The True Memoirs of Little K

by Adrienne Sharp

  Yes, Petersburg started as a fortress and even in 1890 Petersburg was a military town; sixty thousand men were garrisoned there in vast barracks on Konnogvardeisky Boulevard behind the Horse Guards Ménage or at the western edge of the Champs de Mars or by the Winter Palace or the Alexander Nevsky Monastery or the Obvodny Canal or in the Vyborg District, and the city was colored by the greenish-gray uniforms of the Grenadiers, the white and silver of the Horse Guards, the crimson jackets of the Hussars, and the blue and gold of the Cossacks. These men and their officers were not in Peter just to train but also to play. The high social season began in January, sparked by the twelve balls given by the tsar at the Winter Palace. Court servants in green jackets and black feathered caps and soft leather gloves delivered thousands of cards stamped with gold double-headed eagles inviting the deliverees to the palace. Its great halls on those nights would be lit by ten thousand beeswax candles and garnished with pruned fruit trees in enormous pots and vases thick with pink roses, Parma violets, and white orchids sent north by train in heated cars from the warm Crimea, along with bowls full of fruit embossed with the tsar’s silhouette. Hundreds of troikas and carriages would clot the palace square, pulling close to the braziers, flames rising like red fountain spray to the black sky, their drivers carrying hot water bottles, sable blankets, and bottles of vodka—for even the blankets and braziers were not enough to keep these men warm. These balls went on until three o’clock in the morning, until the final polonaise. Too much vodka, though, while you waited for your master, and you felt overheated—if you tossed off your robe you might sleep your way to a frozen death. Although the square was shielded from the Gulf of Finland by the immensity of the palace itself, there are no words to explain the cold of a Petersburg winter. The lights from the palace lit up a white and black world—brittle ice and flakes and drifts of snow, the steaming black breath from the horses and the waiting men.

  The season ended at Lent, after which society went to the country, to the islands outside Petersburg or to the Crimea at the Black Sea or to estates around Moscow, until the end of summer military maneuvers called them to the village of Krasnoye Selo near Peter, which boasted a great parade ground, around which the wooden villas of the officers lay like fringe. Ah, the lovely rhythm of those days. After maneuvers the court traveled to Europe, but by late August the ballet, the opera, the French theater had begun once again to adorn the stages, and their audiences eventually returned and began once again to adorn the blue velvet parterres and the loges to applaud the art we actors, dancers, musicians perfected just for them. During my time there were nineteen courts in Petersburg—the tsar’s, his mother’s, and seventeen grand ducal courts—several thousand people when one counted all the family members and courtiers; and these aristocrats along with the ambassadors and the Diplomatic Corps and the Guards and the occasional provincial nobleman came to the theaters every night during the season. You must remember we had no television, no radio, no cinema; Russian winter days are short, and there are many dark hours to fill. The Imperial Theaters produced plays, operas, operettas, concerts, and ballets, and of these performances at the Maryinsky, fifty were the ballet, and of those, forty performances were by subscription only. It fell to the director of the Imperial Theaters, Ivan Alexandrovich Vzevolozhsky, an aristocrat himself who could trace his lineage to Rurik and the princes of Smolensk, to supervise the production of all these amusements, and to Marius Petipa, the French dancer who had come to Petersburg in 1847 and clawed his way up to succeed St. Léon as ballet master of the Imperial Ballet, to create all the pas for them. He had help from the second ballet master, Lev Ivanov—who became a family friend and who loved my father’s meals, unfolding his linen napkin and saying, Let’s have a bite, but who never received the credit he deserved for his work, being a Russian in a Francophile court. M. Vzevolozhsky favored the Petersburg theaters over the Moscow ones, and why not? The court, after all, was here. At the Maryinsky one saw the same faces night after night. We were like family facing each other across the footlights, they very vocal relations, for the balletomanes would call out to us freely, Go, Mala, or More roles to Tata, to urge us to dance harder or to urge the directorate to reward exceptional talent. And, of course, there would be boos and hisses, as well. It was the court’s interest in the ballet that led eventually to the great Tchaikovsky’s composing for it and to the flowering of the art. Once I became famous, I delayed my return to the stage until later and later in the season, until the more prestigious months of December and January, as if I, too, were an aristocrat who had just returned from Europe to Peter. But that is ahead. At this moment I am still seventeen.

