The Last Tsar (6 page)

——

He returned. Not stopping in Petersburg, he continued on to Krasnoe Selo to see his parents.

“7 August 1891. Strange not to have to go anywhere or have any more night lodgings with late arrivals and early departures.”

He resumed his old familiar life.

“15 December. This morning received an entire shipment of papers from the Council of State and Committee of Ministers. Simply cannot understand how anyone can read so many papers in one week. Always limit myself to one or two matters, the most interesting, and the rest go straight into the fire….

“31 December. Cannot say I have regretted 1891 coming to a close. It was definitely fateful for the entire family: the death of Aunt Olga [the mother of his friends Sergei and Sandro Mikhailovich],… the illness of and long separation from George [his brother], and finally, the incident in Otsu. All happened so fast, in such quick succession. Added to these great misfortunes has been the famine. I pray God that the year to come will not resemble the year just past.”

Again it was March.

“5 March 1892. Mama says she hardly sees me, I gad about so much, but I do not think so, it seems to me at my age that is the way it should be.

“8 March. Woke up just before Mass. Sleeping so soundly that it drives even me to despair.”

Thus passed this scattered life. Alix was far away, a myth, a dream, and nearby was this dear girl who was so well liked—by him, by Sergei, by his entire company of friends.

“25 March. Returned to Anichkov in falling flakes of snow. And this is spring? Dined with Sergei in my rooms, then went to visit the Kschessinskis, where I passed a pleasant hour and a half.”

That day Nicholas ventured a step that was surprising for the indecisive young man.

The bold decision must have been made during the dinner he mentioned. The wine and the talk with his childhood friend Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, who made no attempt to hide his own rapture over the young ballerina’s charms. One might even guess what they talked about—after all, exactly two years had passed since Nicholas had first seen Mathilde. One might easily imagine what the
lady-killer, the brilliant Petersburg dandy Grand Duke Sergei, advised him.

Nicholas came to a decision.

Kschessinska recalled that March Petersburg day. She was sitting at home, ill, with a bandaged eye. The romantic K. had been suffering from a mundane stye. When her maid informed her that a certain Guards officer, a Mr. Volkov, wished to see her, the surprised ballerina, who did not know Mr. Volkov, nevertheless told her to show him into the drawing room. She could not believe her eyes: standing in the drawing room was Nicholas.

They were alone for the first time. They made their declarations and … nothing! To Little K.’s astonishment, after “a pleasant hour and a half,” he took his leave.

The next day she received a note: “Ever since our meeting I feel as if I am in a daze. I hope I shall be able to see you again soon. Nicky.”

Now for her he was “Nicky.” A charming (and what was amazing for the times) innocent game of love began. His fellows in the Corps brought flowers from her admirer, and the admirer himself was now a frequent visitor at Felix Kschessinski’s apartment. But each visit coincided oddly with the absence of the rest of the family. Notes when he did not visit followed without letup. Now he called her
pannochka
, Polish for “young lady.”

“Think of what Andrei, who adored a young pannochka, did.”

He brought up Gogol’s characters to no purpose: the story of the Cossack Andrei, who betrayed the behest of his father, the old Taras Bulba, for the love of his pannochka, was utterly inappropriate. Because the whole time, behind the scenes of his love story, stood the terrible Bulba—his father-emperor.

Actually, during his meetings with Mathilde he was always dreaming of another, whom his father opposed and with whom a union would indeed constitute a betrayal of the old Bulba. Kschessinska was merely the false pannochka. Hidden away as before in the depths of his soul was the true pannochka: Alix H.

In a strange way, he merged the two.

“31 March. Stopped in for a while at Uncle Misha’s.… He led us through the rooms of his deceased wife—nothing had been touched.” Here he is thinking about Alix. The touching love of the parents of his friends Sandro and Sergei—marital love—this is Alix H.

“Returned to Gatchina. Am in the most un-Lenten of moods. A
good thing am staying at Gatchina and 49 versts [30 miles] from the capital.” This is Mathilde.

