Lydia Lopokova - Biography

Biography

Lopokova was born into a Russian family in St. Petersburg. Her father, who was born a serf, worked as the chief usher at the Alexandrinsky Theatre; her mother was the descendant of a Scottish engineer. All the Lopukhov children became ballet dancers; one of them, Fyodor Lopukhov, was a chief choreographer for the Mariinsky Theatre from 1922 to 1935 and again from 1951 to 1956.

Lydia trained at the Imperial Ballet School, where she almost immediately became a star pupil. "She responded instinctively to the expressive choreography of Mikhail Fokine, his rebellion against the stiff academicism of the classical style, and her chance came when she was chosen to join the Ballets Russes... on their European tour in 1910.... Diaghilev knocked a year off her age and promoted her as a child star." She stayed with the ballet only briefly, knowing that she had little future in Russia ("she was the wrong size and shape for the grand roles and there were already plenty of prima ballerinas in St. Petersburg"), she accepted an American offer of ₤16,000 per month and after the summer tour left for the United States, where she remained for six years, enjoying tremendous success and legally changing her name to Lopokova in April 1914.

In 1915, while in New York, she had become engaged to the New York Morning Telegraph sportswriter Heywood Broun, later a member of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table coterie. In 1916 she broke off their engagement—or perhaps Broun did: according to Fred Lieb, another sportswriter and a friend of Broun's at the time, Broun "caught the enchanting Lydia Lapopka in the lap, so to speak, of her Russian director. ... walked east on one street, knocking over every garbage and trash can he passed. Then he walked west on the street giving it the same treatment. Just as he was getting really warmed up to the sport he ran into the hands of the law. Heywood spent the night in the hoosegow before friends bailed him out the next morning."

Actually, if Broun indeed caught her in flagrante, it was not in the lap of "her Russian director," Diaghilev, but the company's Italian business manager, Randolfo Barrocchi, whom she soon married. From her perspective, the union was ill-advised: "A 'glossy man of the world', he stole her earnings and — luckily — turned out to be a bigamist; meanwhile, in the midst of a wartime European tour, she had an on-off affair with Stravinsky, who was married."

In America she was basically a novelty act, and she rejoined Diaghilev in 1916, dancing with the Ballets Russes, and her former partner Vaslav Nijinsky, in New York and later in London. She first came to the attention of Londoners in The Good-humoured Ladies in 1918, and followed this with a raucous performance with Léonide Massine in the Can-Can of La Boutique fantasque. When her marriage to Barrocchi broke down in 1919, the dancer abruptly disappeared for a time, as she had done before in America.