During this terrible year, Niki took Alix, Alexei, and the girls and retreated into the routine of the imperial year—winter at Tsarskoye, spring at Livadia, summer at Peterhof, Poland in autumn for the hunt, back to Tsarskoye for the long Russian winter. But in retreating from his people, he also retreated from me. He had not been seen in the capital since the Feast of the Epiphany. Might he not forget I existed, and as long as Alix’s son remained healthy, forget my son’s existence, as well? For not all hemophiliacs died young. Prince Leopold of England had lived to thirty-one. It was possible my son and I might wait here for thirty years or more before Niki turned his head toward us again. By then Niki and Vova would be strangers! Niki and I would be strangers and I an old woman! Away from the theater, sequestered in this palace and by social position, Vova and I were invisible to the court and therefore to the tsar. And I had never been invisible. And so, in February 1905, I determined to return to the Maryinsky stage. As I had already completed my obligatory ten-year term as dancer and therefore had repaid the treasury my debt of free schooling, I could now negotiate a better contract for myself with the court minister, asking fees per performance in addition to an annual salary. And I knew the tsar would approve any fee I asked. As my father had said, from my art came my power, though this is not exactly what he meant.
In my short absence, though, I had gotten out of shape and put on weight, and so I began to fast and to practice, which I did privately, at home. One trick I had was to set four chairs about me and test my precision and my nerve by executing grand battements without tipping over a chair or breaking a leg—and when I thought I was ready, I met my sister at Liteiny Prospekt, in my father’s ballroom, where I danced for her the variations from all the ballets in my repertoire and where she pronounced me fit, for of course, that was what I wanted to hear. But I returned to the theater in triumph only to find that life there had gone on without me—the curtain rose, the stagehands lowered and raised the scenery, old dancers retired and younger students graduated from the school to take their places, Pavlova, Karsavina, Fokine, and Nijinsky, who would all eventually make their names with Les Ballets Russes. You’ve heard of them because they danced in the West—but my name, perhaps, is a mystery, for I always preferred to dance in Russia, in Peter, for the tsar. But worst of all, my rivals had been assigned to what had been my roles alone in my ballets. At the Imperial Theaters, a ballerina did not share roles. Once a dancer had made her debut in a ballet retired by another, that ballet belonged to her until she retired. While I was gone measuring my head for my crown, my old rival Olga Preobrajenska had inherited my part of Lise in La Fille mal gardée, and upon my homecoming, I, of course, demanded back my old role. But Colonel Teliakovsky, a rather straitlaced boob who had never really liked me for my debauchery with the Romanovs, and who once walked in on me as I sat chatting with Sergei Mikhailovich in my dressing room, wearing only a robe, and who raised his upper lip as if he had seen a pile of offal, and who in 1924, like the rest of the exiles, would write his memoirs and in those pages would slander me unforgivably not only as a woman, but also as a dancer, calling me vulgar and trite and describing my beautifully formed legs as fat—yes, we had all lost our country, our tsar, our theater, and yet we continued our ridiculous rivalries about which no one cared but ourselves—this Colonel Teliakovsky refused to let me reclaim my role. I suppose he thought with the loss of the tsar and Grand Duke Sergei, I had become powerless, a puff-ball of tulle easily blown about by his hoary breath. He might have to let me back into the theater but he thought he did not have to schedule me to dance. I could have gone to the tsar but I did not wish him to see me as a supplicant but as his equal, his consort! So I took matters into my own duplicitous hands. Literally. Before the first scene of Fille one night, I, descending from my artists’ box and chatting gaily with the dancers backstage, surreptitiously unlatched the door of the chicken cage. You know the ballet Fille? Set in a provincial French village of the 1750s, it opens in the barnyard of Madame Simone and her daughter Lise. The use of live animals on the stage is gone now, but in the early 1900s in Russia we often used the furred, feathered, and hooved. Painted backdrops were not enough enchantment for the tsar and his court. We employed horses for Sleeping Beauty, a goat in Esmeralda, chickens in Fille—horses decked out in embroidered blankets and plumed bridles, a goat led about by a braided rope with a bell on its collar, chickens pecking at seeds in their cages in a French barnyard. For animals more difficult to obtain—like monkeys—we used children in costume from the school. Why, the great choreographer George Balanchine, then little Georgy Balanchivadze, swung from tree to tree in a monkey suit in La Fille du Pharaon while I took aim at him with my pretty bow.
