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PDF Ebook The True Memoirs of Little K: A Novel, by Adrienne Sharp
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A California Book Award Finalist
One of Oprah's Book Club's Ten Fantastic Books for Fall 2010
Historical Novel Review Editors' Choice
Exiled in Paris, the frail, elderly Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs. A lifetime ago, she was the vain, ambitious, impossibly charming prima ballerina assoluta of the tsar's Russian Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. Kschessinska's riveting storytelling soon thrusts us into a world lost to time: that great intersection of the Russian court and the Russian theater. Through Kschessinska's memories of her own triumphs and defeats, we witness the stories that changed history, from the seething beginnings of revolution to the end of a grand, decadent way of life that belonged to the nineteenth century. Based on fact, The True Memoirs of Little K is "an engrossing tale of love, loss, and history" (The Wichita Eagle).
- Sales Rank: #1115078 in Books
- Published on: 2011-10-25
- Released on: 2011-10-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .88" w x 5.25" l, .69 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 400 pages
Amazon.com Review
Exiled in Paris, tiny, one-hundred-year-old Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs before all that she believes to be true is forgotten. A lifetime ago, she was the vain, ambitious, impossibly charming prima ballerina assoluta of the tsar’s Russian Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. Now, as she looks back on her tumultuous life, she can still recall every slight she ever suffered, every conquest she ever made.
Kschessinka’s riveting storytelling soon thrusts us into a world lost to time: that great intersection of the Russian court and the Russian theater. Before the revolution, Kschessinska dominated that world as the greatest dancer of her age. At seventeen, her crisp, scything technique made her a star. So did her romance with the tsarevich Nicholas Romanov, soon to be Nicholas II. It was customary for grand dukes and sons of tsars to draw their mistresses from the ranks of the ballet, but it was not customary for them to fall in love.
The affair could not endure: when Nicholas ascended to the throne as tsar, he was forced to give up his mistress, and Kschessinska turned for consolation to his cousins, two grand dukes with whom she formed an infamous ménage à trois. But when Nicholas’s marriage to Alexandra wavered after she produced girl after girl, he came once again to visit his Little K. As the tsar’s empire—one that once made up a third of the world—began its fatal crumble, Kschessinka’s devotion to the imperial family would be tested in ways she could never have foreseen.
In Adrienne Sharp’s magnificently imagined novel, the last days of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov empire are relived. Through Kschessinska’s memories of her own triumphs and defeats, we witness the stories that changed history: the seething beginnings of revolution, the blindness of the doomed court, the end of a grand, decadent way of life that belonged to the nineteenth century. Based on fact, The True Memoirs of Little K is historical fiction as it’s meant to be written: passionately eventful, crammed with authentic detail, and alive with emotions that resonate still.
A Q & A With Author Adrienne Sharp
Q: You were a trainee for Harkness Ballet in New York City. What was the path that brought you there?
A: Like most little girls, I entered the ballet world at the age of seven, but unlike most little girls, I didn’t leave that world until I was eighteen and a trainee at Harkness. If you have the right body type and show a facility for movement, you are going to find your training encouraged and intensified. By the time I was ten years old, I was on full scholarship and taking ballet class six days a week, and when I wasn’t dancing I was going to the ballet and reading Dance magazine and collecting souvenir programs from all the leading ballet companies. By the time I was fifteen, I barely attended high school at all, and by the time I was seventeen, I was living on my own in New York and studying on full scholarship at Harkness.
Q: What was that like?
A: Very magical and very humbling. I was a called a trainee, but the company had disintegrated a few months before I arrived there. Photographs of the dancers were still all over the walls, and the school—with a faculty that included Renata Exeter and David Howard—was still going strong. Unfortunately, I was miserable in class, where I slumped at the barre, no longer the star pupil. I came home after several months and threw myself on my bed with no idea what to do next. My parents held nervous worried conferences outside my bedroom door because they, too, had no idea what I would do next. All I had ever done was dance.
Q: What did you do next?
