Chapter One Appearance of Isadora Summer of 1921 July 1 Theater of the RSFSR First gave the fiftieth performance of the play "Mystery Buff" (which was in Russian). The Pravda newspaper reported: “At the end of the jubilee performance, the heroes of labor will be honored,

Isadora Duncan is an exceptional phenomenon in the history of culture. After it, only legends and an army of imitators remained. Descendants can only believe that she was brilliant. Her dance was a reflection of her nature, which surprisingly combined the thirst for love and the desire for freedom, loyalty to herself and the need for renewal. Her personal life was the brightest firework of passions, and bitterness and pain from irreparable loss constantly lived in her heart.

Childhood, adolescence, youth

Deirdre's daughter

During the next performance, she faints, which deprives Gordon of financing his next project. They soon divorce.

Son Patrick

Duncan categorically refused to marry Singer, because she valued her independence very much. "You can't buy me," she declared and continued to flirt with other men.

Tragedy

Isadora moved with her children to a quiet place in Versailles, not far from Paris. One day, while she was with her children in the capital, she had urgent business. Duncan had to send the children and the governess to Versailles with a chauffeur. On the way, the car broke down - the engine stalled. The driver left the car to inspect it and find out the cause of the breakdown. The car moved abruptly, the doors jammed. The car fell into the Seine. Children fell victim to a car accident along with a nanny.

Life after loss

Irma Duncan

After Isadora left for Europe in 1924, Irma continued to lead a dance school in Russia. She became the wife of journalist I.I. Schneider. After the death of Isadora, Irma divorced her husband. In 1929, she opened a dance school in New York, which she directed for many years. The Moscow dance school ceased to exist in 1949. Irma became engaged in painting and literature, became the wife of the lawyer Sherman Rogers. She wrote books on Isadora's dance technique and teaching methods. In 1977 Irma Duncan died in California at the age of 80.

The biographers of the dancer are still arguing today - but

Dora Angela Duncan was born in 1877 in San Francisco, USA. Her father was a banker, but immediately after the birth of Dora, he went bankrupt, and the family became impoverished. The Duncan children had to grow up early and start working. From the age of ten, after dropping out of school, Dora taught the children of the neighborhood to dance, and as a teenager, a thirst for travel led her first to Chicago and then to New York. There she performed in various nightclubs, soon becoming disillusioned with classical ballet.

Europe

Feeling unrecognized in America, the young Dora went to London in 1898, where she danced in the living rooms of the aristocrats there. Then, by the will of fate, she ended up in Greece and became interested in ancient art. Her dance numbers, performed barefoot and in a Greek chiton, fascinated the audience, and in subsequent years she traveled with performances almost all of Europe. Isadora Duncan visited Russia several times on tour, where she gained a huge number of admirers and students and won the heart of K. Stanislavsky himself.

Gordon Craig

Isadora Duncan's first serious romance happened when she was 27 years old. Her chosen one was the famous theater director Edward Gordon Craig. At first, the couple were very happy, and they had a daughter. However, over time, Craig increasingly began to express dissatisfaction with Isadora's dancing career, suggesting that she leave the stage and become an ordinary housewife. Perhaps the reason for this was that his beloved was doing much better than Craig himself. At that time, the name of Isadora Duncan was already on the lips of all of Europe, she was called nothing more than a “brilliant sandal”, and her sincere manner of expressing her momentary feelings and desires in dance became for many of her followers a new benchmark in dance art. Of course, the freedom-loving and artistic Duncan had completely different plans, and the union broke up.

Singer

To forget the insults caused to her by her former lover, Dora was helped by a new love relationship with a person far from the world of art.

The son of the famous inventor of sewing machines Paris Eugene Singer and the famous artist met in Paris, where they then lived together. The offspring of one of the richest families in Europe surrounded his beloved woman with luxury, but was extremely jealous. They had a son, and Singer proposed to Isadora to marry. However, she chose a career and freedom, and one day one of the constant quarrels about frank dancing and flirting with other men ended for the couple in parting.

Then Isadora left with performances in Russia, and the children remained in Paris. But these tours did not bring joy to the dancer, she had nightmares all the time, and the feeling of imminent loss did not leave. Exhausted from experiences, Duncan arrived in Paris, where the family was reunited. Warmth and mutual affection reappeared in the relationship. However, the idyll was soon broken, and the very nightmarish visions that haunted the actress in Russia came true. One day, returning from a walk, Isadora's children tragically died. She fell into apathy and even planned to commit suicide.

Yesenin, Moscow

Work helped Isadora return to normal life. In 1921, at the suggestion and with the support of the leadership of the RSFSR, she opened her own children's dance school in Moscow. Active and purposeful, Duncan was inspired and made grandiose plans for the future.

Soon fate brought her to Sergei Yesenin, and a short, but very difficult relationship began between the 43-year-old artist and the 28-year-old poet. Surprisingly quickly, the couple began to live together, and when Isadora decided to go on tour with Yesenin in 1922, they got married. Their performances in Europe and the USA were not crowned with great success. The audience greeted Duncan coldly, and Yesenin was everywhere perceived as the husband of a famous wife. The couple often quarreled, and upon returning to Russia, Isadora again went on tour, and Yesenin remained in Moscow. Soon he sent her a telegram stating that he fell in love with another and was insanely happy. Then Duncan finally left Russia and moved to Paris.