I was safely ensconced in my box for Act I when one of the chickens thumped against his wire door and open it flew, followed a moment after by an eruption of squawks, feathers, and claws, while the stagehands and some of the dancers dressed as village boys chased the birds in circles and then, snatching them up by the neck or feet, or tucking them under their elbows, attempted to shove the reluctant chickens back into their cages. How the audience laughed! Olga stood flat-footed to watch the chaos, the length of blue ribbon with which she had been ready to rope her beau Colin to her hanging slack in her hands. My little trick had so unnerved her that the next divertissement in which she and Colin make pretty patterns with that ribbon and wind one another up in it was made all a ruin of knots, one from which my old partner Nikolai Legat could not shake himself, and all that while the laughter from the audience continued. Don’t click your teeth. A loose chicken, a snipped thread that held closed a bodice, a small price to pay to ensure the audience saw whom they really wanted to see. By such tricks and capers, I retrieved my old roles one by one, and I waited for Niki to appear in the imperial box to see me perform them, to remember how bright, how lively, how pleasing I was. How loyal.
But as the season progressed and Niki did not make an appearance at the theater, the revolution did. Inside the theaters, believe it or not, the revolution was also felt in its way. The actors and dancers and musicians began to agitate, just like the feverish workers in the streets, though their demands were different. Students at the music conservatory asked for monthly opera productions and a library, and they wanted M. Auer to stop hitting his students over the head with his bow. Rimsky-Korsakov, my old landlord until the tsar bought his house right out from under him, was dismissed as director of the conservatory for supporting the students, and as if that wasn’t enough, the tsar also barred his music from the Imperial Theaters. From my brother I heard that dancers held furtive meetings in the apartments of their disapproving parents, and these were, of course, the younger dancers, the newest graduates from the school with the least seniority. What these children wanted—to rule the theater by committee—was an absurdity. Petitions circulated all through the schoolrooms and the dressing rooms, calling for freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the printed word. As if they could write! Why, one day a little student from the school, white bow in her hair, proffered a paper for my signature at a rehearsal for Sleeping Beauty, of all ballets, created by Petipa and Tchaikovsky as a paean to the monarchy! The children had prepared a petition demanding lessons in applying theatrical makeup, better instruction in academics—and the older of them wanted to wear their own cuffs and collars with the school uniforms. Ridiculous. Of course, I sent the child off with a pinch. The dancers themselves, rather than the director or the ballet maître, wanted to decide what ballets would be done and who would dance them, what salaries would be paid and how many days they would dance. Of course, I had been for many years deciding those things for myself, but the difference was I had earned that right—I was a decade on the stage and I was La Kschessinska. One could count in months how long these children had been dancing for the tsar. They weren’t electricians like the workers at the Petersburg electrical plant and therefore could not, as those workers had, plunge the city into darkness. And they were not laborers at the Moscow waterworks and therefore could not keep water from filling the pipes. But they could try to make the theaters go dark. At the Alexandrinsky Theater the actors threatened to abandon their lines and instead lecture their aristocratic audience about the need for governmental reform before striding offstage. But the revolutionary actors could not get enough of the other actors to agree to this. At the Maryinsky, committee members barged into the dressing rooms before curtain and began haranguing the corps de ballet, busy gluing on their wigs, to refuse to dance the matinee, to answer the obstinacy of the theater administration with an obstinacy of their own—but these new committees did not have the loyalty of the entire company and the dancers yawned and the matinee performance of La Dame de pique went on as usual. Even my brother Josef, radicalized by all the strikes and marches and all those pamphlets and petitions, took part in these actions, at great embarrassment to my father and me. And when I heard that the imperial family planned to remain at Tsarskoye Selo for the entire social season, I decided I myself had had enough of this strange and desolate season and of the theater to which I had returned with such great hopes. I took Vova and, with my parents, retreated to our family estate, Krasnitzky, for the summer. My brother, of course, stayed in the capital.