“1 April.… I note a very odd phenomenon in myself: never thought that two identical sentiments, two loves, could cohabit the soul simultaneously. Now it is over three years I have loved Alix H., and I constantly cherish the thought that God might let me marry her one day.… But ever since camp in 1890 I have loved little K. passionately. An amazing thing, our heart. At the same time do not cease to think of Alix, although it is true, one might conclude from this I am very amorous. To a certain extent, yes! I must add, though, that inside I am a harsh judge and extremely scrupulous—this is the mood that yesterday I called un-Lenten.”

But for now a merry company gathered almost every evening in Little K.’s room. Nicholas came with his friends, the brothers Sergei, Sandro, and George. The three grand dukes and the heir had a good time in the fashionable ballet teacher’s modest apartment.

Nicholas accompanied the emperor to Denmark, whence he sent Mathilde passionate letters. But simultaneously with these letters Nicholas cautiously resumed his discussion of Alix with his father.

The emperor was disturbed—his game had been to no avail. Was it not a direct consequence of this that the pannochka made her decisive thrust?

“At the time I was thinking more and more about intimacy,” Kschessinska would recall in Paris. “I adored the tsarevich and wanted only one thing—my happiness, however brief it might be.” Finally she was able to force Nicholas to come to a decision. He bought her a “ravishing palace” on the English Embankment, where their platonic love was finally to end. At one time Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich had bought this palace for the dancer Kuznetsova. Little K. left her home and openly became the tsarevich’s mistress. “This killed my father,” she recalled. “He asked me: Did I realize I could never marry him? And that our idyll would be very brief? I replied: I understand, but I don’t care. I want to experience all the happiness I am allowed.”

That is how the old Kschessinska described the scene.

But it could be done more prosaically. Her father simply apprised her of the condition upon which the other father, who stood at the head of both the country and the family, had permitted the liaison: the tsarevich’s marriage must mean an immediate finish to all their relations. In this game, too, the emperor remained a good family man.

——

So she had vanquished, but her victory was the beginning of the end.

“We arranged a housewarming.… The tsarevich gave me a water service—eight gold glasses encrusted with precious stones….

“He brought me gifts quite often. I used to refuse to accept them, but he grieved so … so I had to accept them.”

She had ceased to be a dream, and he pined more and more for his distant beauty. Life and dream: accessible Mathilde and the sublime, regal princess. Little K. disappeared from his diaries.

Yet another year of his life came to an end.

“31 December [1892]. Dear Anichkov sparkled with electricity. We went to mass at 7.30. At 12 the three of us, Papa, Mama, and I, greeted the New Year. God Grant it be just like this one.”

Little K. was dancing part after part. But that was as it should be: the premier young man of Russia should have the premier ballerina for his mistress.

When the great ballet master Marius Petipa chose her to dance Esmeralda, he asked: “Are you in love?” “Yes.” “Are you suffering?” “Certainly not!” Petipa explained to her that only an artist who has known suffering can dance Esmeralda. “I understood that later,” Mathilde recalled sadly, “and then Esmeralda became my best role.”

Her time would come to understand that. She was seeing Nicholas less and less often. But she still clung to her old ties: Nicky’s dear friend Sandro and Nicky’s sister Xenia held a merry engagement party in her home.

In April 1894 Nicholas went to Coburg to attend the wedding of Alix’s brother Ernie. Soon after, the newspapers were writing about the tsarevich’s engagement to Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. After his return from Coburg he never went to see Little K. again.

They exchanged letters. Farsighted, she asked his permission to turn to him if necessary. He replied that the days he had spent by her side would ever be the most beautiful memories of his youth. She could always turn to him.

At his request Mathilde named a place for their last meeting: the main road between Petersburg and Krasnoe Selo. She arrived from town in a carriage; he, on horseback, from camp. “As always in such instances, I found it hard to say anything—choked with weeping and lost for the right words.” She watched him recede into the distance, constantly turning around in the saddle. Thus she described the end.

——

But was this indeed the end? Although Kschessinska ceased to be Nicholas’s mistress once he became engaged to Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1894, she remained a presence in the Romanov family for the rest of her life, as she recounts in her memoir,
Dancing in Petersburg
.

Kschessinska very quickly turned to her longtime admirer Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, who as head of the Theatrical Society and the Russian ballet could secure her former position in the ballet. For of all her lovers she remained faithful to only one: the ballet.

