Imperial Dancer: Mathilde Kschessinska and the Romanovs (43 page)

Towards the end of the season little Alicia contracted double pneumonia and when the company departed for Paris she was left
behind in the care of her mother. When Mathilde heard this she and Andrei climbed five flights of stairs to deliver ‘a huge basket of fresh fruit’ and a bouquet of lilies to the Little One.
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Such thoughtfulness was typical of Mathilde.

In the summer of 1925 Nicholas Legat replaced Cecchetti as Diaghilev’s ballet master and his wife Nadine Nicolaievna became a soloist with the company. Pierre Vladimiroff and Felia Doubrovska rejoined Diaghilev, becoming close friends of Mathilde and regulars at her poker parties at Villa Alam.

In December Mathilde converted to Orthodoxy. Brought up a Catholic, she had always been very religious. Since her days at the Theatre School Mathilde had been accustomed to attending Orthodox services and in recent years had accompanied her husband and son to the Orthodox Church in Cannes during Holy Week. Conversion therefore seemed the next logical step.

Father Gregory Ostroounov gave her instruction and the ceremony took place in the Russian Orthodox Church in Cannes on 9 December 1925. Mathilde then took the Orthodox name of Marie. The following Easter it was a great joy for her to take communion with Andrei and Vova.

In 1925 a rumour circulated through the royal courts of Europe. A sick, unidentified young woman had been pulled from a Berlin canal five years earlier after attempting suicide. It was thought the young woman was Russian but she refused to answer any questions. Some people now believed that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicolaievna, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and the only survivor of Ekaterinburg.

Various courtiers and relatives of the Imperial family had visited the young woman but although they had to admit she knew many intimate details of court life, they were unable to reconcile their memories of the plump, lively Anastasia with the thin, tubercular girl in Berlin. The problem was complicated because the Dowager Empress believed that the whole family was still alive, living in hiding, and as the old Empress was the most potent symbol of the Russian monarchy nobody wanted to endanger her health by shattering that belief. Finally, in 1925 the woman, now known as Frau Tchaikovsky, was visited by the Tsar’s sister Grand Duchess Olga. After much heart-searching, Olga submitted to pressure from the Dowager Empress’s court and issued a statement saying that she ‘had found no resemblance between the unknown woman and the Tsar’s youngest daughter’.
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Andrei had been one of the last members of the family to see Nicholas’s daughters. With the Dowager Empress and her daughters maintaining a ‘negative attitude’, Andrei requested the Dowager Empress’s permission to conduct his own investigation ‘in order to protect his family from further embarrassment’.
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Although Andrei’s investigation lasted well into the 1930s Mathilde was completely silent about the subject in her memoirs.

The question of the identity of Frau Tchaikovsky divided the Romanov family. The Danish Minister in Berlin, under pressure from his government, now reluctantly informed Andrei that he would not be able to support her either morally or financially after 1 February 1927. He hoped Andrei, who was working with the family’s permission, would take over. This left Andrei with a problem. His own efforts to raise money for ‘Anastasia’ among the
émigrés
had netted less than 500 marks and he had no means of financing her mounting hospital bills himself. Nevertheless, he sent a symbolic gift of money to indicate his goodwill.
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Luckily the Duke of Leuchtenberg, Andrei’s distant cousin, offered her a home at his Bavarian castle, Schloss Seeon. Frau Tchaikovsky remained there for the next year as Andrei continued his investigation.

Some of Diaghilev’s company were invited to share the traditional Easter feast at Villa Alam in 1926. After midnight service in the Russian Church of Notre-Dame Joie-des-Affligés at Mentone a fabulous banquet was laid out at the villa. Emboldened by too much wine the young Serge Lifar (Diaghilev’s latest lover) plucked a rose from the table and to general astonishment said to the hostess: ‘Mathilde Felixovna, let me present you with this rose!’ Mathilde rewarded her cavalier by choosing him to partner her in the polonaise after the meal. Lifar was later discovered flirting with Tamara Karsavina behind a sofa as they signed the visitors’ book. Diaghilev was not amused. ‘You seem much too gay, young man, isn’t it time you were at home?’ he said sternly, leading Lifar away.
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Grand Duke Dimitri often dined at Villa Alam, which he described as nice, but rather like Mathilde’s dacha at Strelna. The general area made a less favourable impression though, it was ‘filthy and swampy. I don’t understand how Andrei can stand it.’ Afterwards they all went to the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo, where Dimitri and Vova remained late into the night.

