La Ballerine de Saint Petersbourg
is a precious book by Henri Troyat: it is a vivid portrait of the iconic and glorious tradition of the Russian ballet, picturing also its same decadence.
I start to tell to the readers that all these characters really existed and made the history of the Russian and European ballet.
The book is narrated in first person using the voice of Ludmilla, a dancer.
Orphan of mother, Ludmilla remains alone with her father. A father too in love for vodka and discomfort but not too much for not understand that maybe it is better to find another place for this poor little girl: he can't be a good father for her because he is desperate for the departure of his wife.
But...His father wants to give to Ludmilla a great future, putting her daughter in beautiful hands, assuring her a successful and rich future.
Ludmilla loves dancing and her father accompanies her at the selections for being admitted in the prestigious Ecole Impèriale de Danse located in Saint Petersburg. An exclusive institute where few people, talented and perfect for ballet, are admitted.. A school completeley financed by the same Tsar. There, dancers studies also Russian, french, history, geography and other topics.
Ludmilla is choosen and her second father and idol, with best qualities than not his real one becomes her teacher of ballet, Marius Petipa, born in Marseille but later emigrated in Russia.
Oh, that formative years are wonderful, tiring, suffering because dancing means an exploration of the limits of the body, and that limits where possible must be overcome: blood, sufferances are part of the process of learning and resistance.
Ludmilla obtains her first contracts, and she is happy: she understands with the time that she won't never be the first dancer, but she doesn't mind. She understands that the secondary role can be portrayed with extreme grace and beauty: there are wonderful italians and Russians as first dancers and she admires them so badly.
She becomes an affectionate of the house of Petipa, because there it is possible to breath an atmosphere permeated with creative vibes. Petipa has a beautiful family.
Tchaikovski the composer of enchantment and dream, supervises with Petipa the coreographies of his works largely putting on stage. Loved by everyone it is a real tragedy for the entire Russian world of ballet and opera when the beloved composer falls sick with cholera and dies. No one knows exactly what happened: if he died of cholera or killed himself because he had catched cholera...
What appears more than sure? That the world has lost a real talent, gone too soon.
Ludmilla after a beautiful show meets the tsar Alexander III. The Tsar remembers very well her father when she tells him her last name. Ludmilla is the daughter of two creatives: her father, before to lose any interest for life was an actor, and also pretty good as tells to her, Alexander III. The son Nicolas II, that would have been the last Russian Tsar, is there with them: beautiful boy, at that time he has a relationship with a famous dancer but later they break-up because his father decides for another woman, Ferodovna, as we all know.
Important changes decided in terms of direction of the imperial theather with the arrival of a colonel Vladimir Teliakovski, an incompetent, create horrible scenarios for the creativity of that place and for the same Marius Petipa...Teliakovski doesn't know anything of that world and build a sad atmosphere making unhappy choises and destroying the beauty everytime portrayed by dancers and coreographers.
In Russia, in the while the most modern dancer and coreographer is Serge Diaghilev, also devastated for the departure of his beloved Tchaikovski: he would have left later for Paris where he started to propose an innovative ballet, meeting the perplexities of Marius Petipa for an innovation that would have modified too much the way of dancing. With Petipa in Saint Petersbourg there is also Cecchetti, an italian who created a method of work for dancers still used in modern ballet.
Petipa, having lost his job at the Theater because of Teliakovski, and in a forced pension decides to return to France.
Ludmilla thinks that maybe he wouldn't never made return to Russia, but Petipa does. After all it is in Russia that he has found a family, a country where he worked with success, where achieved successes, and where he would have been remembered forever.
The father of Ludmilla, after a pneumonia dies, like also, close to him, Petipa.
Abandoned by the men of her existence, 32 years, Ludmilla discovers in a dancer more young than her, Boris, maybe her future: there isn't anymore just dance, the only love she had known till now but someone: and it is, for Ludmilla a strange and joyous discovery this one.
She hasn't never had the habit of thinking at a different passion than dancing.
Because of the straining moments breathed in Russia where there was a war against Japan, resolved, with a chaotic internal situation that later would have brought at the destitution of the Tsar, the couple decide to move to Paris.
Serge Diaghilev searches every year for some Russian dancers.
Ludmilla is not enthusiastic of the innovations apported by Diaghilev. She remains a student of Marius Petipa: it's a completely different world and methodology of work the one by Diaghilev in comparison to the scenographies proposed by Petipa.
Boris during the first world war decides to fight for his country dying in the battlefield. Ludmilla is destroyed.
At the same time, subscriber of several russian magazines Ludmilla is always more worried for her country.
Why? Because she reads of the end of the Tzar saluted as a shock from a lot of russian citizens, not resigned to see the end of that glorious and beauty past: the advent of Lenin with the name of Russia changed in URSS oh, so so horrible for Ludmilla.
What remains to her is the dancing school she has opened in Paris, her first and final love: the mature Ludmilla admits that yes, there are not anymore the applauses in big and beautiful theathers, but the ones of mothers, fathers, friends and relatives of the students she follows at the end of the year, but it is satisfying, because as says our narrator, Ludmilla at the end of the book: "I think that for everyone, at every age, life reserves surprises if you believe in her and you work as if fatigue, old age and death would be only for others."
Touching, a real portray of a period. If you love ballet, history, if you are curious to understand a world where grace, harmony are the product of great love, sacrifice and sufferance, it's absolutely for you.
This book déclassé was part of the Biblioteque Municipale Merxheim. It will stay with me forever!
Anna Maria Polidori
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