Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Given Lenin’s reputation for pitiless debate, his defense of Pushkin from the revolutionary youth seems rather timid. “Pushkin is better than Mayakovsky”? Lenin was devastatingly scathing about Mayakovsky (“nonsense, stupid, double stupidity and pretentiousness”),⁵ so that was faint praise indeed. It is obvious that for Lenin Pushkin was merely a name, part of the official canon. He wouldn’t get into an argument over Pushkin.

But in one aspect, Pisarev’s view of Pushkin as the teacher of “parasites and sybarites” was clearly absorbed by the revolutionary leader: Lenin’s disparaging attitude toward ballet and opera.

Pushkin adored the ballet (and ballerinas). For the radical Pisarev that was a readymade target, and he gleefully mocked Pushkin’s “useless poetry,” attractive only to “those mentally challenged subjects who can be thrilled by ballet poses.” Not being “mentally challenged,” Lenin resolutely dismissed opera and ballet as a “piece of purely landowner culture.”⁶

It is hard to deny a certain logic in Lenin’s thinking. Opera and, even more so, ballet, under the personal patronage of the Romanov family, held a special place in the official Russian culture.

The professional theater, including musical theater, began in Russia as court entertainment. Tsar Alexei, father of Peter I, invited musicians from Europe “who know how to play various instruments, such as: organs, horns, pipes, flutes, clarinets, trombones and viola da gambas along with vocal performance, and also other instruments.”⁷ (The money to support theater and ballet came from the Salt Chancery for many years: the state had the monopoly on the salt trade, and part of the enormous salt income went to actors, singers, dancers, and musicians.)

After various perturbations, the imperial theaters were moved to the Ministry of the Court, which ran (through the Directorate of the Imperial Theaters) the Maryinsky and Alexandrinsky theaters in St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi and Maly theaters in Moscow. In fact, they were the personal theaters of the Romanov family: a display window of their vanity, a platform for elaborating their ideological projects, but also a place for relaxation and merriment and, last but not least, a high-class and exciting harem.

Nicholas I sometimes took over the rehearsals of ballets and liked to hang around backstage, where the ballerinas ran around in tights; Alexander III never missed a dress rehearsal of an opera or ballet, much less the premieres.

Alexander III also introduced the tradition of emperor and family attending the graduation exams of the ballet school. After the performance, the young dancers were presented to the tsar and his wife, and at the dinner that followed, the young grand dukes flirted with their lovely companions.

At one such dinner in 1890, the graduating ballerina seated next to Alexander III was Mathilde Kschessinska, small, dark, muscular, very talented, and incredibly ambitious. She drank tea between the huge, flabby emperor and his miniature heir (who took after his mother), the future Nicholas II, a shy young officer with dreamy gray-blue eyes.

Alexander III told them with a benign smile, “Watch it now, don’t flirt too much.” The heir timidly spoke to Kschessinska, pointing to the unornamented white mug before her: “You probably don’t drink from such plain mugs at home?”⁸

That was the prelude to their famous and stormy affair, which lasted from 1892 until the spring of 1894, when the heir’s engagement was announced to Princess Alix Hesse-Darmstadt, who converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Alexandra.

Kschessinska had a brilliant career at the Maryinsky and dictated all her conditions there. Although detractors claimed that her special place at the theater was due to her high connections, the majority of the press and public received her with enthusiasm and considered her among the great stars of the Maryinsky.

Marius Petipa, the great choreographer and creator of Don Quixote, La Bayadère, and Raymonda (to music by Glazunov) and The Sleeping Beauty (Tchaikovsky), worked happily with Kschessinska. She always recalled proudly how Tchaikovsky came to her dressing room after her performance in Sleeping Beauty in 1893, praised her, and promised to write a new ballet just for her.

At the turn of the century, the era of Petipa, master of Petersburg classicism in ballet, was closing. Kschessinska, always brazenly chasing after success, befriended innovators, appearing in the experimental ballets of Mikhail Fokine and even traveling to Europe with the Diaghilev troupe, where her partner was the legendary Vaclav Nijinsky. But she lost out to the new stars—Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina. Nevertheless, Kschessinska did not give up, and in 1916, at the age of forty-four, she debuted successfully in Giselle, that gem of the Romantic repertoire.