No, Tchaikovsky never made a ballet for me, but there were many extant roles ready for habitation. One I especially coveted was Esmeralda, the title part in the ballet based on Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, that of the Gypsy dancer who loses her great love, Phoebus, to another woman. Though I coveted it, I would not dance it until 1899: I had not yet learned to go to the tsarevich, to the court, to get what I wanted at the theater. At twenty, I was still the obedient girl who listened to the régisseur, the maître de ballet, the directeur. Yes, I was mad to dance Esmeralda, but Petipa would not let me. Écoute, ma belle, he began when I asked him. He had been in Russia fifty years and still spoke only French—not a problem with the court, which also spoke French, but a problem for us at the theater, where other than ballet terms, which were always in French, Russian was what we knew best. No wonder Petipa was so good at mime. In his broken Russian he said to me, You love? And when I assured him that yes, I loved, he stroked his waxed moustache. Do you suffer? To which I responded, Of course not. That was the wrong answer. Only an artist who understood the suffering that accompanied love, he told me, could dance the part. He should know. He had been married twice, both times to ballerinas.
One day I would suffer, and one day Esmeralda would become my greatest role.
She Was His Doll Come to Life
But I was not suffering in 1892. The tsarevich visited me at home, sent roses and orchids to my box at the Sunday horse races at the Michel Riding School, offered up little gifts of jewelry, a gold brooch, a set of emerald earrings, which at first I declined, but when I saw how my refusals saddened him and because, after all, I really wanted those trinkets, I happily changed course. Greed made in me its triumph over manners, and not for the last time. Yes, the tsarevich’s shyness and my innocence made good partners in this long courtship. My desire for Niki was still not fully the desire of a woman for a man, but more of a child for the biggest prize that she could wave at others with glee. My parents were somewhat mollified when they saw how Niki’s courtship benefited my career, and my brother and sister titillated themselves with the possibilities such an alliance promised for them. While I accepted the tsarevich’s attention off the stage, it seemed I wore it on the stage as well, and my being a favorite of the heir heightened both my appeal and the appeal of my whole family. The balletomane subscribers fought to get tickets for the nights we four Kschessinkys were cast together in the same ballet. One night in Sleeping Beauty my father played King Florestan XIV, I Aurora, my sister an attendant fairy in the retinue of the Fairy of the Lilac, my brother Josef was Prince Fortuné, a small part as Cinderella’s porteur in the Act III divertissement.
Then one night at the theater, between Acts II and III of Coppélia, my long girlhood ended. I and my father’s friend Stukolkin, who was playing Dr. Coppelius, a role my father himself often played, had just exited the stage—I as Swanhilda dressed up like the doll Coppélia, which the lonely doctor had made for himself as a daughter—just as Geppetto in the fairy tale Pinocchio made for himself a puppet to be his boy. Swanhilda had tricked the doctor into thinking she was his doll come to life, and Stukolkin had mimed his shock and then his fury at being tricked, and I thought his panting as he ran after me as the curtain lowered to be for comic effect. His rubber pate glued to his head, two big white tufts of hair shaking above each ear, spectacles teetering on his nose, he began to grip at the flats backstage right and with the other hand grope at his left arm. Beneath his orange makeup his skin made a shiny white sheath. And then, with a dense sigh, he collapsed, the piece of painted canvas he had been clutching swaying free as his hand opened, and when he fell, victim of a heart attack, he shook all the props on the stage and the hay-thatched cottage itself. In those several moments as I knelt by him in my doll costume I saw his eyes behind those fake spectacles grow dull. The thick face paint stood on his skin like a porcelain mask and with his dull pupils he looked like a doll. The columnists would eulogize him the next week: He died like a soldier at his post, serving the art he loved passionately to his last minute. Was this what I wanted—a life lived only on the stage? And a love affair that seemed to dwell there also, just for show? For Swanhilda had dressed up as Coppélia not only to fool the poor befuddled doctor but also to win back the attention of her beau, Franz, who had become mesmerized by the pretty new doll the doctor had posed, as if reading a book, on the balcony of his house. For the tsarevich, I understood I, too, was a pretty doll posed on my balcony, the Maryinsky stage, or the smaller stage of my parents’ house, where I must appear to be a thing worse than a doll—a child! If I wanted the tsarevich to see me as a real woman, I would need to break away from my parents’ embrace. I would need my own house—and quickly! For, after all, one does not live forever.
Of his own accord, Niki might never have suggested this. It was in his nature to drift, a small sailboat in warm, currentless water. Our little love affair would eventually have ended in the tall reeds of a marsh when he became enamored of someone else, perhaps an opera singer or a kamer-freilini, a lady-in-waiting at court. But it was not in my nature to drift. So after an evening of impassioned kissing, at my signal, of course, Niki agreed with me that, yes, he supposed it was time I had my own house. And so I learned—Niki the sailboat needed a push.
The tsar, Alexander, was not happy about this development. Niki’s dalliance with me had suddenly become too serious for him. A flirtation with a clean Polish girl, the young dancer, Kschessinska II, yes. An interlude, yes. But take her as a mistress, set her up in a house, no. The emperor was notoriously straitlaced. The joke in the capital was that Alexander III was the only husband faithful to his wife. He did not want the heir apparent to set up a household in Petersburg with me, give me children, as his two uncles had done with their dancer-mistresses, as his own father had done with Princess Ekaterina. My father felt the same, of course.
I remember standing outside the door of my father’s study for some moments, gathering my courage to tell him of my intention to set up household with the tsarevich, my intention and my father’s hopes for me about to collide. I was not a girl from the lower classes. My parents traveled in the best Polish Catholic circles. My godfather was M. Strakatch, who owned the largest linen shop in Petersburg. My parents expected me to make a good marriage. My mother, I thought, being a woman, would understand what I had to do for love, but I was wrong about this; she would turn away from me for years, refusing even to see my new house. When I went to Liteiny Prospekt to visit my family, she stayed in her room and sent out no message—but I could not foresee any of this. No, outside that study door I worried only that I would break my father’s heart. So I hesitated. I wanted in those moments to crawl into the study and lay myself beneath my father’s big table as I had as a child, when just the warmth of my father’s feet and the sound of his breath as he wrote or drew designs on paper for some of his inventions would provide an unfathomable comfort. I wanted to be a child again, to sit on the hands of a clock as they moved backward. I stood there so long my sister, Julia, whom I had left waiting in our bedroom, came to check on me. When she saw me standing there stolidly and silent, a mushroom under the beeches waiting to be picked, she raised her own hand to rap on the door. She believed the tsarevich’s liaison with me guaranteed good fortune for our family. So she pushed past me into the room and told my father what I was afraid to tell him. Mathilde is going to be kept by the tsarevich. We three stood in silence as the clock ticked, the pendulum swung, the cuckoo bird slid out of the clock on its tongue of wood and gave twelve cries. An omen. The cry of the cuckoo tells you how many years you have yet to live. But this was a wooden bird, housed in a clock. My father’s face rimpled above his great waxed moustache, the elegant erect posture eroded. Finally, my father said, You understand the tsarevich can never marry you and your idyll will be short? I nodded. I understood but I did not understand. Who at nineteen could? Hidden up my sleeve was the bracelet of sapphire and diamonds the tsarevich had given me in anticipation of our new estate and the gold clasp pinched impatiently at my skin.