A: Eventually I went to college and discovered writing. But I was lucky to be admitted to college at all, since education--any class that didn’t have to do with dancing--was of no interest to me up until that time. All dance students struggle to combine high school academics and dance training. If you’re going to be taken into a company at age 16, 17, 18, your most intensive training is going to be done during your high school years. Many dancers give up on high school. Suzanne Farrell in her autobiography writes of struggling through an algebra test in the morning and running in late to a rehearsal with Balanchine and Stravinsky. Finally she told her mother she just couldn’t do both anymore. I spoke recently with a young dancer in New York City Ballet, who at age 20 finally got her high school diploma, and she only managed that because she was sidelined with a foot injury for a year.
Q: What are some of those issues that you wanted to explore in your writing?
A: For one, every dancer’s life is a race against age and debilitation. A dancer has a very short season in which to perfect her craft and display it on the stage before injury or time overtake her. Most leave dancing somewhere in their twenties. Only the soloists and principal dancers last longer and they find themselves with fewer and fewer peers. The greatest dancers retire in their early forties and there are only a teaspoon of dancers of that age in each company. I imagine it’s increasingly lonely at the top.
Q: What is the draw of dancing?
A: I think it’s not only the beauty of the art that draws us, but also the discipline and rigor of it. You devote yourself to the barre and to the ideal of perfection and everything else falls away. That was my experience, an utter single-mindedness that becomes the center of your life. Which is why so many dancers and serious dance students have enormous trouble readjusting to the outside world.
Serious ballet study begins when children are at an enormously impressionable age. If you study long enough, you’ll be haunted by it forever. There’s all the worship of the older students and their beauty and perfection. I remember sitting under the big piano at Washington School of Ballet, watching the fabulous Mary Day coaching Kevin McKenzie (now the director of American Ballet Theater) and his partner Suzanne Longley for the International Ballet Competition at Varna, where they took silver and bronze medals. Talk about idol worship. I trembled when Suzanne spoke to me, spent hours trying to do my hair just the way she did hers.
From Publishers Weekly
Sharp impressively conjures the grand life of Mathilde Kschessinka, Russian prima ballerina and mistress of Czar Nicholas II, in her sweeping third novel (after The Sleeping Beauty). Narrated by Mathilde--"Little K" as she was affectionately known--the story follows her early life under her well-placed father's tutelage, and on through her determination, at 17, to catch Niki's eye, their affair, his breaking it off so he can marry his Alexandra, Little K's affairs with two grand dukes, Niki's return to father her son, the removal of his family from power, and her escape before the imperial family's slaughter. Sharp, a trained ballet dancer, gives the backstage escapades a lively spark and writes movingly of Russian dance. Though Mathilde is a bit narrow in terms of her icy ambition, her story is an unrelenting thrill ride and chockfull of the stuff that historical fiction buffs adore: larger than life characters, epic change, grand settings, and lusty plotting.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Sharp artfully evokes the extravagantly decadent twilight of czarist Russia in this dazzling fictional memoir. When 99-year-old Mathilde Kschessinska, former prima ballerina of the Russian Imperial Ballet, decides to write her memoirs, she opens the door to a bygone era populated with a glittering cast of historical notables. Mathilde, affectionately nicknamed Little K, was mistress to Nikolai Romanov (future czar) prior to his marriage to Alexandra. Never truly relinquishing her hold on her first love—he was, after all, the unacknowledged father of her illegitimate son—she used and tossed aside a parade of other titled aristocrats as ambition and fancy suited her whims. As the Romanov dynasty became more insular and out of touch with the social and historical reality, she recognized she had to do whatever she could to escape the grim fate that awaited the imperial family and their close associates. Secrets, scandals, and suspense steeped in authentic period detail provide a sumptuous feast for historical-fiction fans. --Margaret Flanagan
Most helpful customer reviews
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
You can't help yelling, "Brava!"
By Amazon Customer
Ballet fanatics like myself generally possess not only worn toe shoes signed by favorite dancers and piles of old theatrical programs, but a whole library on the subject --- from biographies to encyclopedias, criticism to coffee-table books. Ballet novels, however, are rare, and good ones even rarer. Among my favorites are Rumer Godden's A CANDLE FOR ST. JUDE, Colum McCann's DANCER (in which he reimagines Nureyev's life), and a few gems for kids (notably Noel Streatfeild's marvelous Shoes books).
THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF LITTLE K is Adrienne Sharp's third foray into ballet-themed fiction; her previous works include a short-story collection, WHITE SWAN, BLACK SWAN, and a novel set in the dance-crazed 1980s, THE SLEEPING BEAUTY. I must confess that I wasn't thrilled by the first two. Although the balletic details were fun and gossipy, I found the narrative and characters rather melodramatic. But here Sharp explores her fascination with dance through the lens of history, giving us prerevolutionary Russia from the perspective of Mathilde Kschessinska, prima ballerina assoluta at St. Petersburg's Maryinsky Theatre.
The setting, for a balletomane, is iconic: the wondrous era in which many of today's classics --- from Swan Lake to Le Corsaire, Don Quixote to Nutcracker --- were created and feats like the Black Swan's 32 fouettés first accomplished (Kschessinska learned how to do them from the Italian ballerinas who dominated the Russian dance scene at the time). Storied choreographers, composers and impresarios like Petipa, Tchaikovsky and Diaghilev people the pages of this novel, and backstage politicking abounds. In order to sabotage a rival, Kschessinska --- a born diva --- once let live chickens loose on stage!
Kschessinska was a survivor. She escaped revolutionary Russia and wound up in Paris, where she had a school (she taught such ballet luminaries as Alicia Markova, Andre Eglevsky and Margot Fonteyn); in 1971, before her death at 99, she wrote her memoirs. Sharp's book, based on this autobiography and other historical sources, is written entirely in the aged ballerina's voice (by turns ambitious, greedy, vain, calculating, tender and romantic). It focuses on her years as a student and then as star of the Imperial Ballet; it merely sketches her life in exile. In the end, THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF LITTLE K isn't really about ballet as such, though there are some piquant details (for example, performers then wore corsets and wigs on stage --- heaven forbid that they should show their real hair, a private thing --- as well as the lavish jewelry given to them by admirers). It is about a woman caught up in one of the most turbulent political upheavals of the 20th century.
Essentially, it is the story of the Russian revolution viewed from inside the tsarist court, for ballerinas at that time customarily had aristocratic "patrons," and promotions at the Maryinsky Theatre were clearly ruled by royalty, not solely by artistic directors. Thus, Kschessinska --- who had an intermittent but long-term affair with the man who became the last tsar, Nicholas II --- is able to maintain her preeminence not simply through her talent but by working her powerful connections.
While Sharp evinces a certain fondness for the grandeur and tradition of Old Russia, she makes it clear that the tsarist regime dug its own grave through arrogance, corruption and an unwillingness to make any sort of democratic concessions. Overshadowing the entire novel is the ultimate fate of the tsar and his family (they were sent to Siberia and executed, a grisly event you might remember from popular books and films such as Nicholas and Alexandra and Anastasia). Reading it is a bit like watching a slow-motion train wreck, or a fictionalized version of a term paper: "Causes of the Russian Revolution."
In the first half of the book, I often felt that Sharp was laboring to use every scrap of her research. The background material tends to crowd and encumber the narrative (besides, it's hard to believe that a 99-year-old woman would have total recall). Why would Kschessinska describe the wintertime balls given in St. Petersburg, down to descriptions of the floral arrangements and servants' uniforms? Why would she know or care to mention that 130,000 soldiers were involved in summer maneuvers? Sharp's accounts of such turning points as the "Bloody Sunday" massacre of 1905 are gripping, but they seem like set-pieces, disconnected from Kschessinska's intimate recollections.
As THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF LITTLE K proceeds, however, Sharp becomes more successful at integrating history and fiction. At the heart of the book is the love story between "Niki," as Kschessinska calls the tsar, and "Little K" (his nickname for her). Thus, when he marries the German princess Alexandra, she feels like the "poor girl" of several classical ballet plots (Giselle; La Bayadère) who is thrown over in favor of an aristocratic bride. (She takes her revenge by comparing her figure to the less athletic tsarina's: "Well, of course, I had not had four children and I was a dancer --- an occupation that preserves the body better than a dip in formaldehyde.") But Kschessinska isn't cut out for victimhood. Needing protectors, she attaches herself to Nicholas's cousins, the Grand Dukes Sergei and Andrei; she even draws the tsar himself back to her bed for a brief coda to their affair and bears a son, Vova (although in the novel the child is supposed to be Nicholas's, leading to dramatic plot complications, the historical evidence for this assumption is shaky, as she was not exactly a one-man woman).
