Imperial Dancer: Mathilde Kschessinska and the Romanovs (5 page)

From 1 June 1890 Mathilde was officially a member of the Imperial Theatres Ballet Company and, as such, was scheduled to perform at Krasnoe Selo. Her recent success ensured that she had the rank of
coryphée
, one of the minor soloists who usually danced in groups of three or four. She was given a new pair of ballet shoes after every three performances and earned 800 roubles a year. This was a good salary. Even in 1902 the rate for a beginner was still 600 roubles.
⁵
As her sister was already in the company Mathilde became known as Mlle Kschessinska II. The main attraction for Mathilde was that the Tsarevich was serving in the army and would be attending the manoeuvres. This would be her big chance.

Tsarevich Nicholas was born on 6 May 1868. Compared with the previous generation of Romanov Grand Dukes he was small, only 5 feet 7 inches, a trait inherited from his Danish mother Empress Marie Feodorovna. He was shy, extraordinarily polite, with enormous charm and a streak of obstinacy. There was no trace of his mother’s vivacity or of the enormous physical strength that enabled Alexander III to straighten horseshoes and bend iron bars. In 1887 Nicholas joined the Preobrajensky Guards and by 1890 was serving in the Hussars. He was perhaps at his happiest in the army, obeying orders without question.

On 28 April 1890 his round of lessons and tutors ended. ‘Today I finished definitely and for ever my education,’ he wrote triumphantly.
⁶
He immediately began to lead the life of a playboy – balls, dinners, skating parties, visits to the theatre and, of course, drinking. ‘I returned home at about half-past eleven, extremely merry,’ Nicholas recorded in his diary, not for the first time. Next morning’s entry read ‘I felt very unwell and miserable.…’
⁷

Nicholas had also begun to notice the opposite sex. He was in raptures after seeing the beautiful American opera singer Sibyl Sanderson and his early diaries made frequent reference to whether the girls at this or that party were pretty. After a teenage crush on his cousin Princess Victoria of Wales his attention turned to Princess Olga Dolgoruky, with whom he fell very much in love.
⁸
These were just platonic romances.

There was rumoured to be a more serious affair with a beautiful Jewish opera singer, which ended when it came to the notice of the notoriously anti-semitic Emperor. The lady and her entire household were sent away. According to gossip, Nicholas was at her home at the time and, although he protested (‘Over my dead body’, he is alleged
to have said to St Petersburg’s governor), he was taken back to the Anichkov Palace. The lady never returned to the capital.
⁹
.

Constantine Pobondonostsov, Procurator of the Holy Synod and the Tsar’s chief adviser, recommended that they find a
suitable
partner so that Nicholas could ‘sow his wild oats’ before he had to marry.
¹⁰
In 1889 the Foreign Minister Count Vladimir Lamsdorff reported that General Tcheverine, Chief of Police (a close friend of the Tsar and Tsarina), had recommended a young member of the
corps de ballet
as a mistress for the Tsarevich. Maria Nicolaievna Labunskaya was born in 1868. She was ‘very beautiful, with fine aristocratic Russian features, delicate skin, large expressive eyes, luxuriously long, ash-blond hair, and a charming smile.’
¹¹
Maria had graduated from the Theatre School in 1886, the same year as Mathilde’s brother Joseph, and around that time was introduced to the Tsarevich. One of the advantages of a dancer was that their health was carefully watched. There would be no chance of the Tsarevich picking up any unpleasant sexual disease.

In 1890, as Mathilde was graduating, Maria was promoted to
coryphée
and later that year danced in the first performance of
Sleeping Beauty
with Julie Kschessinska. According to Count Lamsdorff, Mlle Labunskaya was to be paid 18,000 roubles a year and would be summoned to the palace ‘when required’.
¹²
Maria was already engaged to young officer and when rumours circulated in St Petersburg that she had been chosen to initiate the Tsarevich, her fiancé’s mother tried to put an end to the betrothal. Princess Stephanie Dolgoruky called Maria ‘very pretty, but too opulent to become a star’.
¹³
Whether Labunskaya was ever summoned to the palace is unclear. Marie Feodorovna, concerned that her sluggish, apathetic son had little or no sexual experience, thought he seemed to prefer playing cards and taking long walks on his own to the company of women.

