work immediately. Any sudden movement could be dangerous. This was a bitter blow. She and Andrei had put everything into the school, on which all their hopes rested.

Mathilde had always been a survivor and refused to accept defeat now. She immediately sent the X-rays to Dr Kojine, her old surgeon from Russia, who was practising in Nice. His opinion was the exact opposite – resting would only do harm. Mathilde therefore gritted her teeth and began exercising at the barre. Soon afterwards she was able to resume teaching.

Her faith was important to Mathilde. Once, while picking mushrooms in the park at Strelna, she lost a valuable brooch, a present from the Tsarevich many years earlier. She immediately promised an offering to St Anthony of Padua and returned to the park. Remembering that Vova had jumped on her back, she found the spot, bent down and discovered her missing brooch. Now Mathilde attributed her cure to a miracle. Vova was in the south of France when he heard the news about his mother’s hip. He immediately went to pray at the Sanctuary of Notre Dame de Laghet, before writing Mathilde a letter which he sprinkled with holy water. For Mathilde there was no other explanation for her sudden improvement.

Soon afterwards Andrei was admitted to hospital with lung problems. His condition was so serious that an operation was necessary. Mathilde moved into his hospital room, staying there after work at the studio. When Vova caught measles the doctors forbade Mathilde to see him in case she passed the illness to Andrei.

Andrei’s physician was Dr Zalewski, gynaecologist and physician
to the Russian colony in Paris. On 18 January 1931 he received an urgent telephone call from Victor Dandré. Anna Pavlova was very ill in The Hague and Dandré asked if he could come at once. Mathilde was concerned, as Andrei was still seriously ill. The doctor delayed his departure for two days and by the time he left Paris Pierre Vladimiroff was already on his way from The Hague to fetch him. When Dr Zalewski arrived on 22 January there was nothing he could do. Pavlova died the following day.

Mathilde cried all morning – as well she might. ‘It is as if a part of myself were dead,’ she told a reporter. ‘In her, genius was combined with goodness. I don’t think that there was ever an artist in need who she did not help’, she continued, bursting into tears again.
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The news of Pavlova’s death was kept from Andrei (as was the reason for Dr Zalewski’s sudden departure), as he was still very ill. Cyril and Boris visited, as did Elena and Nicholas of Greece with their daughters. Dimitri came every day, bringing with him whatever the doctor permitted Andrei to eat and drink. Andrei remained in hospital for three months and it was Easter before he was allowed home. Even then he was still confined to bed.

That summer they spent a month at a small family
pension
at Evian to enable Andrei to recover his strength. Then they moved to Marly-le-Roi, where Prince Gabriel and Nina were living at the Villa Bienaimé. A frequent visitor was Andrei’s cousin Grand Duchess Xenia.

In 1932 Ivan Kournossov, who had worked for Mathilde for over twenty years, retired on health grounds. When he died in 1957 he left Vova his small apartment in Nice (inherited from his second wife Marfousha) and all the presents given to him by Mathilde and Andrei.

On 4 August 1932 Georges Grammatikov, a member of the Georgian nobility and former officer in the White Army, joined the Villa Molitor household as butler. Early in October his Polish-born wife Elizabeth became Mathilde’s cook. ‘Monsieur Georges was a relic of the old regime,’ recalled a guest, ‘so gentle and thoughtful, always at hand. He served the meal with exquisite grace.’
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Mathilde worked hard, going to the studio early in the morning by Metro, sometimes only returning home at 9 o’clock in the evening. After dinner she played poker until late at night. She loved the game and played like a madwoman, twice a week continuing until 3 o’clock in the morning.

The success of the studio enabled Mathilde to continue sending money to Joseph, who had only a meagre pension to live on. By sending him 10 dollars through the Soviet Torgsin agency he could purchase 20 roubles’ worth of goods at one of the Torgsin shops.
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She and Julie sent clothes for Joseph and Celina, as well as material for him to have a suit made.

