Flashback: Olga Spessivtseva

On 25 October 1934 an exceptionally talented but troubled woman stepped onto the platform at Sydney’s Central Railway Station. It was unusually cold that month for a city on the fringe of summer and Olga Spessivtseva felt the chill of a southerly wind bite into her fragile body. The tiny ballerina told the press on her arrival in the city: “I am not much weight, eh?”

She wore a severely cut wool flannel suit and around her shoulders a fox stole, complete with bushy tail, head, and paws. Waiting on the platform was the photographer Sam Hood who was then working for the Labor Daily. He coaxed a small smile from the Russian star.

Spessivtseva was visiting Australia as the principal ballerina of the Dandre-Levitoff Russian Ballet, formed by Victor Dandre (the de facto husband of Anna Pavlova) and the impresario Alexander Levitoff. The two men had assembled a troupe of 36 dancers for a tour of South Africa, followed by performances in South-East Asia, and Australia where they performed in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne before a final season in Perth, January 1935.

Spessivtseva and her dance partner, Anatole Vilzak, both formerly with the Maryinsky Ballet in St Petersburg and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, joined the Dandre-Levitoff company after the South African leg of the tour. The troupe sailed from Bali to Brisbane on the SS Nieuw Holland.

On the voyage to Brisbane Spessivtseva appeared to enjoy the role of the ship’s celebrity, dressing for dinner each evening in one of her Parisian evening gowns created for her by the houses of Lanvin and Chanel. But she was also grieving privately for her past life as a ballerina at the Paris Opéra Ballet and worried about her reception in Australia where she feared she would be compared, unfavourably, with Pavlova who had last toured the country in 1929.

Looking at the photos taken of Spessivtseva by Sam Hood, and with 20/20 vision into the past, one can see a sadness in her demeanour, perhaps a signal of her inner turmoil that led to an emotional breakdown during the four-week Sydney season. Early in December The Argus in Melbourne reported she had sprained her ankle, and that she was “resting” in Sydney, adding “she may not be able to appear again for several weeks” and that Natasha Bojkovich had danced in Spessivtseva’s place from 24 to 28 November.

The “rest” was short-lived. Her biographer Anton Dolin wrote that she recuperated for some weeks in the Blue Mountains but, as the dancer Algeranoff told his mother in a letter, when the company began its Melbourne season on 1 December Spessivtseva was already on board a ship bound for Europe.

Valerie Lawson is the Nancy Keesing Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales

Top image: Olga Spessivtseva at Central Railway Station, Sydney, 25 October 1934.

Bottom image: A 14-year-old Juliana Enakieva, in a white hat, is at the right of the back row. Olga Spessivtseva is fifth from the right in the second to back row. Anatole Vilzak is second on the left in the second row, and Natasha Bojkovich is behind his shoulder, wearing a dark hat and jacket. Paul Petroff, in a dark jacket, and fair-haired Algeranoff (whose real name was Harcourt Algeranon Leighton Essex) are at the right hand side of the second row. Upstairs at the Theatre Royal, Sydney, 25 October 1934. Photography by Sam Hood.
Images courtesy the State Library of NSW, Mitchell Library, Hood II Collection, ON 204/Box 67