Olga Spessivtzeva

Another ballerina was the better loved when Olga Spessivtzeva made her New York debut in 1917. “Lydia Lopoukhova was the ballerina who, with her exuberant charm, her elfin but earthy quality, her sex appeal, meant perhaps more to the public of America.” A ballerina with vibrancy and cheer and a warm smile that no doubt flushed her rouged cheeks redder; a ballerina who could evoke cheer in a curtsey, coquettish appeal in a piqué, innocence in a jeté. A ballerina who could express joy and passion to her audience through her dancing.

Olga Spessivtzeva was not this kind of ballerina. Anton Dolin, Spessivtzeva’s biographer, dance partner, and dear friend, has given us the most detailed account of her life. As most people do in describing her, Dolin writes extensively on Spessivtzeva’s physical appearance and qualities onstage. He says that any relation she had to “earthiness,” unlike Lopoukhova, was her lack of it. Spessivtzeva did not exude sex appeal and warmth with her thin limbs, her careful, calculated steps, her pale face and dark eyes. Other dancers of Spessivtzeva’s time — Anna Pavlova, Thamara Karsavina — were charming, dynamic, animated in their dancing, able to draw an audience in with high spirits and sweaty faces. Pavlova was said to have a “turbulence of soul,” to be “like a lily sparkling in her candor.” Spessivtzeva, technically as brilliant as these two, was a cold, crystalline figure in comparison: flawless, immaculate, practically glinting with perfection but distanced by her seemingly unflappable exterior. Her lines were so pure, her body so perfectly formed, she might well have been a figurine come to life — delicate and beautiful, but remote. Khoudekov, the critic who wrote of Pavlova’s sparkle and candor, said of Spessivtzeva, “She has conquered by her physique, her graceful silhouette, and her perfectly moulded legs…yet at the same time, her style of dancing irritates me….”

Spessivtzeva performed Les Sylphides in her New York debut, but her performance was not met with good reviews. When audiences in Russia first saw Spessivtzeva as a sylph, they did not praise her, this talented young prodigy who joined the Imperial Russian Ballet as a corps de ballet dancer but never danced a corps role in her life. Dolin speculates as to why she who was deemed perfect — nearly too perfect — by all who saw her did not leave a lasting impression in the ethereal one-act ballet by Fokine: “Perhaps her quality, her extraordinary aloofness….made her stand out too sharply.”

Perhaps she played so well the part of sylph, people could not be amazed and impressed the way they would be by any other woman performing the role: a woman who would have to rein in her humanness and heat to attain a sylph’s ghostly quality. Perhaps, as the patrons filed out of the theater, the memory of Spessivtzeva performing the poet’s fantasy — the phantom — dissipated, as do the misty remembrances of dreams upon waking. Spessivtzeva, the cold and perfect, physically a sylph without the Romantic tutu, was so convincing as an imagined wraith that she left existence as soon as she left the spotlight, disappearing, as a sylph would, into the dark.

The perfection of her form and features, her proportion, the shape of her limbs, the oval of her face, the enormous eyes, exquisite nose and mouth — all this was the ideal appearance of a ballerina….And even that would not be enough without her astonishing capacity for work in her search for perfection. And she achieved it: the suppleness of her body, the lightness and height of her jump, the lightning speed of her batterie, the steel points of her highly arched feet — she had all that.

-Dame Marie Rambert

Spessivtzeva had physical perfection: so I have read. It seems that anyone who saw her could not help but marvel over her supposedly flawless body, the epitome of balletic perfection, ever since Marie Taglioni set that standard when she appeared on stage in La Sylphide. Yet after the praising of her sublime form, her reviewers and friends always made note of her reserve, her fragility, her melancholy, her sometimes pained face. Having seen her perform in Giselle, André Levinson wrote:

She is unique and singular in that she belongs to the type of beauty created by Taglioni for the ballet…the human form idealized even to the point of exaggeration, as the contours of an angelic sylphide. The delicacy, the touching fragility of this new Giselle seems even a little unhealthy….In her there dwells a spirit which is strange, mournful, exhausted, resigned, sometimes even withdrawn.

