Though her novel is a work of fiction, Adrienne Sharp’s protagonist Mathilde Kschessinska was a real person. She really was a prima ballerina assoluta, and Nikolai Romanov, ill-fated last czar of Imperial Russia, was indeed her lover. Certainly the bones of Kschessinska’s life, set against the backdrop of a devastatingly romantic era, are ripe for a riveting historical tale. Despite a misleadingly unremarkable title, Sharp brings her protagonist to life in “The True Memoirs of Little K.”
Our narrator, a 99-year-old Kschessinska, relates her life in retrospect, as if transcribing her memoir. She tells readers about her rise to highest-ranking female ballet dancer, her never wavering devotion to the tsarevich in an affair that could not go on, and her role within a crumbling family and empire. If the character’s point of view is one-sided, it’s supposed to be.
With beautifully detailed, often conversational, language, Sharp, describes a lost world, pre-revolution Saint Petersburg: “Hundreds of troikas and carriages would clot the palace square, pulling close to the braziers, flames rising like red fountain spray to the black sky.” Her words on ballet, a wholly visual art form, are equally apt.
