Imperial Dancer: Mathilde Kschessinska and the Romanovs (10 page)

To Mathilde of course it was not ‘very lucky’. She was devastated, writing of her ‘desolation and despair’. Mathilde maintained that she fully supported Nicholas’s decision to marry Princess Alix, who subsequently ‘was very grateful to her for her support’.
⁴¹
In her memoirs she paid tribute to Nicholas’s wife, ‘a woman of high moral worth who was his faithful companion in times of trial’, who throughout his reign and the period of captivity which followed never wavered in her devotion, right up to their terrible death.
⁴²
These were hollow words.

After the betrothal Mathilde had to put on a brave face and on 25 April she danced Swanilda in
Coppelia
. Although the Tsarevich no longer visited, she said they continued to correspond. In her last letter she far-sightedly asked his permission to continue addressing him by the familiar form ‘
tu
’ and to turn to him for help if it became necessary. This last point was to be essential in the years to come.

He replied, she said, with these moving words: ‘Whatever happens to my life, my days spent with you will ever remain the happiest memories of my youth.’ There was also a signed photograph, inscribed, ‘In memory of two good years!!! Nicky. St Petersburg, 1894’.
⁴³

Kschessinska’s diaries for this period have apparently not survived and the original letter was ‘lost’ in the Revolution, along with other correspondence from Nicholas. Like the rather doubtful command of Alexander III (‘be the glory and the adornment of our ballet!’) which does not appear in the many revisions of the original autobiography, the text of this letter was conveniently remembered over sixty years later. With
her vivid imagination, Mathilde ‘recalled’ events and words which are not corroborated – and which it is impossible to prove or disprove.
⁴⁴

Mathilde also said that Nicholas begged her to name a time and place for them to say goodbye, claiming the meeting took place on the Volkhonsky highway and that Nicholas rode over from the camp. This places it between 13 May and the end of that month while he was at Krasnoe Selo.

Mathilde arrived by carriage from St Petersburg. ‘As always when there is too much to say, tears tighten one’s throat and stop one finding the words one would like to utter. What is there to say when the last moments arrive, those terrible inexorable minutes of farewell?’ She did not enlighten us.
⁴⁵

Mathilde watched him ride away. ‘He kept turning back. I did not weep.’ The inference here, as one scholar has pointed out, is that Nicholas was loath to part with
her
but that Mathilde remained strong to the end like the heroine of a novel.
⁴⁶
There is no mention of this final meeting in Nicholas’s diary.

Mathilde returned sadly to the house on the English Prospekt, the house with so many memories, which now seemed so empty. She knew that some would pity her, but many would rejoice. ‘My youth’s happy springtime was over. A new life was beginning, the painful life of a woman with a prematurely broken heart!’
⁴⁷
Mathilde wrote dramatically.

In fact she did not accept defeat that easily.

Four

D
EAR
S
TRELNA

T
he summer of 1894 was an unhappy time for Mathilde. She and Julie rented the first floor of a villa at Strelna on the Gulf of Finland, between St Petersburg and Peterhof. Mathilde said she lived in seclusion, seeing no one. What Kschessinska did not say in her memoirs is that she spent some of this time writing anonymous letters.

The Tsarevich sailed to England on 3 June, where he was to be reunited with his fiancée. During this reunion, around the beginning of July, Alix received some unsigned letters in which the jealous Mathilde tried to influence her against Nicholas. These secret denunciations, full of libel against the Tsarevich, were an attempt to blacken him in Alix’s eyes and stop the marriage, scheduled for the following spring. Alix showed the insulting letters to Nicholas, who at once realised who they were from. He was then forced to confess to Alix his affair with Kschessinska.
¹

Mathilde’s plan did not work. ‘I love you more since you told me that little story,’ Alix wrote in English in Nicholas’s diary. ‘Your confidence touched me, oh, so deeply, and I pray to God that I may always show myself worthy of it.’
²
Although Alix forgave Nicholas, in her eyes Mathilde was blackened for ever.

