Lydia Lopokova

Lydia Lopokova, born Lidiya Vasilyevna Lopukhova in Saint Petersburg on 21 October 1891, was a Russian ballerina who performed across Europe, the United States, and on Broadway between 1912 and 1921. She died on 8 June 1981 at the Three Ways Nursing Home in Seaford, Sussex, at the age of 89. Her father held the position of chief usher at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, and her mother was descended from a Scottish engineer. Four of the Lopukhov siblings pursued careers in ballet, among them Fyodor Lopukhov, who served as chief choreographer for the Mariinsky Theatre during two separate tenures: 1922 to 1935 and again from 1951 to 1956.

Lopokova trained at the Imperial Ballet School in Saint Petersburg, where she quickly distinguished herself as a star pupil. As a child she performed before the Emperor and his family in productions including the Fairy Doll and The Nutcracker, and she was present during the events of Bloody Sunday. In 1910 she joined the Ballets Russes on their European tour, with Sergei Diaghilev promoting her as a child star, having reduced her stated age by a year. She accepted an American engagement paying 18,000 francs per month, sixty times her Russian earnings, and departed for the United States, where she remained for five years. In April 1914 she legally changed her surname to Lopokova.

During her years in New York, Lopokova became engaged in 1915 to Heywood Broun, a sportswriter for the New York Morning Telegraph who later became associated with the Algonquin Round Table. When the Ballets Russes arrived in the United States in 1916, she ended the engagement and rejoined the company, subsequently marrying its Italian business manager, Randolfo Barrocchi. She danced regularly with the troupe during this period, including alongside her former partner Vaslav Nijinsky. Her Broadway appearances during these years included productions such as Fads and Fancies, The Antick, The Age of Reason, Just Herself, and The Rose Girl, with her Broadway career spanning from 1912 to 1921.

Lopokova's London profile rose considerably when she appeared in The Good-Humoured Ladies in 1918, followed by her performance with Léonide Massine in the Can-Can sequence of La Boutique fantasque. When her marriage to Barrocchi broke down in 1919, she disappeared from public view for a period, as she had done previously in America. She also maintained an intermittent affair with Igor Stravinsky during these years. In 1921, Diaghilev mounted a production of The Sleeping Beauty in which Lopokova danced both the Lilac Fairy and Princess Aurora, and it was during this run that the economist John Maynard Keynes became captivated by her performances, attending nightly from the stalls. The two became lovers shortly thereafter and married in 1925, once her divorce from Barrocchi had been finalized.

Keynes's circle, centered on the Bloomsbury group and including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Lytton Strachey, was resistant to Lopokova for years following the marriage. E. M. Forster later acknowledged this attitude, writing that the group had consistently underestimated her. Outside that circle, however, she cultivated friendships with T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, and Pablo Picasso, who drew her on multiple occasions. The couple honeymooned in Sussex in 1925, during which the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein paid them a brief visit. Lopokova and Keynes hoped to have children but did not.

From 1928, Lopokova appeared on stage in London and Cambridge and took on broadcasting work for the BBC as both a presenter and an actress, including a reading of "The Red Shoes" in 1935, which she later reprised for BBC television. In 1933 she danced her final ballet role, performing as Swanhilda in Coppélia for the Vic-Wells Ballet. That same year, Boris Anrep depicted her as Terpsichore, the muse of dancing, in his mosaic The Awakening of the Muses at the National Gallery, London. She was a partner to Keynes in founding the Cambridge Arts Theatre and played an active role in the Camargo Society, which contributed to the establishment of a national ballet company, and she advised Keynes on the constitution for the Arts Council. Following his heart attack in 1937, Lopokova devoted herself to managing his health, supervising his diet and rest.

After Keynes's death in 1946, Lopokova withdrew from public life and spent her remaining decades at Tilton House in Sussex. She had also been known by the title Baroness Keynes and as Lady Keynes following her marriage. Virginia Woolf drew on Lopokova as a partial basis for the character of Rezia in Mrs Dalloway. Two biographies document her life: Lydia Lopokova by Milo Keynes, published by St. Martin's Press in 1983, and Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes by Judith Mackrell, published by Weidenfeld in 2008.