  Alexander III on the day of my graduation had instructed me, Be the glory and the adornment of our ballet, and so I determined to be just that; and as I had chased first prize at my school, so I determined to chase the first prize outside of it: the tsarevich. I took so long with my toilette that April afternoon of my promenade I almost missed my chance to tag him. Now everyone has long, straight hair parted in the middle, a generation of girls who wear their hair like children in the nursery, but in 1890, we wore our hair tightly curled, wet it with sugar water and wrapped it around curling papers, spent hours pinning it to dry. I had a rivulet of bangs at the top of my forehead, tendrils fell before my ears, and that day I wore a ruffled blouse with a doubled length of brocade secured at the neck by a brooch, dabbed my violet scent behind my ears—for in 1890 each eau de cologne was made of just a single flower’s scent—and in this costume of a young lady, my school clothes packed away now, I walked the fashionable section of Nevsky Prospekt, where in the shops one could buy soft French gloves or Chinese tea or English soaps, past the site where Eliseyevsky’s would open in 1901, a shop so fancy it was hung with chandeliers and where one could buy the fruit and nuts of any region, to the Fontanka Canal, to the mustard-and-white façade of the Anichkov Palace where Niki’s family lived while in the capital, his father having eschewed the Winter Palace except for official receptions. The imperial family lived among us then—it was only later that Niki and his family secluded themselves so completely from Petersburg society that people forgot what they looked like. Right away I spied the tsarevich sitting on the balcony with his fifteen-year-old sister, Xenia, he smoking, of course, the two of them leaning forward in their chairs to look through the railings at the passersby. I slowed my pace, the better to be seen. Niki blew smoke from his mouth and nodded to me. I nodded back. He nodded at me again but he did not rise and approach the rails. What could I do but walk on?

  So. That was our second encounter and it was not much. I understood from it that it would not be as easy for me as it had been for Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, whose tsar lover did not cower behind balcony railings but instead boldly arranged to meet her again in the Summer Garden on those paths beneath the linden, and just as boldly ravished her one afternoon in the Babigon Pavilion at Peterhof on a beautiful July day, the Gulf of Finland glinting in the distance, heat and perfume everywhere, flower petals crushed between her fingers.

  No. Those next few weeks I would ride around and around the city with the family’s Russian coachman I begged from my father. Not every family could afford its own coachman, especially a Russian coachman in his centuries-old costume who drove with his arms held out stiffly in front of him as if in balletic port de bras and who, as we plowed our way through the streets, shouted throatily at every other carriage, cart, and person in our way. Though I wanted to show him off, as well as myself, I might as well have stayed at home. For though I drove along the Morskaya, strolled Nevsky Prospekt, applauded the races at the Horse Ménage, even in a ridiculous act of desperation paced once again back and forth on Karavannaya Street across from the Anichkov Palace, the tsarevich took no notice of me at all. The stage for my seduction was not meant to be Petersburg, though I did not know this, but most unexpectedly the summer encampment at Krasnoye Selo in August.

  The Imperial Guards of Petersburg and dozens of regiments from the provi
nces converged at Krasnoye Selo for summer maneuvers away from the Petersburg heat and swirling dust, 130,000 men in their pale canvas tents erected by the great parade ground along the Dudergov and Ligovka rivers. How the Romanovs loved their uniforms and their bugles and their horses! Niki’s great-grandfather Nicholas I would weep at the sight of a great group of uniformed soldiers. There were white tunics and scarlet, the long blue coats and gold belts of the Cossacks, the Golden Grenadiers in their gray coats and tall gilded helmets—each regiment with its own epaulets, ribbons, braids, crosses, medals, ornaments, hats. Some regiments wore papakhi of bleached lamb, other Cossack regiments wore dark wool; still other officers sported visored caps festooned with feathers and medallions. Until almost the end of his life, Nicholas fiddled with the uniforms of his regiments, adding a row of buttons here, another golden braid.