She practiced at the ballet barre obsessively. People who observed Spessivtzeva’s precise technique might have been surprised had they seen her sweat soaked clothes, for Olga made everything look so effortless. Few knew the exertion that she put forth to obtain a thin balletic body that hardly seemed to belong to a human, so easily did it float across a stage.. Dolin saw Spessivtzeva’s perfectionism as unhealthy, but she brushed off his concern, the way so many overworked dancers brush off the concern of worried friends, fretting mothers, disturbed lovers. In reply to King George’s comment after a performance of Sleeping Beauty in London — “One should feed you, Madam, you are but a shadow” — Olga attributed her too finely sculpted limbs to a mere passing circumstance. “Perhaps I looked a little pale,” she wrote, “for I was still in my Vision scene costume and had no time to brush the white powder from my face and shoulders before hurrying to the Royal Box.”

Spessivtzeva may have subdued any complaint, ignored any detriment to her body while she sought perfection daily in exercise after exercise, but such devotion to the art form was more than a human body could take. People saw the harm Olga was doing to herself in the reserve of her face, the painful and sad expression she wore while she danced. But Dolin and others were so taken with her impeccable technique that they failed to step in before it was too late.

Why have even some of the most devoted ballet fans never heard of Olga Spessivtzeva’s tragic story? I had not until I was twenty years old. In a documentary about the ballet Giselle, a brief ten-minute segment reveals that one of the greatest ballerinas of all time went mad just like the woman she portrayed in her most famous role.

Before her very first performance of Giselle, Spessivtzeva was extremely nervous. Haunted by nightmares of a ridiculing audience, she was plagued by the possibility of failing before ever taking the stage. Her practice, as usual, was obsessive, but even more so in preparation for this ballet. For, in addition to dancing the steps perfectly, Olga wanted to play the perfect madwoman, so she visited asylums to study the behaviors of the mentally ill. If by day she rehearsed her footwork in a studio, did she, at night, sit in front of a mirror to train the muscles of her face to alternate between the expression of distraught heartbreak and the image of emptiness: the face of a girl whose intense passion drives her into insanity and death?

As the character in the ballet skips limply, dancing the shade of former steps before coming to her senses and running to her mother, only to deteriorate into further disjointed motions in a seemingly endless cycle, Olga too was affected physically. In 1931, the year of Pavlova’s death, while the Paris Opera Ballet was on tour in Australia, Spessivtzeva abruptly left a rehearsal, shaking and complaining of “intrigues in the Company,” plots against her. The next day she was found in a trancelike state wandering the street near her hotel; as abruptly as she had left the previous day’s rehearsal, she decided that she needed to practice, ignoring insistence that she had missed the rehearsal already. Yet when she arrived at the studio, she was not her usual brilliant self: “Instead of the perfectly coordinated exercises that no dancer ever did more beautifully,” Dolin writes, “she went through a series of distorted movements, ugly and quite without balletic reason.”

This first episode was followed by periods of extreme nervousness in Spessivtzeva, but she was near enough to “normal” that people disregarded her extreme anxiety for years. Undoubtedly, Spessivtzeva struggled more than people could perceive; her usual reserve was not just unvoiced melancholy, but subdued panic. In a hotel in America seven years after the first incident, Olga insisted someone was leaking poison fumes into her room. Revealing her confused sense of place and self, she told doctors, “I am Giselle. I am Olga Spessivtzeva of the Paris Opera. Prima ballerina. This is my home. I stay only here.”

I am Giselle. Spessivtzeva was calmed down and temporarily placed in Bellevue Hospital’s Psychopathic Ward, then transferred to a private sanatorium in Upstate New York. But she did not remain there for long, either. Anton Dolin left Spessivtzeva in America to finish his own tour with the Royal Ballet, but he came back to New York to find that she had been transferred to the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane at Poughkeepsie, mere hours away from the classroom in which I had first heard of Spessivtzeva. No one at the hospital knew who she was. Dolin describes his sad reunion with Olga: “For there, sitting like a small caged animal, was the great ballerina. Staring with vacant eyes, black shadows beneath them, her face was ashen yellow, her hair unkempt….”

She was Giselle materialized — the perfect madwoman at last. When Spessivtzeva was no longer able to take the stage, the world forgot her as she had forgotten herself. An end she had anticipated while she was being photographed in Wili attire: out of the corner of her eye, she must have sensed the awaiting shadows.

In 1940, before entering the asylum in Poughkeepsie but already trapped by her unsettled mind, Spessivtzeva wrote a poem. Writing, a distraction that does not suffice for long:

I arrived from North to South,

And suddenly my eyelids were hanging

Over my eyes

And over my ear.

And this was Grace

As I might have been

Suddenly changed into a camel,

And now, I am sitting

And hoping to regain my eyes.

-Olga Spessivtzeva