Mathilde Kschessinska
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| Mathilde Kschessinskaya as Aspicia in the Pas de Fleche from Act I of The Pharaoh's Daughter, St. Petersburg, 1898 |
Mathilde Kschessinska (
Polish:
Matylda Krzesińska,
19 August 1872 (O.S.) Ligovo near
Peterhof â€"
7 June 1971 Paris), (also known as
Her Serene Highness Princess Romanova-Krasinskaya since 1921) was the first Russian
prima ballerina assoluta in the world. Today, she is probably best known for her love affair with the future Emperor
Nicholas II, who is said to have lost his virginity with her.
Like all her Polish family, Mathilde performed at the
Mariinsky Theatre of
St Petersburg. After
Pierina Legnani amazed the world with her
32 consecutive fouettés in
1893, (in
Cinderella), Kschessinska was the first who managed to repeat this feat . The scandals and rumours around her name persisted, however, as she formed a
MĂ©nage Ă trois with two Grand Dukes of the
Romanov family - Sergei Mikhailovich and his cousin Andrei Vladimirovich.
Through her aristocratic connections, she managed to amass much valuable property in the Russian capital. It was from the balcony of her elegant house that
Lenin addressed the revolutionary crowd when he had returned from
Finland in
1917.
The
Russian Revolution over, Kschessinska moved first to
French Riviera before she moved to
Paris, where she married, in 1921, one of the tsar's cousins, Grand Duke
Andrey Vladimirovich Romanov, with whom she had had a son, Prince
Vladmir Romanovsky-Krasinsky ("Vova"), in 1902
1. In
1929, she opened her own ballet school, where she taught such students as
Dame Margot Fonteyn,
Dame Alicia Markova,
André Eglevsky, and
Tamara Toumanova. She performed for the last time at the age of 64, for a charity event at
Covent Garden. In
1960, she published an
autobiography entitled
Souvenirs de la Kschessinska (published in English as
Dancing in St. Petersburg: The Memoirs of Kschessinska). She died several months before her 100th birthday.
1Though Andrei acknowledged Vladimir as his son, it is possible that Vova's biological father was Grand Duke Sergei, whose patronym he was given. It has also been suggested that Grand Duke Vladimir was the father.
*Hall, Coryne,
Imperial Dancer: Mathilde Kschessinska and the Romanovs, Sutton Publishing, England, 2005.
Further reading
*
Mathilde's story on www.peoples.ru (in Russian)
*
In search of Mathilde Kschessinska (in English)
*
The Ballerina Gallery - Mathilde Kschessinska