During one dinner party at Villa Alam Mathilde noticed that Dimitri was attracted to one of the unmarried guests, Mlle B. ‘Mala
was acting quite openly as a kind of procuress,’ he wrote. After several games of poker the guests retired, and Dimitri discovered that Mathilde had put the young lady in the room next door. ‘It was simply awful. Fortunately nothing happened, but alas! We came awfully close. Then there would have been some kind of scandal, God forbid. We flitted from room to room for a long time, as a result of which I only got to my bed at three in the morning.’ At breakfast, ‘naturally Mala was full of all kinds of insinuations about last night.’
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Dimitri’s affair with Coco Chanel had ended when she met the Duke of Westminster in Monte Carlo. Chanel was said to be the love of Dimitri’s life and he was depressed after the break-up of the relationship. Dimitri’s sister Marie often joined Mathilde and Andrei when she was in Paris, all obstacles having been removed by Mathilde’s marriage. The friendship between Mathilde and Marie, who had met on the train to Paris in 1908, was now rekindled. One night at a cabaret Marie was persuaded to sing a Russian song and Mathilde performed her Russian dance.

On 21 November 1926 Dimitri married Audrey Emery, an American heiress. Mathilde and Andrei became frequent guests at their temporary home, the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo. The following season Dimitri and Audrey held lively dinner parties at a rented villa in Cannes. In 1928 their son Paul was born in London.

Cyril confirmed his decision to grant Mathilde and Vova the title and surname of Princess and Prince Krasinsky in January 1927. The document, signed on 30 November 1926, stated that

by virtue of the Fundamental State Laws and Rules of our Imperial family, my dear brother … married with my consent to Mathilde Felixovna Kschessinska, cannot under any circumstances transfer any titles and advantages, not to his present wife, nor to children resulting from this marriage. I am willing to allow the present wife and any children from this marriage the surname and title of Princes Krasinsky.

No such document was sent to Boris, as Cyril considered his marriage ‘illegal and void’.
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While lunching at Claridges in Nice Mathilde met Isadora Duncan, whom she hardly recognised after her most recent trip to Soviet Russia. Shortly afterwards, on 14 September 1927, Isadora was killed when her shawl became caught up in the wheels of a Bugatti sports car.

Maybe Isadora was able to pass on news of Joseph, who had remained in Russia. Once dismissed from the Maryinsky Theatre for revolutionary activity, Joseph, unlike his monarchist sister, welcomed the Bolshevik revolution. He had been ‘a habitué of good restaurants, a gourmand who feasted on silver platters’
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but now Mathilde knew he was badly off. She wanted him to move to France, or at least send his young daughter Celina. Diaghilev invited Joseph to join his company and Mathilde sent the letter, together with a French visa and travelling expenses, to her brother via Finland. Yet Joseph refused to leave Russia, assuring Mathilde that artists were ‘in a privileged and exceptional position’, he was not deprived of anything and was even living in his old twelve-roomed apartment. ‘He did not wish to leave a world to which he was bound by so many memories.’
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Thanks to the insistence of Lenin, the old Imperial Theatres had been endowed as Academic Theatres. In 1919 the Maryinsky became the State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, becoming in 1935 the Kirov Theatre (after the revolutionary hero Sergei M. Kirov). The Theatre School became the Leningrad Choreographic Academy and, later, the Vaganova Choreographic Academy. After the revolution, Joseph’s participation in the 1905 strike and his subsequent dismissal from the Imperial Theatres was ‘his safe conduct’, recalled a former dancer. The Soviet government’s attitude was at first ‘emphatically attentive’ to Joseph. One writer has wondered whether they suspected that he knew (or maybe even that Joseph disclosed) the whereabouts of Mathilde’s treasure, which the Bolsheviks had searched for unsuccessfully in the Petrograd mansion and at Strelna.
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In 1927 he was awarded the title of Honoured Artist of the Republic and at the beginning of March 1928 gave a farewell performance on the stage of the former Maryinsky Theatre.

