July 1959
Nikitina is clearly an extraordinary creature: not only did she enjoy a dazzling career in the Russian Ballet but when her physical health finally made dancing difficult or impossible, she took to opera, and in no time (by operatic standards) she was singing Gilda in the State Opera at Palermo.
Unfortunately, she has not added a third branch of the arts to her laurels - she not only does not write well, she really cannot write at all - and in some strange way this makes her naïve burst of illiterate conceit quite enjoyable - like reading the happy excited vanities of a child who is having a lovely time and being spoiled.
Russian by birth, she left that country as a young girl and her first public appearance as a dancer was in Yugoslavia. She did not join Diaghilev’s company until 1923 by which time as ballet lovers will know or remember, Nijinsky was lost, Massine and Balanchine were the principal choreographers, and Lifar was rising as the next star dancer: it was the Indian Summer of the Diaghilev company.
Nikitina, in spite of a minimum of classical training by Russian standards, rose to the enviable position of ballerina in a company rich with artists to provide the materials and setting for great dancing: Legat and Cecchetti became her masters, Romeo and Juliet, La Chatte, Le Train Bleu and Les Noces some of her best-known ballets. Wherever she went she seems to have been a wild, instantaneous success: she was beautiful, delicate, subject to ‘intense sensibility’, and constantly displaying the temperamental extremes. She attracted the protective adoration of a Lord R. who was of course, fascinating and fabulously rich, and kept laying yachts, Rolls Royces and finally his heart at her feet: they went for charming recuperating holidays together whenever she was not dancing…
But in spite of her childish manner of relating all this with the little golden trumpet (doubtless given her by Lord R.) which is constantly on the toot, one senses that a great deal of the applause she relays was really merited, the signs of a serious artist, the discipline, the devotion, and her appraisal of her contemporaries are what makes this little book worthwhile - one does laugh at her, but one admires her too, and it is pleasant to read about somebody who enjoyed such glittering as well as justified desserts.