Our Ballet: Photo cards from the Russian imperial era
By Robert Greskovic
The image heading this page is one of a series of photo cards featuring dancers from Russia’s imperial ballet troupes, which were supported by the tsar and presented on turn-of-the-20th-century stages in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Printed on heavy card stock, the photos were meant to be souvenirs, and sometimes sent as postcards.
The caption on the two photo cards featured in this post (the one below is postmarked 1905, the top one was never mailed) spells out Our Ballet in Cyrillic letters (Nash Balet in Roman), with images from the series collaged to form the letters. These are just two such cards from my sprawling personal collection, started as part of a long-time fascination with ballet history, especially that connected to imperial and soviet Russia.
Our Ballet is also the title of a book, published in 1899 by balletomane Aleksandr Pleshcheyev, which was widely known and revered in Russia. The Nash Balet cards were presumably produced in reference to the 467-page book, which includes commentaries on about 180 dancers active between 1673 to 1899. Some of the artists featured in Pleshcheyev’s study can be glimpsed in these two cards, including historically significant female dancers Matilde Kshesinskaya, Vera Trefilova, Anna Pavlova, Marie Petipa, Liubov Roslavleva, Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Ekaterina Geltser, as well as their male counterparts Michel Fokine, Nikolai Legat, Pavel Gerdt and Alfred Bekefy.
The photos of women outnumber those of the men, reflecting the dominance of female dancers in ballets of this era. Consider the superior number of female characters and corps de ballet elements of Marius Petipa’s ballets, which long dominated the imperial stage, La Bayadère and The Sleeping Beauty, for instance.
PART TWO OF THE SERIES “OUR BALLET,” FEATURING MARIE PETIPA, SERGEI LEGAT AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE HERE
