Kchessinka was always chic, noted for her striking beauty, expressive arms and wrists, a beautifully poised head, an indescribably infectious smile. She was a social queen who used her gifts and her powers for all they were worth. It was a question in the minds of many whether Kchessinska’s private life was more important than her professional career. The gods had not seen fit to smile too graciously on Preobrajenska in the matter of face and figure. Her tremendous success in a theatre where, at the time, beauty of form was regarded nearly as highly as technique, may be said to have been a triumph of mind over matter. Despite these handicaps or, perhaps, because of them, she succeeded in working out her own distinctive style and bearing.
Free from any Court intriguing, Olga Preobrajenska was a serious-minded and noble person, a figure that reflected her own nobility of mind on ballet itself. Whereas Kchessinska’s career was, for the most part, a rose-strewn path, Preobrajenska’s road was rocky. Her climb from a corps de ballet dancer to the heights was no overnight journey. It was one that took a good deal of courage, an exhibition of fortitude that happily led to a richly deserved victory. Blessed with a dogged perseverance, a divine thirst for knowledge, coupled with a desire ever to improve, she forced herself ahead. She danced not only in every ballet, but in nearly every opera in the repertoire that had dances. In her quarter of a century on the Imperial stage she appeared more than seven hundred times. It was close on to midnight when her professional work was done for the day; then she went to the great teacher, Maestro Enrico Cecchetti, for a private lesson, which lasted far into the early hours of the morning. Hers was a life devoted to work. For the social whirl she had neither time nor interest.
These qualities, linked with her fine personal courage and gentleness, undoubtedly account for that unbounded admiration and respect in which she is held by her colleagues.
Preobrajenska remained in Russia after the revolution, teaching at the Soviet State School of Ballet from 1917 through 1921. In 1922, she relinquished her post, left Russia and settled in Paris. Today, she maintains one of the world’s most noteworthy ballet schools, still teaching daily, passing on to the present generation of dancers something of herself so that, though dancers die, dancing may live.
It was during her teaching tenure at the Soviet State School of Ballet, the continuing successor in unbroken line and tradition to the Imperial Ballet School from the eighteenth century, that a young man named Georgi Balanchivadze came into her ken. Georgi Balanchivadze is better known throughout the world of the dance today as George Balanchine. In the long line of pupils who have passed through Preobrajenska’s famous Paris school, there is space only to mention two of whom she is very proud: Irina Baronova and Tamara Toumanova.
Frequently, I have had great pleasure in attending some of Preobrajenska’s classes in Paris, and I am proud to know her. It was during my European visit in the summer of 1950 that I happened to be at La Scala, Milan, when Preobrajenska was watching a class being given there by the Austrian ballet-mistress, Margaret Wallman. This was at the time of the visit to Milan of Galina Ulanova, the greatest lyric ballerina of the Soviet Union. The meeting of Ulanova and Preobrajenska, two great figures of Russian ballet, forty-one years apart in age, but with the great common bond of the classical dance, each the recipient of the highest honors a government can pay an artist, was, in its way, historic.
I arranged to have photographs taken of the event, a meeting that was very touching. Ulanova had come to see a class as well. The two great artists embraced. Ulanova was deeply moved. Their conversation was general. Unfortunately, there was little time, for the Soviet Consular officials who accompanied Ulanova were not eager for her to have too long a conversation.
At eighty-two, Preobrajenska has no superior as a teacher. At her prime, she was a dancer of wit and elegance, excelling in mimicry and the humorous. With her colleagues of that epoch, as with Ulanova, she nevertheless had one outstanding quality in common: a sound classicism.
LUBOV EGOROVA
Less exalted in the hierarchy of the Russian Imperial Ballet, since she never attained the assoluta distinction there, but, nevertheless, a very important figure in ballet, is Lubov Egorova (Princess Troubetzkoy).