  He had talent as an artist, you know, had been taught to handle pencils and watercolors by Kyril Lemokh, the curator of art in the Russian Museum of Alexander III. He drew landscapes. I saw a few. One sketch held no figures, only a tree, a field, a red dirt road glowing like brick in the sun; in another a small wooden boat had just been pushed off from the shore, and one could see a lone figure hunched on it, two men on the very edge of the land who must have shoved the boat off for their friend, the tall, tall grove of birch trees in the background dwarfing them all. They were pictures drawn by a boy who loved the natural world and who found in it a place where a tsar was not a giant but simply part of a larger whole. But Niki gave up painting, other than making sketches in his record book of the gifts he was given. And later in life, I suppose, uniforms became the paper he drew upon.

  The big show on the vast plain at Krasnoye Selo shimmered in the late July heat, the waves of heat soothed into stillness only when they reached the woods and hills that marked the boundaries of the big grassy space, which served as stage for the precision marching, the smart turns and lunges with saber and bayonet. The elite of Petersburg society turned out for the Great Review, seated in stalls near a thatch of trees, the women wearing summer whites, their hats and parasols caught by the breeze, undulating like the leaves and catkins of the beech trees above them. The ministers of the court stood in their tails and top hats beneath tents on the Emperor’s Mound, and the tsar, the empress, and the grand dukes and duchesses inspected the troops from their horses and carriages, then joined the ministers to survey the rows and rows of men who filled the plain, marching in unison, flags held high. The next two wars Russia fought would be disastrous failures for her, leaving men like these and millions of others lying dead on the battlefields across Europe and Russia. But no one would have guessed this then.

  No, that summer in 1892, at Krasnoye Selo these actors stood out on that great plain enacting battles they never lost.

  This, however, was not theater enough. There must be evening entertainment, as well.

  And so a wooden theater in the Russian style was built at Krasnoye Selo, a theater as big as the Mikhailovsky in Peter, a bright place of balconies hung with striped silk drapes and tasseled valances, and we artists performed there twice a week in July and the first part of August, when the grand dukes and the emperor and his family came to the camp, leaving behind their marble palaces to stay in their graceful wooden villas, with canvas awnings and wide verandas. In the evenings, all the theater artists stood at attention in the theater windows that overlooked the private imperial entrance to salute the imperial entourage as they disembarked from their landaus and troikas. The men wore their military regalia even to the theater. The grand dukes all sat in the first row; in the second and third ones sat their officers, with the ladies after and junior officers beyond, and in boxes opposite one another sat the tsar’s family and the families of the ministers of the court and the military. I used to spot my turns by all the medals and decorations shining on the men’s breasts.

  The grand dukes and the emperor and the tsarevich always stopped by after lunch to chat with the dancers or to watch rehearsals, and they mounted the stage between the evening’s entertainments—a comedy first and a ballet divertissement second—to greet all the performers. Great beauty, which I did not possess, could shape one’s fate. And so I worked even harder to shape mine, with my pretty hands and my little feet and my lively conversation. Like my father, I have always been gay, with the gift to make those around me also so. And this was how Nicholas was finally drawn to me—by my charm. He would seek me out on that stage and stand in the sun to chat with me, showing his white teeth at my jokes, while I tried to hide my crooked ones. Sometimes I touched a button on his tunic or rose en pointe or made flying birds of my hands in my rapture at being so close to him. I had noted how Niki seemed most at ease around those who were merry, like us theater artists or like his rowdy cousins, the Mikhailovichi, or his fellow officers at camp, with whom Niki drank himself beyond drunkenness until they all played “the wolves,” which involved crawling naked in the grass, howling and biting one another, before drinking on all fours from vats of champagne and vodka their obliging servants hauled out for the young men’s pleasure. One afternoon, in my hurry to make sure I didn’t miss the chance for conversation before rehearsal, I ran onto the little stage right into the uniformed belly of the emperor, who took one look at my flushed face and said, You must have been flirting. But he was wrong. I was just eager to begin! My brief moments with the tsarevich at camp were more important to me than the evening’s show, and they were still all I had of him.