All this time Nicholas was also dreaming of a princess. ‘Oh God, how I want to go to Ilinskoe,’ he wrote on 20 August 1890. ‘Victoria and Alix are there now. If I don’t see her now I shall have to wait a whole year, and that would be terribly hard.’
¹⁴
The princess was Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, eighteen-year-old granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who was staying at Ilinskoe with her sister Grand Duchess Elisabeth (‘Ella’), wife of Nicholas’s uncle Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Nicholas had fallen in love with Alix when she visited St Petersburg the previous year. Although she was beautiful, with red-gold hair, pale skin and blue-grey eyes, his parents did not approve. In the summer of 1890 Nicholas told his father of his wish to marry Alix. The Tsar was
noncommittal. The Empress was already looking round for a suitable bride. Her plans did not include Alix.

At a family council the Tsar’s aunt Grand Duchess Alexandra Josifovna surveyed the options and decided a Polish girl would make the best mistress for the Tsarevich. Polish girls combined ‘beauty, elegance, passion, sentimental tenderness and passionate melancholy’.
¹⁵
Mathilde was therefore an ideal candidate. She was healthy, had an easy manner, a sweet and good character, was blossoming in youth and although not a beauty, was vivacious and coquettish. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, with black hair, a slim waist, wide hips and expressive features. Her shoe size in English was only three. She had no noticeable negative traits. Princess Catherine Radziwill went as far as to say that ‘the dancer had been chosen by the Empress Marie herself as a fit friend for her eldest son’.
¹⁶
This seems unlikely.

As far as Nicholas was concerned, Princess Alix was, for the moment at least, unattainable. Mathilde was not and she was determined to show it.

At her first Krasnoe Selo season Mathilde performed as part of the company with a shared dressing room. It was customary in the interval before the ballet
divertissement
for the Emperor and Grand Dukes to come on stage and talk to the performers. Mathilde, who had been hoping to see the Tsarevich again if only from a distance, was ecstatic when he came and spoke to her during every performance. Once as she ran happily on stage Mathilde almost collided with the Emperor. ‘Ah!’ he said as the ballerina pulled herself up sharply, ‘you must have been flirting!’
¹⁷

Mathilde still had no idea of Nicholas’s feelings, yet the Tsarevich was not immune to her charms. ‘I positively like Kschessinska II very much,’ he admitted on 17 July.
¹⁸
All that summer they continued to flirt. Only once as she allotted a solo performance and a corresponding better dressing room whose window looked out over the Imperial entrance, allowing her to stand and talk freely with the Tsarevich and the younger Grand Dukes. ‘The growing affair has heated up powerfully , … Was at the theatre … Talked with little Kschessinska through the window,’ Nicholas wrote.
¹⁹
On 31 July he recorded: ‘After
zakuskee
[Russian
hors d’oeuvres
] went, for the last time, to the dear little Krasnoe Selo Theatre. Said goodbye to Kschessinska.’
²⁰
The following day he attended the ceremony of the Blessing of the Colours. ‘Those few minutes spent in front of the theatre tantalised my memory.’
²¹
Yet Mathilde never had the chance to
be alone with Nicholas. He made no attempt to pursue her and when the manoeuvres ended the relationship had progressed no further.

The Imperial family moved to The Cottage at Peterhof. Mathilde followed, staying with a friend nearby. Every day she walked around the area in the hope of meeting Nicholas. Her wish remained unfulfilled.

Soon afterwards, an announcement came from the Imperial court. The Tsarevich and his younger brother Grand Duke George Alexandrovich would be going on a trip to the Far East. They would leave on 23 October 1890 and be away for nine months.

Mathilde was devastated. She had spent the remainder of the summer trying to develop the relationship, and was looking forward to the winter season at the Maryinsky where Nicholas, a devotee of opera and ballet, would doubtless be in the Imperial box. Now all her dreams were shattered.

