She was not only the toast of Europe for her work with the Diaghileff Company, but she returned frequently to the Maryinsky, dashing back and forth between Petrograd and Western Europe. An aversion to sea travel in wartime prevented her visiting America with the Diaghileff Company on either of its American tours. She did, however, make a brief American concert tour in 1925, partnered by Pierre Vladimiroff. Neither the conditions nor the circumstances of this visit were to her advantage, and Americans were thus prevented from seeing Karsavina at anything like her best.
Karsavina has painted her own picture more strikingly than anyone else can; and has painted it in a book that is a splendid work of art. It is called Theatre Street. Tamara Karsavina’s Theatre Street is a book and a portrait, a picture of a person and of an era that is, at the same time, a shining classic of the theatrical dance. But not only does it tell the story of her own career so strikingly that it would be presumptuous of me to expand on her career in these pages, but she shows us pictures of Russian life, of childhood in Russia that take rank with any ever written.
After the dissolution of a previous Russian marriage, Karsavina, in 1917, married a British diplomat, Henry Bruce, who died in 1950. Her son, by this marriage, is an actor and director in the British theatre. Karsavina herself lives quietly and graciously in London, but by no means inactively. She is a rock of strength to British ballet, through her interest and inspiration. A great lady as well as a great artist, it would give me great pleasure to be able to present her across the American continent in a lecture tour, in the course of which illuminating dissertation she would elucidate, as no one I have ever seen or heard, the important and expressive art of mime.
LYDIA KYASHT
Classmate of Karsavina at the Imperial School, and born in the same year, is Lydia Kyasht, who was the first Russian ballerina to become a permanent fixture in London.
Kyasht’s arrival in the British capital dates back to 1908, the year she became a leading soloist at the Maryinsky Theatre. There were mixed motives for her emigration to England. There were, it appears, intrigues of some sort at the Maryinsky; there was also a substantial monetary offer from the London music hall, the Empire, where, for years, ballet was juxtaposed with the rough-and-tumble of music hall comedians, and where Adeline Genée had reigned as queen of English ballet for a decade. Kyasht’s Russian salary was approximately thirty-five dollars a month. The London offer was for approximately two hundred dollars a week.
Her first appearance at the Empire, in Leicester Square, long the home of such ballet as London had at that time, was under her own name as Lydia Kyaksht. When the Empire’s manager in dismay inquired: “How can one pronounce a name like that?” he welcomed the suggestion that the pronunciation would be made easier for British tongues if the second “k” were dropped. So it became Kyasht, and Kyasht it has remained.
Kyasht was the first Russian dancer to win a following in London, and in her first appearances there she was partnered by Adolph Bolm, later to be identified with Diaghileff and still later with ballet development in the United States.
The Empire ballets were, for the most part, of a very special type of corn. Kyasht appeared in, among others, a little something called The Water Nymph and in another something charmingly titled First Love, with my old friend and Anna Pavlova’s long-time partner, Alexandre Volinine, as her chief support. There was also a whimsy called The Reaper’s Dream, in which Kyasht appeared as the “Spirit of the Wheatsheaf,” seen and pursued in his dream by a reaper, the while the corps de ballet, costumed as an autumn wheatfield, watched and wondered.
Most important, however, was Kyasht’s appearance in the first English presentation, on 18th May, 1911, of Delibes’ Sylvia. Sylvia, one of the happiest of French ballets, had had to wait thirty-five years to reach London, although the music had long been familiar there. Even then, London saw a version of a full-length, three-act work, which, for the occasion, had been cut and compressed into a single act. It took forty-one more years for the uncut, full-length work to be done in London, with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet production, staged by Frederick Ashton, at Covent Garden, in the Royal Opera House, on 3rd of September, 1952. The original British Sylvia, Lydia Kyasht, was, by this date, a member of the teaching staff at the famous Sadler’s Wells School.