Kschessinska’s shadow next crossed the palace threshold in May 1896 in conjunction with Nicholas’s coronation, which was to be followed by a brilliant gala concert. The dowager empress, the new tsar’s all-powerful mother, had no intention of allowing Little K. to perform, and her scandalous name was crossed off the list of performers. However, when the astonished public saw the program, there was the name: Mathilde Kschessinska, dancing the lead!

They had done everything—both his mother and the minister of the court—to convince Nicky not to permit this scandal, but Mathilde knew her old lover too well. She had gone to the aging Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, who pleaded her case with Nicholas. On Nicholas’s other flank, his dear friend Sergei stepped forward. Nicholas ordered her name written in. Little K. had shown everyone her power—as she would continue to do in the years to come.

Kschessinska would bid the stage farewell many times but would continue to dance until 1917, and all the while she would keep the Romanov family around herself by whatever means necessary. When Sergei Mikhailovich and Kschessinska were accused of accepting huge bribes in arms deals during World War I, Nicholas refused to betray her, even to Alix.

For many years Sergei Mikhailovich remained by Little K.’s side. But when the frivolous grand duke became involved in a serious romance, Little K. immediately took an interest in a new Romanov: Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich came into her life. They went to Venice and then Provence, where he bought her a house by the sea. When they returned to Petersburg, Sergei Mikhailovich was by her side once more. Then she bore a son, Vladimir. Did she know whose son it was? Yes, indeed: the Romanovs’!

In February 1917, Kschessinska gave her last reception on the eve of the revolution. The following morning, as her housekeeper was checking the tea service and silver, she saw a vast crowd turning onto the bridge—toward the Winter Palace. Then she got a call from
the chief of police: “The situation is critical, save whatever you can.”

Vera Leonidovna: “In February 1917 I was in the apartment of a friend, the famous artist Yuriev.… That is where Mathilde hid out for a few days. She showed up dressed in a pathetic coat and some kind of kerchief with her little son, her dog, and a tiny reticule, which contained all that was left of her palaces and incalculable riches.”

With her trembling, age-spotted hands, she showed me how Kschessinska had held her reticule.

Kschessinska had no faith in the stability of the situation in the capital. She decided to leave Russia and take her son with her. After her departure, the Bolsheviks occupied Kschessinska’s palace. Cheap tobacco smoke permeated the upper rooms, endless people streamed up and down the trampled stairs, and sailors guarded the palace. In April 1917 a conference of Bolsheviks was held in her beloved hall, with its tall mirror over the mantel and its winter garden. And there, on her chairs, sat Filipp Goloshchekin, who was appointed to lead the Ural Bolsheviks. He would be the man to decide the fate of the two people who had been closest to her—Nicholas and Sergei.

Having escaped to Paris, Little K. would finally fulfill her dream: Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich married her. His brother Kirill became the Russian emperor in exile, and she became his relative.

Early in 1894 it became clear that Alexander III was going to die, evidently as a consequence of the train wreck at Borki six years earlier. The tsar had received only a bruise, but that bruise developed into a fatal kidney disease. Now the heir’s marriage had to be readied with all due speed.

The emperor’s sudden mortal illness put an end to the game with Little K.

The diplomats earned their pay. Constant negotiations were conducted back and forth between Petersburg and Darmstadt.

In April 1894, Alix’s brother Ernie was to marry his cousin the Saxe-Coburg Princess Victoria Melita, (“Ducky”), another granddaughter
of Queen Victoria. Emperor Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria, and innumerable European princes were assembling in Coburg. One of the last brilliant balls of royal Europe was to be held at the brink of the terrible new century.

Russia was represented by a powerful phalanx of grand dukes. Even Father Ioann Yanyshev, confessor to the tsar’s family, attended. His presence spoke clearly to the very serious intentions of those who had come: Father Ioann was supposed to instruct Alix in the fundamentals of Orthodox teaching. Also arriving in Coburg was Ekaterina Adolfovna Schneider, who had taught Russian to Ella, Alix’s sister. Should the matter reach a favorable conclusion, she would teach Russian to the Hessian princess. And naturally, Alix’s favorite sister, Ella (Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna), came too.