Five novels and one marriage of Isadora Duncan: why the famous dancer got married only at 45 years old
Five novels and one marriage of Isadora Duncan: why the famous dancer got married only at 45 years old

Video: Five novels and one marriage of Isadora Duncan: why the famous dancer got married only at 45 years old

Video: Five novels and one marriage of Isadora Duncan: why the famous dancer got married only at 45 years old
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The famous dancer Isadora Duncan
The famous dancer Isadora Duncan

May 27 marks the 140th anniversary of the birth of the famous dancer, queen of the modern dance, wife of Sergei Yesenin Isadora Duncan … Fate gave her only 50 years, she had many novels, but she married only once - for Sergei Yesenin. Biographers find various reasons for this - from fatal bad luck to a categorical rejection of traditional family relationships. Be that as it may, she never managed to find the other half, and all her life one of the most desirable women felt very lonely.

Isadora Duncan
Isadora Duncan

She said: "Dance and Love is my life." Contemporaries argued that love "gave her the strength to live, and killed." And although there was a lot of love in her life, this did not bring her happiness. Isadora Duncan's parents divorced when she was a nursing child, and the mother raised four children alone. Mary Dora was a music teacher. “It was her own beautiful and restless spirit that made us artists,” said Isadora Duncan. It is possible that the example of her parents aroused her antipathy to marriage since childhood. “All my childhood, it seemed, passed under the dark shadow of a mysterious father, about whom no one spoke, and the terrible word“divorce”was imprinted on the sensitive subcortex of my mind,” she said.

The famous dancer Isadora Duncan
The famous dancer Isadora Duncan

According to Isadora herself, at the age of 12 she decided that she would fight "against marriage, for the release of a woman, for the right of every woman to have a child or several children whenever she wants it." And she tested these principles on her own experience. But in fact, the dancer did not get married not because of her convictions, but rather because none of her chosen ones was ready to create a family. She confessed: “I have always remained faithful to my beloved and probably would not have left any of them if they had remained faithful to me. Having fallen in love with them once, I love them now and forever."

Isadora Duncan
Isadora Duncan

At the age of 18, she first wanted to get married. Pole Ivan Mirotsky became one of the first admirers of her talent. Later, the dancer recalled: “He is one of the whole crowd, in front of which I danced in those days, he understood my dances and my work … passion that I instilled in Mirotsky. This man of about forty-five fell madly, madly in love with the naive innocent girl, what I was then … I have not yet fully taken up arms to defend the free love for which I later fought. At that time, Isadora was ready to get married, but it suddenly turned out that her chosen one was already married. With a broken heart, the dancer left Chicago for London, where her rapid career began.

Oscar Berezhi
Oscar Berezhi

In 1902, the first recital of 25-year-old Isadora Duncan took place in Budapest. There she met 27-year-old Hungarian actor Oskar Berezhi, who became her first man. He proposed to her, they were even engaged, but a week before the wedding, he was offered to shoot in Madrid, and he preferred a career to marriage, terminating the engagement. After that, Isadora vowed to herself "never to leave art for the sake of love."

Gordon Craig and Isadora Duncan
Gordon Craig and Isadora Duncan
Gordon Craig and Isadora Duncan
Gordon Craig and Isadora Duncan

4 years later, the dancer met theater director Gordon Craig. They began an affair, Isadora had a daughter, Dirdre, after which she demanded that her chosen one marry her. But he refused and left her, and soon married his old girlfriend. This union also fell apart because Craig wanted the dancer to leave her artistic career. “To live with him meant to renounce your art, from your personality, moreover, perhaps, from life itself and reason. To live without him meant to be in a state of constant despondency, tormented by jealousy, for which, alas, I seemed to have every reason."

Paris Eugene Singer
Paris Eugene Singer

Isadora Duncan has always dreamed of her own dance school for children, and her admirer, Paris Eugene Singer, the son of a famous sewing machine manufacturer, one of the richest people in Europe, helped her to fulfill her dream. They had a son, Patrick, and the dancer felt absolutely happy: “After all, children, more than my art, a thousand times more than the love of any man, filled and crowned my life with happiness,” she admitted. But soon 6-year-old Deirdre and 3-year-old Patrick died after drowning in a car that fell in the Seine, and Paris Singer left her.

Isadora Duncan and Sergey Yesenin
Isadora Duncan and Sergey Yesenin
Isadora Duncan and her first and only husband Sergei Yesenin
Isadora Duncan and her first and only husband Sergei Yesenin

After the death of the children, the dancer found solace in the arms of a young Italian sculptor, she even gave birth to a child, but the boy lived only a few days. After that, she left for Russia in 1921 and there she met the poet Sergei Yesenin, who soon became her first husband. At that time, Isadora was almost 45 years old. And this marriage did not bring her happiness, two years later they parted. At the end of 1925 Yesenin died, and after him, a year and a half later, Isadora Duncan passed away.

Isadora Duncan and her first and only husband Sergei Yesenin
Isadora Duncan and her first and only husband Sergei Yesenin
The famous dancer Isadora Duncan
The famous dancer Isadora Duncan

A friend of the dancer said that "a curse seemed to weigh on her love, all her novels ended in disaster." Perhaps there was some truth in this: was Isadora Duncan really a family curse?

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