Nicholas had other problems, particularly concerning the house which was promised to Mathilde as part of the settlement. He was particularly keen for her to continue living in the house where they had passed so many cherished moments, she claimed. ‘He gave it to me as a present,’ Mathilde wrote, ‘and I was deeply moved.’
³

Yet Nicholas could not buy the house without money – and the Tsar refused to advance more than a certain amount. As Tsarevich, Nicholas received ‘money for the expenses of his court plus 100,000 [roubles] a year’. Nicholas was therefore forced to borrow 400,000 roubles from the Michaelovichi Grand Dukes in order to finish with Mathilde, effectively to pay her off – and it put Nicholas firmly in the debt of the Michaelovichi branch of the family, both morally and financially.
⁴

During the summer Mathilde had to appear at Krasnoe Selo. Nicholas was in the audience, having returned from England in time for Xenia’s wedding at Peterhof on 25 July. Mathilde found consolation in seeing the Tsarevich from a distance.
The Awakening of Flora
, a one-act ballet with no dramatic plot, had been specially arranged for the magnificent gala performance at the Peterhof palace theatre a few days after the wedding. Mathilde danced the leading role in front of a distinguished audience.

This gala marked the end of the season and the dancer retreated to solitude at Strelna.

The Tsar’s 25-year-old cousin Grand Duke Sergei Michaelovich now became Mathilde’s ‘protector’ – in those days another word for lover. This, she said, was at the wish of the Tsarevich, so that she would not fall prey to intrigues. Having lost Nicholas, Mathilde jumped at this new arrangement immediately – seeing, if not the chance of love, at least the possibility of continued wealth and power.

Sergei was born at Borjomi, his father’s 200,000-acre estate 90 miles from Tiflis, on 25 September 1869. He was tall with blue eyes and blond hair but became prematurely bald. Described as ‘the least handsome’ of a very good-looking family, he developed a ‘defeatist, pessimistic, nature’. His favourite saying was ‘
tant pis
!’ (So much the worse!) He was not much interested in art but liked mathematics, physics and the artillery. Although he was clever, with a keen sense of the ridiculous, he had a tendency to be moody.
⁵
A graduate of the Michaelovsky Artillery School, he joined the Life Guards of the Cavalry Artillery Brigade, becoming an ADC to the Emperor in 1891.

Like all the Grand Dukes, Sergei was immensely wealthy. Besides his Grand Ducal allowance of 200,000 roubles a year he received the income from vast personal estates which included a hunting lodge 60 miles from St Petersburg. Most of the Grand Dukes also received a salary from a government sinecure. They employed armies of servants and, when travelling, their money was handled by a ‘financial manager’ who settled hotel and restaurant bills, bought train tickets and generally smoothed their paths.
⁶

From now on Sergei acted as Mathilde’s go-between when she wanted something from Nicholas. Although Sergei was devoted to Mathilde, she was not in love with him and ‘used him as a tool to get what she wanted’. People said that Nicholas had ‘transferred her’ to his cousin.
⁷
He remained her devoted friend through all the years ahead, both in good times and during the Revolution.

Sergei indulged her every whim. Mathilde spent hours walking around Strelna, deep in her own sorrowful thoughts. One day, while walking through the lower park near the Constantine Palace, she spotted a large carved wooden dacha with a turret. Its garden ran right down to the sea and it even had its own beach, reached by a tree-lined private road. The neglected building had a sign hanging outside, ‘dacha for sale’, so she and Sergei went to view it. The property, at Berezoviya Alleya 2, was situated in an avenue of birch trees alongside the stables of the Constantine Palace, separated from it by a narrow canal. It was also conveniently near the St Petersburg highway and the junction of the road to Krasnoe Selo. Mathilde could not have asked for anything better.

Sergei purchased the villa in Mathilde’s name and gave it to her as a present. She soon referred to it as ‘dear Strelna’.
⁸
Mathilde at once began to put it in order so that she could use it every summer.

As autumn approached Mathilde returned to St Petersburg, knowing she would have to be strong and face the future with courage and determination.

