Theatre Street: Karsavina’s eternal truths
By Barbara Quick
The Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina became a writer at the age of 46, when — against all odds as someone who only learned English as an adult — she penned a richly detailed, wonderfully written memoir for the English-speaking world: Theatre Street, first published in London in 1931. I sought out the book while doing research for my novel, What Disappears, which features Karsavina in its cast of historical figures.
A poet and novelist by profession, I’ve taken classes and occasionally performed with Brazilian dance troupes for the past 25 years. I derive a sustaining sense of pleasure from the physical discipline of dance, which gets me out of my head and into my body. Reading Theatre Street, I found myself attuned to the dancer’s satisfaction as she used the writer’s craft to articulate the physical poetry of her art.
Karsavina was born in St. Petersburg in 1885 into a family connected to the Imperial Ballet, where her father worked as a dancer and teacher until he fell out of favour with the school’s higher-ups and was forced into early retirement. With her family deprived of their breadwinner, Karsavina was pushed, at age nine, to compete for a paid position as a student in the Imperial Ballet School.
She remembers being filled with joy when she learned of her acceptance. The honour came with a small but significant monthly salary that would increase as she rose through the ranks. “You danced your way from brown frock to pink and from pink to white, by which time brown looked up to you with awe,” she writes.
Karsavina watched her brother Lev “wistfully” as he got to play in ways that were forbidden to her as a ballerina in training. Nonetheless she embraced the life, seeing herself as a servant of her art, even after becoming one of its biggest stars.
Born with talent and beauty — and perhaps helped along, she’s first to admit, by the influence still exercised by her father — Karsavina was chosen for named roles early on. “The tedious grind through which many a dancer went before reaching any prominence had been spared me. From the very beginning I was placed amongst the chosen.”
Karsavina’s mastery of written English is astonishing. The charming giveaway in the ballerina’s prose is her occasional omission of “the” or “a” before a noun — a characteristic of native Russian-speakers — or such whimsical locutions as when she describes a fashionable gathering as “a parade of jewels and toilettes.”
The storied glamour of Imperial Russia (minus the cruelty) comes to life in Karsavina’s tale. As a tiny ballerina, she attracts the notice of young Tsar Nicholas II, who receives her in the Imperial box at the theatre and speaks sweetly to her about her role as the Golden Fish in The Little Humpbacked Horse. “His smile had a charm irresistible… To me it was like being lifted to Paradise.”
Karsavina’s memoir allows us to witness the day-to-day details of her life as she rises through the ranks to become a professional ballerina at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre. “The corps de ballet were entitled to one pair [of pointe shoes] each four performances; coryphées received a pair each three performances; second solo dancers for two; first, every night; ballerinas, each act.” We meet towering figures in the cultural world before the world has discovered their genius. Of Ballets Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev, she writes, “A young man then, he already… distinguished between transient and eternal truth in art.”
Quite apart from Theatre Street’s historic treasure-trove, I found a creative sister in Tamara Karsavina, whose process of imagining herself into a role resonated with my own approach to writing fiction. “I imagined the looks of my heroine; the more different it was from my own self, the better it helped me,” she writes. “When I succeeded in giving a body to the part, I stepped aside and looked on to the visionary figure that went through all the evolutions of dancing and acting.”
While riding on a bus, Karsavina says she “became aware of the amused smiles of people sitting opposite. In utter confusion, I then realized that I was mentally going through my dances. My face must have worn a ludicrously ecstatic expression, as my head waggled and bowed to the music running in it.”
Although Karsavina’s memoir, so filled with eternal truths about art, is out of print now, it isn’t hard to score a copy. Many editions of the book have been published, and the internet makes it easy to find them.
