Because the present has its basic roots in the past, and because the future must emerge from the present, let me, in honoring those outstanding representatives of the recent past, pause for a moment to sketch their achievements and contributions.
MATHILDE KCHESSINSKA
In the early twentieth century hierarchy of Russian Ballet, Mathilde Kchessinska was the undisputed queen, a tsarina whose slightest wish commanded compliance. She was a symbol of a period.
Mathilde Kchessinska was born in 1872, the daughter of a famous Polish character dancer, Felix Kchessinsky. A superb technician, according to all to whom I have talked about her, and to the historians of the time, she is credited with having been the first Russian to learn the highly applauded (by audiences) trick of those dazzling multiple turns called fouettés, guaranteed to bring the house down and, sometimes today, even when poorly done. In addition to a supreme technique, she is said to have been a magnificent actress, both “on” and “off.”
Hers was an exalted position in Russia. Her personal social life gave her a power she was able to exercise in high places and a personal fortune which permitted her to give rein to a waywardness and wilfulness that did not always coincide with the strict disciplinarian standards of the Imperial Ballet.
Although she was able to control the destinies of the Maryinsky Theatre, to hold undisputed sway there, to have everything her own way, all that most people today know about her is that she was fond of gambling, that the Grand Dukes built her a Palace in Petrograd, and that Lenin made speeches to the mob from its balcony during the Revolution.
More rot has been told and written about her by those with more imagination than love of accuracy, than about almost any other person connected with ballet, not excepting Serge Diaghileff. In yarn upon yarn she has been identified with one sensational escapade and affair after another. None of these, so far as I know, she has ever troubled to contradict.
Mathilde Kchessinska was the first Russian dancer to win supremacy for the native Russian artist over their Italian guests. An artist in life as well as on the stage, today, at eighty, the Princess Krassinska-Romanovska, the morganatic wife of Grand Duke André of Russia, she still teaches daily at her studio in Paris, contributing to ballet from the fund of her vast experience and knowledge. Many fine dancers have emerged from her hands, but perhaps the pupil of whom she is the proudest is Tatiana Riabouchinska.
OLGA PREOBRAJENSKA
Sharing the rank of ballerina assoluta with Kchessinska at the Maryinsky Theatre was Olga Preobrajenska. Preobrajenska’s career paralleled that of the Princess Krassinska-Romanovska; she was born in 1871, and graduated from the Imperial School in the class ahead of the Princess. Yet, in many respects, they were as unlike as it is possible for two females to differ.