Kschessinska grows on the reader. Her toughness and strong will come to the fore when she is tested by the chaos of the revolutionary years, and she evolves from a naïve, flirtatious maiden infatuated with celebrity and her royal connections into a world-weary woman honed by tragedy and motherhood. Just as Russia's character is an ambiguous mix of East and West --- part credulous, earthy peasant; part refined, elegant European --- so is Kschessinska's, and her acerbic, tell-it-like-it-is voice is Sharp's finest accomplishment. Here's my favorite passage: Disparaging the younger generation of Russian dancers, Kschessinska calls Anna Pavlova's famous solo The Dying Swan "mawkish" and adds smugly, "I've outlived her, you know."
So she had. And you can't help yelling, "Brava!"
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A believable tale of tsarist Russia with a fascinating and flawed main character
By Cathy G. Cole
First Line: My name is Mathilde Kschessinska, and I was the greatest Russian ballerina on the imperial stages.
In 1971, a tiny, 100-year-old woman sits down to write her memoirs of everything she knows to be true. She is Mathilde Kschessinska, once the greatest ballerina on the Russian imperial stage. Born to Polish parents, when the extremely competitive Kschessinska was enrolled in ballet school, she set high goals for herself. She became the best ballerina; she became the lover of tsarevich Nicholas Romanov; she became wealthy beyond her dreams. In the end, she lost everything but her memories.
I had a difficult time reading this book for two reasons. The first is a technicality: not everyone can sit down and read undisturbed for a lengthy period of time. I've learned to look for paragraph breaks as natural stopping points. This book is 384 pages of very, very long paragraphs, and I was surprised to find that one little thing was tiring. It may sound picky, but it's a detail that I noticed over and over again.
The second reason why this book could be difficult to read can be found in the character of Kschessinska herself. Throughout the book, she is unapologetically opportunistic. She thinks nothing of using slander and sabotage (among other things) to get what she wants. I found that, after a few pages of her machinations, I wanted to stop and do something else. However, her unflinching honesty was refreshing. She may have enough pride for three people, and she may not be sorry for anything she's done, but at least she tells the truth.
"I hear that visitors to my mansion, now the State Museum of Political History, to this day ask to see the entrance to the secret tunnel that once linked the palace of the dancer Kschessinska to the palace of the tsar. Political history does not interest them. I interest them."
The one thing about Sharp's book that held me spellbound was her depiction of a vanished world. Tsarist Russia may have been filled with decadence and cruelty, but it was also filled with incredible beauty-- a land of vast contradictions as so many countries are.
I enjoyed Sharp's skill in weaving her believable fictional tale around historical figures I've read so much about. She also provided more background into the history of ballet and helped me put several dancers in their proper context.
If you love novels set in the Russia of Nicholas and Alexandra, you should love this book-- as long as your heroines don't have to be scrupulously honest in their morals and behavior.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
too much poetic license for my taste but well written and still enjoyable...
By Helen Azar
So, if I was writing this review when I was only half way through the book, it would have definitely gotten 5 stars from me. As things stand, I was going back and forth between 3 and 4 stars, and the reason I wanted to give it 4 was because of an excellent and elegant writing style and also an interesting story which was readable and entertaining. Here is why I ended up giving it only 3 stars(this will contain SPOILERS!). It is a clearly well researched novel, and the first half is historically accurate. However, half way through the book things start getting a little too fantastical for my tastes. First of all, there is absolutely no historical evidence whatsoever that Nicholas II continued to have an affair with Mathilde Kschessinska after his marriage, and yet this is a rather large part of the plot. There is even less evidence that Mathilde's son Vova was the Tsar's son and his paternity was accepted by the Tsar. Not only that, but according to the book Vova was also accepted by the Tsar's family as his son, including his wife and his children, and he spent a significant amount of time at the Alexander Palace with them. Including the days when they were under arrest. This was a little too much for me, but I did finish the book, and even actually enjoyed it on some level. So as long as you can live with this type of glaring poetic licensing, then you may like this book too.
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