  Yet it was not only with Nicholas that I chatted, for when else would so many Romanov men be assembled in a single place to which I had access? I attempted to charm every man with a title—who knew what use he might one day be for me?—including Grand Duke Vladimir, one of Niki’s many uncles, who served as minister of the Imperial Theaters and was a great lover of the arts. An old man, but a valuable one—no?—given his position. He would come sit in my dressing room and visit with me while I painted my lips red. He didn’t talk but rather boomed wherever he went, and his voice from his box could be heard all over the theater as he commented on the dancers. What? What is this? A sparrow? he cried when a young, thin girl appeared, poor thing, to perform a few spindly steps. Or he bellowed, Let us all go home, when the first-act curtain fell on a ballet he didn’t like. Vladimir believed he should be a tsar rather than a grand duke and he acted like a tsar, despite the birth order that put his brother Alexander on the throne. Vladimir’s wife, Miechen, the second-ranking woman in the empire, carried on like a tsaritsa herself. It was her annual Christmas bazaar in the Hall of Nobles which heralded Peter’s holiday season. The Empress Vladimir, Niki’s mother bitterly called her. The day the tsar’s train derailed in 1888, almost crushing the imperial family as they ate chocolate pudding in the dining car, was for Vladimir a day close to triumph. We shall never have such a chance again, Miechen whispered indiscreetly to her friends at court. At Krasnoye Selo, Vladimir gave me his photograph to keep in my dressing room. Yes, the imperial family signed photographs of themselves for their intimates the way cinema stars do for their fans today—and on mine Vladimir inscribed the words Bonjour, dushka, which meant little darling, and he sighed that he was too old for me.

  He was too old for me, but Niki was not, and just when it appeared my impassioned twice-weekly flirting with Niki the Hussar before the chartered train hauled me the thirty versts back to Peter had utterly failed to have the desired effect, and when only one week remained of maneuvers, Niki suddenly asked me to wait for him in the alley behind the theater after a performance that August night. He wanted to double back from his villa after supper to take me for a ride in his troika. Need I spell out my answer? What had inspired this sudden and uncharacteristic boldness on his part? I had seen him watching me with special interest from the imperial box, which at this theater was designed to look like a Russian peasant’s hut. It must have been my costume that evening of tulle, the bodice embroidered with two great flowers that lay, one each, over my breasts. Or perhaps my little
dance—for while the other girls had performed that night as a flock of birds or a school of fish, I had been given the adagio, the love duet, my hands laid tenderly on the forearms and shoulders of my cavalier. I remember Niki’s invitation gave me trouble tying the sash of my white summer frock as I readied myself in my dressing room that night, and my hair sprang away from my face like the wild wig of Dr. Coppelius. The covered walkway to the theater was deserted by the time I came out, most of the dancers having already boarded the train back home to the capital, and the theater itself had gone dark. A tiny pulse flicked at the base of my throat. What if he didn’t come for me? I would have to trudge to the villa where my older sister, Julia, also a dancer, visited with her beau and cry to her like a baby that I had missed the train. I went with some trepidation to the alley, where I stood alone, trying to smooth out everything about me, including my emotions, which were in a jumble. I waited. Before me the sandy yellow drive unwrapped itself, became dark and grainy, emptied into nothing. In the park and garden beyond the theater the summer insects made waves of sound, which crested and fell. Many are the stars in a Russian night, and here, fifteen miles from the capital, the sky made a plain well-furrowed with stars above the infertile, difficult earth below. Eventually I heard the bells of a troika and at the sound I was smart enough to feel a small moment of premonitory dread—on what journey was I now embarking and with what consequences? But I could not go back, would not go back. The troika appeared, the lanterns swinging from it shaking the stars from the sky and sticking them all around the tsarevich, who glowed like a saint on an iconostasis. He put out a hand with a grin and pulled me up onto the seat beside him for our wild ride, driving that troika across the parade grounds and through the small village, where all the streets and thoroughfares were empty, as if by decree. These streets, this village, these cities, Russia itself, one-sixth of the landmass of earth, belonged to him—or soon would—and when I was with him, it belonged to me, too. What was he showing off to me that night when he drove me across the plain, abducted me, as I later read in his journal—the countryside or himself?