Nina Tikhonova

Nina Tikhonova
Nina Tikhonova by Serge Choubine
Born	Nina Alexandrovna Tikhonova (1910-02-23)23 February 1910 Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Died	4 January 1995(1995-01-04) (aged 84) Paris, France

Nina Alexandrovna Tikhonova (23 February 1910 – 4 January 1995) was a Russian-French ballet dancer and dance teacher.

Early life

Nina Alexandrovna Tikhonova was born on 23 February 1910 in Saint Petersburg to Varvara Vassilievna Zubkova and writer and publisher Alexander Tikhonov (known as Serebov), who was a friend of writer Maxim Gorky. Her mother had been married previously to Anatole Tchaikevitch. Tikhonova's parents' marriage ended after Varvara became Gorky's mistress. During the Russian Revolution, the family was dispersed and the children of both marriages lived with their grandmother in Yekaterinburg, before later returning to Saint Petersburg. At the age of 11, Tikhonova and her elder stepbrother Andre Tchaikevitch fled Soviet Russia, taking refuge first in Berlin, then Paris.

Career

Tikhonova was trained in Paris by Russian dancers Olga Preobrajenska and Nikolai Legat. She made her debut at the age of fifteen with the Theatre Romantique Russe, which was founded in Berlin by Boris Romanov. In 1928, she joined Ida Rubinstein's avant-garde troupe of which Bronislava Nijinska was the principal choreographer. Tikhonova later said "Nijinska was a deity for me. Her talent was like no other. I was at Ida Rubinstein's house when she was choreographing there, I followed her when she founded her troupe. I danced in the Biches, and she created Variations for me, to the music of Beethoven".

In July 1931, Tikhonova performed the leading role of Alcine with the Ida Rubinstein Company at Covent Garden in a new version of Léonide Massine's ballet arranged to the music of Georges Auric. The season was positively received, with a correspondent from Le Figaro calling it a "truimph" and pressed for a return visit.

George Balanchine invited her to join his first company Les Ballets 1933, but she opted to join Nijinska's Ballets Russes instead, where she became a soloist. With the company, Tikhonova toured extensively in Italy and South America. Whilst in Italy, she reunited with Gorky, who drove her to Naples, and together they visited Pompeii and Capri. Afterwards, she later regretted not delivering a letter from her mother to him.

Between 1942 and 1944, she also danced with the Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo and thus escaping some of the harshness of the Nazi occupation of France.

After World War II, Tikhonova taught dance for free in orphanages for children whose parents had been killed during the war. After her retirement, Tikhonova created her own ballet school in Paris on Conservatoire Russe on the Quai de New York. She continued to teach there throughout the 1960s. Among her students were Béatrice Massin and Christine Bayle.

Later life and death

In 1971, Tikhonova visited Russia for the first time in 50 years. She returned to the city of Leningrad which she left as child, she stated in her memoir how she stood on a bridge beside the Moika canal and reminisced about her childhood writing "Some remarkable figure illumined my childhood, and followed my fate. It gave me everything that was good in my life, teaching me early to discern what was bad." During her visit, she visited Vaganova Choreographic Academy where she befriended artistic director Konstantin Sergeyev. There she watched Natalia Dudinskaya's class, which inspired Tikhonova to work on a book of memoirs. The memoir, The Girl in Blue was published in 1991 in France and Russia.

Tikhonova received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Tikhonova died on 4 January 1995 at her apartment in Paris, at the age of 84. She never married and lived all her life with her stepbrother Andre.