Joseph formed a small touring youth company which travelled across Russia to present propaganda to the masses and persuade them that ballet was not just a bourgeois pastime. In the first revolutionary ballet,
The Red Poppy
, he performed the role of the captain of a Soviet ship whose life is saved by a Chinese tea-house dancer. His partner was none other than Mathilde’s old friend Ekaterina Geltzer. Despite spending every summer touring, he ran up colossal debts. Many of his parents’ possessions were pawned or sold to buy food. This money saved the life of his son Romauld, who had been ill.

Joseph’s wife Celina and their daughter Celina (who had graduated from the former Theatre School) also joined Joseph’s company. Mathilde continued to correspond ‘freely’ with him at fairly regular
intervals and he never failed to send news of his daughter’s success on the stage. Young Celina was said to be even more talented than her famous Aunt Mala. ‘Judging by photographs … she very much resembled me,’ Mathilde wrote.
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By 1927 Joseph’s situation was desperate and he begged Mathilde and Julie to send a small monthly sum of money as he was his family’s only breadwinner. ‘Believe me,’ Joseph wrote, ‘we really are having tough times now, life is unbearable, it is the end. I would not have bothered you, if it were not as serious as this. Have I not been silent for ten years about all this? Only my pain and my fear for the family make me write to you about my affairs.’
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Mathilde sent food and clothing through the Hoover Committee.

On 28 April 1928 Zoia Inkina visited Villa Alam. Mathilde awaited her arrival with impatience, hoping at last to learn the fate of the Tsarevich’s letters which she had given to Zoia’s mother for safekeeping. For over ten years Mathilde had hoped for their return, ‘to see and re-read them, to remember dreams and experiences of early youth’ – but Zoia brought bad news. Their apartment had often been searched, her mother was arrested and it became dangerous. The letters were therefore burnt. For Mathilde this was the cruellest blow of all. Of all the losses – home, fortune, her jewellery – she lamented the loss of these letters the most.
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This was more than grief at the loss of old letters. In order to survive, Mathilde had been forced to sell some of her jewels. They desperately needed money. When Mathilde hoped to recover the letters she probably had an eye on the future – they would have been useful when she came to write her memoirs.

At the end of January 1928 Frau Tchaikovsky arrived at the Hotel du Palais in Paris, en route to stay with Andrei’s second cousin Princess Xenia Georgievna and her husband William Leeds on Long Island. Andrei had not yet met ‘Anastasia’, ‘feeling he could be more use to everyone involved if he undertook an objective, neutral examination of her claim’. From photographs, he had already noted her likeness to the children of the Tsar’s sister Grand Duchess Xenia. Andrei did not want ‘Anastasia’ to leave Europe without legal clarification of her identity
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, but he finally agreed that America was the best solution. There had already been a campaign in the German press to prove that she was Franziska Schankowska, a Polish factory worker.

On 31 January Mathilde and Andrei arrived in Paris. That same day Andrei visited Frau Tchaikovsky, taking the gift of a small house plant. When the meeting took place it was, in Andrei’s own words, an ‘unshakable recognition’. ‘I have seen Nicky’s daughter’, he repeated over and over in a state of shock. He told Mathilde that he was in no doubt that she was Anastasia. The resemblance was remarkable but Andrei expressed his surprise that she did not speak to him and merely sat sobbing.
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Andrei and Mathilde’s hotel room was on the first floor directly over the entrance, so as Frau Tchaikovsky left the next day Mathilde was able to observe the young woman. ‘In her manner of holding her hands, in her figure’ she noticed similarities between Frau Tchaikovsky and the Dowager Empress Marie. They then went to the Gare du Nord where Andrei introduced his wife to Anastasia. Mathilde had never met the real Grand Duchess and had only seen her from a distance.
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Now she became one of the few members of the Romanov family to meet the Anastasia claimant. In an official declaration for the Hamburg court Mathilde said that the young woman looked at her with ‘kindness’ but, once again, never said a word. They sat for almost an hour in the railway carriage and Mathilde was struck by the woman’s eyes, which she thought had ‘the Emperor’s look’. Mathilde had brought flowers, which made ‘Anastasia’ remark later that Andrei’s wife was ‘really very nice’. Andrei and Mathilde remained convinced that they had just met the only survivor of Ekaterinburg. When this fact was made public, against Andrei’s wishes, it provoked ‘a real storm’ among his relatives.
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