Mathilde was now supporting the whole family. Joseph was shocked when he learnt that thirty-year-old Vova lived at his mother’s expense. Joseph was proud of his handsome son Romauld, now eighteen, who hoped to enter the Polytechnic. Celina was now quite well off and wanted her father to go and live with her in central Asia. Joseph refused. He had been working as a theatrical producer and refused help from Slava, saying he could not take money from his children. He asked Julie to send photographs of Slava and the rest of the family, lamenting that regulations forbade him to send her the old family photos he still possessed, ‘photos taken when we were young, photographs of our Mother in stage costumes, photos of Vova taken when he was a child’.
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From Joseph’s letters, it appears that Julie was also feeling lonely and isolated. Mathilde was busy all the time with the studio, her husband and son. Julie had only her little dog Tobik and seems to have taken no part in the running of the ballet school.

Among the ever-increasing number of pupils was Diana Gould, a twenty-year-old English girl who had studied with Marie Rambert and was brought to Kschessinska by Arnold Haskell. One evening Andrei arrived at the studio. This was the beginning of a long-lasting friendship between Mathilde, the Grand Duke and ‘Dianochka’, who they more or less adopted that winter, frequently inviting her to Villa Molitor. One day Mathilde asked Diana to have tea with Andrei while she took a class. At Villa Molitor Monsieur Georges served Russian tea in tall glasses with cherry jam in the bottom, held by elegant little silver holders, and biscuits baked by his wife. As Andrei and Diana chatted in English, she quickly realised that it was Mathilde’s willpower during the Revolution that had enabled the unworldly and rather innocent Grand Duke to survive. Diana quickly nicknamed the Grand Duke ‘Lucy’, after the female saint who shared his name day, and in their correspondence Andrei often signed his letters, even years later, ‘Lucy’.
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Joseph was delighted at Mathilde’s success. ‘I read with deep interest about the little one [Mathilde, who he never mentioned by name], about her work and her studio and I was happy to learn that her pupils gained first place,’ he told Julie in the summer of 1933. ‘Well, I was sure
it could be no other way. She deserved it, because she is persistent, a true master of her subject. It is sad that I cannot be of any help to her and cannot share with her my vast experience.’
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Mathilde improvised movements which Ekaterina Wasmoundt, playing without sheet music, skilfully followed on the old upright piano. ‘None of the Russian teachers adhered to strict musical patterns,’ recalled Margot Fonteyn. ‘The accompanist was expected to lengthen some measures and add a few flourishes at the end of a phase as required.’ At the Maryinsky, the conductors had been expected to do the same.
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As Mathilde spoke no English classes were in French, although she quarrelled with Mme Wasmoundt in Russian. The students worked hard. Once when Diana Gould showed Mathilde her bleeding toes during an exhausting class she was told to repeat the step twelve more times.
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Mathilde guided Claire de Robilant towards the history of ballet, an unusual subject of research in the 1930s, and taught Nathalie Krassovska
Le Spectre de la Rose
. Later, when Nathalie was dancing with Fokine, he said that what Mathilde had taught her was wrong. ‘That woman can’t remember anything’, he claimed, changing the choreography.
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Nevertheless all their old differences were now forgotten and he sometimes choreographed dances for Mathilde’s pupils when he was in Paris. Before returning to America he gave her a set of crystal liqueur glasses.

On 21 April 1935, at the request of the Directors of the International Dance Archives, Mathilde gave a public demonstration of her methods. Six pupils, from a beginner to a graduate, were chosen to show the results of Mathilde’s teaching and were warmly praised in an article written by Prince Volkonsky. Her pupils also danced in charity performances and at private parties, for which Mathilde choreographed short pieces. They scored a particularly resounding success at the Russian Press Ball on 13 January 1930, their first performance.
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The publicity brought still more pupils, until the school was nearly bursting at the seams. Somehow a solution had to be found.

The death of the Dowager Empress Marie in October 1928, followed early in 1929 by that of Nicholasha, removed the two most senior members of the Romanov family and dealt a bitter blow to the monarchist movement. Both the Empress and Nicholasha had remained hostile to Cyril’s claims as ‘Emperor’ in exile but there were still those who hoped to see the old order restored.

