Imperial Dancer: Mathilde Kschessinska and the Romanovs (57 page)

However, there still remains Strelna. There are those who believe it would have been possible to hide something at the dacha because the enclosed fence surrounding the property and the dense bushes and shrubs provided perfect cover. They say that when Grand Duke Sergei Michaelovich returned from Stavka in June 1917 he could have organised a sympathetic guard and used the burial of Mathilde’s dog as a cover for the hiding of her treasure.
¹³

Mathilde loved to build and it has been suggested that after the unsuccessful 1905 revolution she began to make plans to hide her valuables, just in case. Then, in the summer of 1917, she used the drives in Sergei’s car as an excuse to take things to Strelna, a distance of about 12 miles from the capital. Sergei and the Command of the Military Engineers of the Imperial Army would have been well placed to organise the concealment of valuables (some of which had been put in boxes at the beginning of the war). According to this theory, Sergei’s resolve to remain in Petrograd to finish hiding Mathilde’s valuables probably cost him his life. By the time he was ready to leave it was too late.
¹⁴

Although the Constantine Palace was set alight during the Second World War and its park severely damaged, contrary to the impression given in Mathilde’s memoirs her dacha survived the war. In it were established communal flats, which were eventually resettled. In 1953 an administrative building of the Architectural School was built close by with, in 1956, a sports ground attached. The fence passed straight through the base of Kschessinska’s fountain. Larch beams were stripped from Kschessinska’s dacha around this time and, according to stories told by old residents, they were used to build one of the new houses in Strelna. The dacha was finally demolished because the military institute which was built next door needed the grounds for training purposes. The military building has now become a four-star hotel.
¹⁵
On 4 December 1996, just before the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mathilde’s death, the remaining lamp-post of the first street lighting in Strelna was transported from Kschessinska’s dacha to the museum Maritime Strelna and there were rumours that the dacha would be reconstructed as part of a new complex.

On 26 September 2001 a television crew arrived to film a programme about Kschessinska’s dacha. Suddenly a guard appeared from the Constantine Palace and stopped them. He had to obtain authorisation from the highest level before filming was allowed to continue. The documentary was screened on 10 October 2001.
¹⁶

Most of the site of the dacha has now been swept away for the guest houses built when the Constantine Palace was restored and the whole of the area now forms part of the state complex of the Constantine Palace. Bereozoviya Alleya is still there and until a few years ago the foundations, the base of the fountain and the concrete foundations of the mooring could still be seen. The fountain has now disappeared. The former area occupied by Mathilde Kschessinska’s dacha has passed into the jurisdiction of the President of the Russian Federation. This very fact has made at least one Russian author wonder whether there is any truth in the story of the treasure hidden at Strelna.
¹⁷

Nothing has apparently been found.

Although Mathilde Kschessinska was the last great pre-Revolutionary Russian ballerina her name was taboo in Russia during Soviet times. Her connections with the Romanovs and the Imperial Court ensured that her name did not even merit a mention in the Soviet Encyclopaedia and she was denigrated by Soviet ballet historians. Since the fall of Communism, interest has grown in Kschessinska, both as the Tsar’s one-time mistress and as a ballerina.

At the request of the Ardent Supporters of the History of Strelna, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death a Panikhida was said for Mathilde for the first time by monks of the Holy Trinity Maritime Monastery at Strelna.

In 1997, to mark the 125th anniversary of her birth, a memorial column was erected at Strelna opposite the fountain in her garden, with an inscription: ‘Seaside Dacha of M.F. Kschessinska, 1894–1917’. Also at the request of the Ardent Supporters of the History of Strelna, a life-sized model of Mathilde was sculpted, which from 1 September 2001 was exhibited in the museum Maritime Strelna. On Mathilde’s birthday that year the model was temporarily placed on the seashore near the site of the dacha.

