Mirabel Cecil reviews Judith Mackrell’s biography of Lydia Lopokova .
Judith Mackrell describes her subject as ‘a star whom the world almost forgot’. Lydia herself lamented, on the death of Pavlova, that ‘a dancer can leave nothing behind her. Music will not help us to see her again and to feel what she could give us, nor the best words.’ And her own career vanished even more completely than most. That might be so, yet in this absorbing biography Lydia Lopokova comes alive again on every page.
Lopokova’s life fell into three phases: the first as an internationally acclaimed ballerina; the second as the devoted — and inspirational — wife of the great economist Maynard Keynes; and the third her peaceful twilight years of solitary widowhood. Born Lydia Lopukhov in St Petersburg in 1891 and trained at the renowned Imperial Theatre School, she soon came to the notice of Diaghilev (whom she nicknamed Big Serge) and was included in his corps de ballet in 1910 when she travelled with the Ballets Russes to Paris and from there toured extensively in America, both the North and the South. She was not to return to her native land for 15 years, long after the upheaval of the first world war, the Russian Revolution and her two marriages, one mistakenly, and bigamously, to the opportunistic business manager of the Ballets Russes, and the other, after her divorce, to Keynes.
When the company arrived in London, at the tail end of the war, in 1918, it was a sensation, and Lydia was its star, nowhere admired more than among the Bloomsbury coterie, and among them, no one was more smitten than Maynard Keynes. Their unlikely, idyllic union forms the heart of this book, as it did of both their lives.
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