Eugene Volkoff, a Hussar officer, was asked by Nicholas to arrange for him to meet Mathilde before he left Russia. The request came via another dancer, an intimate friend of Volkoff. Mathilde lived with her parents, Nicholas was reluctant to visit her home and a meeting outside was too difficult to arrange. Nicholas then requested a photograph. Mathilde only possessed one, which she felt was not good enough, so did not send it.

The night before Nicholas left he was at the Maryinsky, where Kschessinska was dancing in
Sleeping Beauty
. They would not meet again for another year.

While Nicholas was away Mathilde’s career prospered. That season she danced twenty-two times in ballet performances, mainly in the
corps de ballet
, and twenty-one times in ballet scenes with the Imperial Opera. In Tchaikovsky’s opera
The Queen of Spades
she appeared as a shepherdess, one of a group of statuettes wearing white wigs pushed out of the wings on little platforms. They jumped off and danced while a choir sang, then leapt back on to the platforms and were carried away again. Occasionally there were small solo roles. In one performance of
Sleeping Beauty
she danced the Fairy Candide in the first act, the Duchess in the second and Little Red Riding Hood in the third. Keen to emulate her idol Virginia Zucchi she took lessons with the Italian teacher Enrico Cecchetti, who gave his pupils ‘strength and endurance’.
²²
This so upset Johansson, with whom Mathilde continued to have private lessons, that she gave up Cecchetti’s classes and studied the Italian technique on her own.

Mathilde followed Nicholas’s progress in the newspapers – Athens,
Egypt and on to Bombay, Singapore and then Japan. She made a pencil sketch of him and drew his portrait in naval uniform from a photograph. Unknown to Mathilde, Nicholas was kept informed about
her
by his sister.

Before he left St Petersburg Nicholas had confided to fifteen-year-old Grand Duchess Xenia that he now had a friend. Xenia was dying of curiosity and finally Nicholas told her more. The young Grand Duchess was close to her brother and eager to please. ‘I am sorry that I am not able to tell you anything about your friend Kschessinska, because unfortunately, she is too far from me,’ Xenia wrote. ‘I hope to see her often in winter, so that I can tell you more about her.’ At the same time, Xenia was also mischievously telling him about Princess Alix. ‘Your dear Alix we see every Saturday. She is really charming. … She thinks about you all the time.’
²³

Although Xenia knew little about Mathilde she very much wanted to find something to tell Nicholas. ‘I saw your friend, little Kschessinska,’ she reported a few weeks later, ‘this time in
The Queen of Spades
! She was dancing in the ballet during the ball and she reminded me of you.’ Xenia was unable to report anything scandalous about Mathilde, she could only tell her brother which performances she appeared in and what was said about her. Unfortunately, Xenia was unable to keep the secret and told many people ‘confidentially’. Soon St Petersburg was buzzing with rumours about the Tsarevich’s interest in the young ballerina.
²⁴

Actresses and dancers were considered to belong to the
demi-monde
, not really respectable. Rich balletomanes, the true devotees of the ballet, occupied the first few rows at the Maryinsky and many of them had a mistress in the company. The poorer balletomanes, especially students, watched their favourite ballerinas from high up in the ‘gods’ and flocked to the stage door afterwards.

The Grand Ducal
loge
was next to the Imperial box and it was said that a special passageway ran from there to the stage, giving the Grand Dukes easy access to the dancers. Most of them were notorious rakes. During the season they attended the balls given by the aristocracy and afterwards went for wild troika rides through the snow to St Petersburg’s night haunts. They dined at Cubat’s restaurant, a favourite venue of society, where their wild parties often ended in drunken brawls. At the Maryinsky uniforms predominated, and one Grand Duke described those ‘self-satisfied stalwart Guardsmen who watched the world go by through the short end of their opera glasses fixed on the
limbs of a twirling ballerina’.
²⁵
The Imperial family and the aristocracy ‘considered the ballet as a nursery for carefully chosen women’, recalled Serge Lifar. ‘People went to the ballet to choose a mistress.’
²⁶