The Kirov Ballet, successor to the old Imperial Ballet, has begun to revive some of the original productions in which Mathilde starred, including
The Sleeping Beauty
and
La Bayadère
. Among the thousands of old costumes discovered in the Maryinsky Theatre’s attics is one of Felix Kschessinsky’s mazurka costumes. In 2004 the Bolshoi Ballet
performed one of Mathilde’s favourite ballets,
Pharaoh’s Daughter
, at Covent Garden for the first time. It had been removed from the repertoire in Soviet times and largely forgotten. The choreographer, Pierre Lacotte, recorded his indebtedness to the great Russian ballerinas still living in Paris when he began researching the project, and who had given their blessing to his reconstruction of the work. Among them was Kschessinska.

Today Mathilde even appears as a character in a ballet. In 1971 Kenneth MacMillan choreographed the three-act ballet
Anastasia
. In the second act the Tsar gives a ball to celebrate Anastasia’s debut into society and he invites his favourite ballerina and one-time mistress Mathilde Kschessinska to dance for his guests. Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell danced the resulting classical
pas-de-deux
in the original production, and more recently it has been performed by Darcey Bussell among others. In keeping with Mathilde’s somewhat racy reputation one of the costumes for the role of Kschessinska is a stunning long black number complete with diamonds.

About a year after Mathilde’s death Irina Klyagin discovered the Russian manuscript of Mathilde’s memoirs, written in her ‘lively, slightly vulgar style’, in the Lenin Library in Moscow. This was the manuscript which Mathilde thought had been sent to the Tchaikovsky Museum in Klin. The ‘diplomat’ she entrusted it to seems to have had no intention of delivering it and the manuscript ended up in Moscow. The memoirs were finally published in Russia in 1992.
¹⁸

Mathilde Kschessinska continues to fascinate. She could be scheming and manipulative but generous to a fault to those she did not consider a threat. Courageous, unhurt by scandal, ‘a woman of infinite charm, wit and intelligence’, she was also a fighter.
¹⁹

Perhaps Mathilde’s greatest fault in the eyes of others was that she always won.

N
OTES

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

  
1.
   Radzinsky, 22

  
2.
   
Matilda Malya
, video

  
3.
   Scholl

Chapter One

  
1.
   Scholl

  
2.
   Scholl

  
3.
   DIP, 28

  
4.
   Scholl

  
5.
   DIP, 28

  
6.
   DIP, 28; Scholl

  
7.
   
Vospominaniia
, 10;
Peterbyrgskaya Zhizn
, 1888. No date

  
8.
   Karsavina, 61

  
9.
   Fokine, 11

10.
   Legat, 30–1

11.
   GARF. Fond 616. Op. 1, D3, L3

12.
   Roné, 28

13.
   Krasovskaya,
Nijinsky
, 37

14.
   Scholl

15.
   Krasovskaya, 374

16.
   Benois, 90

17.
   Scholl

18.
   DIP, 29. There are so many revisions and corrections to the unpublished account that, according to Professor Scholl, it is impossible to establish quite how Mathilde came to be seated next to the Tsarevich.

19.
   Scholl; DIP, 29

20.
   Welch, 45

21.
   DIP, 29

22.
   Diary. 23 March 1890, quoted in Radzinsky, 23

23.
   Scholl

24.
   Chuparron, ‘Liubovnitsa Poslednego…’, 64

Chapter Two

  
1.
   Craine and Mackrell, 368, 145

  
2.
   Wiley,
Century
, 283

  
3.
   Karsavina, 140; Danilova, 176

  
4.
   GARF. Fond 616. Op. 1. D3, L4a & Op. 1 D4, L2

  
5.
   Krasovskaya, 13–14

  
6.
   Nicholas II,
Journal Intime
, 31

  
7.
   Radziwill,
Nicholas II
, 36

  
8.
   de Angelis; Maylunas and Mironenko, 22

  
9.
   Radzinsky,
Nicholas II
, 17

10.
   Bezelianskii, 276

11.
   Nijinska, 92