Video: Red Giselle: How fate played a cruel joke with Mariinsky star Olga Spesivtseva
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The name of Olga Spesivtseva is one of the most significant in the history of Russian ballet at the beginning of the 20th century. Refined and graceful, she shone on the stage of the Mariinsky Theater, capturing the eyes of the audience. Prima masterfully performed the main roles in the ballets Swan Lake and Giselle, Le Corsaire and La Bayadère. In the 1910s, it seemed that a great future awaited her, but fate was cruel: Olga had to fight against tuberculosis, painful emigration abroad, persecution by her husband … And the last years of her life, the legendary dancer spent in a psychiatric clinic.
Olga Spesivtseva, who performed under the creative pseudonym Olga Spesiva, went down in the history of world ballet thanks to her masterful performance of the role of Giselle. Abroad, the emigrant artist who fled from the USSR was called “Red Giselle”. This role became significant for the fate of the artist: in her youth, she studied for a long time and persistently the manifestations of insanity in patients of mental hospitals. The young ballerina looked at the horrifying pictures and tried to recreate exactly the manner of behavior of the insane. Another important experience for her was a visit to the crematorium, where she saw how the bodies of the dead were burned. She felt the need for this kind of emotion, and thanks to this she was able to embody on stage the image of a girl who lost her mind due to the betrayal of her lover.
Serious physical exertion, mental ordeal, emotional exhaustion - all this negatively affected Olga's health. In the 1920s, she first contracted tuberculosis, but was able to recover from this disease and return to the stage after a couple of years. During the revolution, Spesivtseva was in the USSR, but the thought of emigration did not leave her. She experienced panic attacks and was afraid of persecution. Olga married an influential Soviet party worker Boris Kaplun, he helped her and her mother to leave for France. Olga was afraid of her husband, it seemed to her that he was watching her, plotting murder.
During the years of emigration, only work saved. Spesivtseva was never vain, she gave all of herself to the dance, and during performances she did not crave fame, she was seduced by the very opportunity to realize her feelings in movements, convey the mood, throw out emotions. Touring actively in the 1920s and 1930s, she performed in Paris, Buenos Aires, Sydney and other major cities of the world.
When mental health deteriorated, Olga Spesivtseva left for New York. There, during one of the seizures, the doctors hospitalized her, accepting the confession that she was a prima ballerina for the fiction of a crazy woman. Spesivtseva was treated with electrical therapy, fortunately she managed to avoid a lobotomy. It took Olga 10 years for a partial recovery, she recovered from mental disorders, but could not return to the stage.
At the end of her life, Olga Spesivtseva lived in complete oblivion in a boarding school organized by Alexandra Tolstaya, the daughter of the great Russian writer. Olga lived a long life, she died at the age of 96 and was buried in New York at the large Russian Orthodox cemetery Novo-Diveevo. Remembering this charming ballerina, Sergei Diaghilev liked to compare her with Anna Pavlova, saying that both of them are two halves of one apples. At the same time, Olga was for him that half that faces the sun.
Olga Spesivtseva and Anna Pavlova - two prima, without which the Russian ballet of the first half of the twentieth century is unthinkable.
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