one person.
“When Niura began to get flowers from bewhiskered, portly gentlemen who brought her home from the theater in splendid carriages late at night, I began to worry. One evening I went to her room after she went to bed and said, ‘You don’t have to do this, Niura, I can go back to washing and ironing.’ Niura looked at me with her large, luminous eyes. ‘Thank you, Mama,’ she answered. ‘But my dancing will support us both; you have nothing to worry about.’ That calmed me, because my little Niura was never wrong.
“Every time I saw Niura dance at the Maryinsky, I thought the same thing. Sitting high up in the gallery I could see the audience in the orchestra seats below, sumptuously dressed in lace and velvet and glistening with jewels. On stage the dancers wore similar apparel and jewelry. No wonder Le Miroir was St. Petersburg’s favorite ballet. The aristocrats were convinced they deserved it all and were fascinated by their own spectacle. Meanwhile in the countryside the peasants continued to starve, because all the food was needed for the soldiers who were fighting a war against Japan.
“Matilde Kschessinska was prima ballerina when my Niura graduated. They danced together at the Maryinsky Theater a few times, and were always competing for the limelight. Matilde also had many followers who would have done anything to advance her career. Being older, she had much more experience than Niura. She obtained the favors of Nicholas II when he was still the czarevitch, and he bought her a magnificent house on the English Embankment, a very fashionable address. Matilde loved to dance wearing the jewelry the czarevitch gave her as a present. Sometimes she wore three diamond necklaces at a time, which made her look like a poodle because she was short and wore her curly hair cropped close to her head. She was not a great ballerina. She was very polished but she only danced ‘on the surface,’ to entertain the audience. She never danced from the depths, like my Niura did.
“Czar Nicholas had many artist friends, not all of them dancers. One of the most famous was a little girl, an American diva whose name I can’t remember. She was ten years old, and created a furor when she appeared at the Winter Palace singing ‘Ah! non giunge’ from Bellini’s La Sonnambula . She was warbling like a nightingale and standing on a little red plush platform with wheels when they rolled her out to the center of the stage. The ovation was so great that the czar and the czarina sent for her at the end of the performance. That was the same night my Niura danced in Le Roi Candaule . She was very young, but she never forgot the doll-like diva, dressed in a fanlike frock and wearing a hussar’s red jacket, who threw her a rose as she went by. The czar presented the young prima donna with a coronet of diamonds that night, a smaller reproduction of the one that graced the czarina’s head.”
9
“A T THIS TIME NIURA took a large apartment in Anelisky Prospekt. I didn’t know how she could afford it, but it was better not to ask. It was a new building, and we were to move in together. I was ecstatic. It meant I didn’t have to be separated from my daughter again. I’d cook for her, wash and iron her clothes. No one was to know I was her mother, so my presence wouldn’t embarrass her.
“The apartment was beautiful—big, lofty rooms decorated with white Empire furniture upholstered in blue silk. Niura’s bed had a latticed headboard and footboard, with garlands of roses carved over them, and her bedspread was exactly the same ice blue as the Neva, which could be seen from her window. In what was once a salon for entertaining guests, Niura set up her own dance studio, with an immense mirror on one wall and a barre the length of the room on the opposite side.
“The income from Niura’s friends and the Poliakoffs’ stipend meant we could live with a certain degree of comfort. Niura also began to make more money