The Emperor’s health had deteriorated. Nephritis was diagnosed and the Imperial family were advised to move to a warmer climate. They went south to Livadia, their Crimean palace on the shores of the Black Sea. At first the change of air seemed to do the Tsar some good but soon it became clear that there was little more the doctors could do. As relatives gathered Nicholas received permission to summon Alix from Darmstadt. She was at Livadia when, on 20 October 1894, Alexander III died aged only forty-nine.

All theatre performances were cancelled until the new year as the whole of the Russian Empire was plunged into mourning. At the age of twenty-six Mathilde’s dear Nicky was now Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, one of the most powerful men on earth. As he was reluctant for his fiancée (who had just been received into the Orthodox church as Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna) to return to Darmstadt, the new Tsar’s wedding would take place at the Winter Palace on 14 November, one week after Alexander III’s funeral. The future Empress Alexandra made her entry into St Petersburg riding in the funeral procession as superstitious Russians crossed themselves. ‘She has come to us behind a coffin,’ they muttered. ‘She brings misfortune.’
⁹

Mathilde remained secluded inside her house, occasionally driving to town in her sleigh to see friends. Perhaps she had heard that on at least one occasion Nicholas went for a walk along the Nevsky Prospekt
alone. Although he was quickly escorted back to the Anichkov Palace, where he was reprimanded by his mother, Mathilde perhaps hoped to meet him another time.

Mathilde tried to suppress the sense of jealousy she felt towards Nicholas’s fiancée and wrote of the ‘unbelievable mental torture’ she experienced on the wedding day.
¹⁰
She tried to consider the woman who had stolen Nicky as her Empress, no more. Yet even now Mathilde Kschessinska had not given up hope.

On 17 November, three days after the Tsar’s wedding, State Secretary A.A. Polovtsov, a member of the State Council, called on Grand Duke Vladimir at his palace. He told the Grand Duke that ‘Kschessinska continues to behave improperly, screaming to those surrounding her – “Well, still we shall see who will win – Alix or me’‘ etc.’ Polovtsov said it was essential that she be sent away from St Petersburg with no capital, but a monthly pension which would immediately be stopped if she returned. ‘I know about her behaviour from Vsevolozsky, Director of the [Imperial] Theatres,’ he said, adding that she felt she had support from the Michaelovichi Grand Dukes who had lent the Emperor money. Polovtsov suggested that Grand Duke Vladimir could help.
¹¹

Court mourning shortened the winter season at the Maryinsky that year. It was chiefly remarkable for the première of the complete version of
Swan Lake
on 15 January, when the thirty-two
fouettés
were inserted into Act 3 for Legnani. However, the real sensation that night was caused by the appearance of Felix Kschessinsky and his daughter Mathilde, who led the mazurka. This was one of two dances which were given an encore. It may then have been suggested to Mathilde that it would be best if she absented herself from the capital for a while.

In February 1895 she accepted the invitation of the impresario Raoul Guinsberg to appear in Monte Carlo. With Mathilde went her brother Joseph, Olga Preobrajenska, the Hungarian dancer Alfred Bekeffi and George Kyasht. Rumours soon circulated in St Petersburg that after the Tsar’s marriage Mathilde had died of a broken heart.

By the 1890s Monte Carlo was the ‘cosmopolitan hub of the Riviera’, where European royalty and prominent members of society mingled with fortune hunters and gamblers who hoped to break the bank in the famous Casino. There was always a strong Russian contingent in the principality, headed by Sergei’s father Grand Duke Michael Nicolaievich. ‘The Russians spent fortunes, losing millions of francs in a single night at the Casino, rented whole floors at the Hotel
de Paris … and hired innumerable servants, dressing them in powdered wigs and livery.’
¹²
The Casino, the luxurious Hotel de Paris and the Café de Paris (where it was
de rigueur
to have tea) were set around three sides of a square. Next to the Casino and sharing its entrance was the Opéra, which stood on a terrace, one side overlooking the sea, the other facing a garden with palms and magnolias. The interior, although small, was lavish, with caryatids, frescoes, and gilt cherubs reflected in large mirrors which gave a feeling of space. It was a place Mathilde would come to know well in later years.