Although Andrei’s morganatic marriage barred him (according to
the Supreme Monarchist Council) as a serious claimant to the throne, in 1922 Cyril recruited him as one of the Grand Ducal representatives in his ‘Council for Building Imperial Russia’. The others were Grand Duke Dimitri, Grand Duke Alexander (Sandro) and his brother Grand Duke Michael. In 1929 many workers in the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow were accused of anti-Soviet activity and the creation of a National Society for the Revival of Free Russia. Among those arrested was the prominent historian S.F. Platonov, who boasted that he had once taught history to Nicholas II’s children – and at the head of the list of those he incriminated in plans for a restoration of the monarchy was Grand Duke Andrei.

In January 1930 Alexander Kutepov, a White general, was kidnapped by Soviet agents off the streets of Paris. Kutepov did not survive the journey to Russia but the very fact that the Soviets were active in Paris sent the Russian
émigrés
into a panic. Through ‘an associate of Grand Duke Andrei’, a collective letter was delivered to the French Prime Minister Andrei Tardieu asking the government for help. When the Soviets kidnapped General Miller from Paris in 1937 and took him to Moscow, where he was shot after a brutal interrogation, the Romanovs realised just how vulnerable they were.
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From now on they were often followed by agents of the French police and received warnings that this or that person was a Moscow agent and not trustworthy. They took their own precautions of course, but none of them was able to pay for extensive private security.

Mathilde and Andrei were all the more worried because Vova’s friendship with Grand Duke Dimitri had led to his involvement in the Young Russian movement, a political group which hoped to restore the Russian monarchy. The founder was a young aristocrat, Alexander Kazem-Bek, a great-nephew of Leo Tolstoy and cousin of Sima Astafieva. Kazem-Bek was an admirer of Italian fascism and wanted a restoration with Grand Duke Cyril as Tsar, but he wanted to preserve ‘the social gains the Soviet system had achieved for the lower classes’. The Young Russians’ uniform was a dark blue shirt and their symbol was an orb (monarchy) with a cross above (Orthodoxy). The chairman of the Council of Young Russians was Grand Duke Dimitri. When Vova was asked who he thought should be the next Russian Tsar he replied enigmatically, ‘in Russia there are people in whose veins flows the blood of the last Emperor’.
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By the early 1930s Vova was close to Dimitri and Kazem-Bek. He organised annual dinner galas for the Russian community and arranged
the Young Russians’ People’s Fete, dinner and ball in December. He was also a frequent guest at Dimitri’s estate at Vienne during the 1930s.

Cyril’s cautious support for the movement risked alienating the more conservative White Monarchists, who were appalled at the Young Russians’ fascist-style rallies and songs glorifying the Red Army. Andrei was also ‘unhappy’ about Vova’s prominence in the movement and his closeness to Dimitri and Kazem-Bek.
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Without realising it, Vova was wading into some very muddy waters indeed.

In July 1937, Kazem-Bek was spotted talking to Colonel Alexei Ignatiev, ‘now a prominent figure in Stalin’s military establishment’. In the ensuing scandal Alexander Kazem-Bek was exposed as a Soviet agent working for Stalin.
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On 13 September 1934 Serafima Astafieva died in London at the age of fifty-eight. Sima had been Mathilde’s sister-in-law, friend and the companion on her travels in the early days of her relationship with Andrei. She was proud of the fact that she was never a refugee, having been living and working in London since 1914. Many of the great British dancers received their early training in her studio. Joseph remained fond of Sima despite their divorce, often asking for news of her.

Mathilde was now very worried about Joseph. His increasing deafness was becoming a problem and he was lonely without Romauld, who was on a scientific expedition to the Kara Sea. There had been no acknowledgement for the money recently sent, something about which Joseph was always very particular. With Stalin’s purges at their height and people being denounced and shot the family in Paris could only hope he was too frightened to write. Joseph was writing, but his letters were not received in Paris. After March 1936 he never mentioned Romauld, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Many years later a woman claimed to be Romauld’s daughter, born in one of Stalin’s camps.
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