Death, Paris

There she met her last love, the young pianist Viktor Serov, who had emigrated from the USSR and was almost half her age. Having experienced many losses and disappointments, the already middle-aged and tired Isadora Duncan felt the approach of old age, plagued her young lover with jealousy and suffered from melancholy and depression. She could no longer dance, her former grace disappeared, and the dance schools that she opened did not exist for long and were closed due to lack of funds. She even once again decided on a voluntary departure from life, but fate decreed in its own way. On September 14, 1927, the great dancer went for a walk in an open car with a random acquaintance. Around her neck she tied her favorite scarlet scarf, which, wrapped around the wheel, strangled Isadora Duncan. Help her, unfortunately, failed, she died instantly.

The biography of this famous woman was full of ups and downs, her manner of dancing gave impetus to the development of modern dance, her personal life is associated with the names of famous men of her time, and her death caused a lot of prejudice and speculation.

Isadora Duncan is an American dancer, the founder of free dance, the wife of a Russian poet.

Isadora Duncan was born on May 26, 1877 in San Francisco. Born Dora Angela was the youngest of four children of Joseph Charles Duncan (1819-1898), banker, mining engineer and noted art connoisseur, and Mary Isadora Gray (1849-1922). Soon after the birth of Isadora, the head of the family went bankrupt, and the family lived for some time in extreme poverty.

Duncan's parents divorced when she was less than a year old. The mother moved with the children to Auckland and got a job as a seamstress and piano teacher. There was little money in the family, and soon young Isadora dropped out of school in order to earn dancing lessons for local children with her brothers and sisters.

Dancing

Isadora from childhood perceived dancing differently than other children - the girl "followed her imagination and improvised, dancing as she pleases." Dreams of a big stage led Duncan to Chicago, where she unsuccessfully went to auditions in various theaters, and then to New York, where in 1896 the girl got a job in the theater of the famous critic and playwright John Augustine Daly.

In New York, the girl took lessons from the famous ballerina Marie Bonfanti for some time, but, quickly disillusioned with ballet and feeling underestimated in America, Isadora moved to London in 1898. In the British capital, Isadora began performing in rich houses - good earnings allowed the dancer to rent a studio for classes.

From London, the girl went to Paris, where her fateful meeting with Loie Fuller took place. Loi and Isadora had similar views on dance, seeing it as a natural movement of the body, and not a rigid system of practiced movements, as in ballet. In 1902, Fuller and Duncan went on a dance tour of European countries.

For many years of her life, Duncan traveled with performances in Europe and America, although she was not at all delighted with tours, contracts and other fuss - Duncan believed that this distracted her from her true mission: teaching young dancers and creating something beautiful. In 1904, Isadora opened her first dance school in Germany and then another in Paris, but it was soon closed due to the outbreak of the First World War.

Isadora's popularity in the early 20th century is undeniable. The newspapers wrote that Duncan's dance defined the power of progress, change, abstraction and liberation, and her photos, which show the "evolutionary development of dance", each movement of which is born from the previous one in an organic sequence, became famous all over the world.

In June 1912, the French fashion designer Paul Poiret hosted one of the most famous evenings of "La fête de Bacchus" (a recreation of the "bacchanalia" of Louis XIV at Versailles) in a posh mansion in the north of France. Isadora Duncan, dressed in a Greek evening dress tailored by Poiret, danced on the tables among 300 guests who had managed to drink 900 bottles of champagne in a few hours.

After another tour of the United States in 1915, Isadora was supposed to sail back to Europe - the choice fell on the luxurious Lusitania liner, but due to a quarrel with creditors who threatened not to let the girl out of the country until she paid $ 12,000, Duncan ended up I had to board another ship. The Lusitania, torpedoed by a German submarine, sank off the coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 people.

In 1921, Duncan's political sympathies brought the dancer to the Soviet Union. In Moscow, People's Commissar of Education of the RSFSR A.V. Lunacharsky invited the American to open a dance school, promising financial support. However, in the end, Isadora paid most of the costs of maintaining the school from her own money, while experiencing hunger and domestic inconveniences.

The Moscow school grew rapidly and gained popularity. The first performance of the students of the institution took place in 1921 on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater in honor of the anniversary of the October Revolution. Isadora, together with the students, performed a dance program, which, among others, included the Varshavyanka dance to the tune of a Polish revolutionary song. The program, during which the revolutionary banner was picked up from the hands of the fallen fighters by fighters full of strength, was a success with the audience.

However, not everyone was impressed. Some were puzzled that this "older woman" would risk going on stage too naked. Short (168 cm), with flabby full thighs and no longer so elastic bust, Duncan could not be as light and graceful as in her youth - the years took their toll.

The dancer lived in Soviet Russia for 3 years, but various troubles forced Isadora to leave the country, leaving the management of the school to one of her students, Irma.

Personal life

In her professional and personal life, Isadora violated all traditional foundations. She was bisexual, an atheist, and a real revolutionary: during her last tour of the United States, Isadora began waving a red scarf over her head, shouting: “It's red! And so am I!"

Duncan gave birth to two children out of wedlock - daughter Derree Beatrice (born 1906) with theater director Gordon Craig and son Patrick August (born 1910) with Paris Singer, one of the sons of Swiss magnate Isaac Singer. Isadora's children died in 1913: the car in which the kids were with their nanny crashed into the Seine at full speed.

After the death of the children, Duncan fell into a deep depression. Her brother and sister decided to take Isadora to Corfu for a few weeks, where the American became friends with the young Italian feminist Lina Poletti. The warm relationship of the girls caused a lot of gossip, but there is no evidence that the ladies were in a romantic relationship.

In his autobiography, My Life. My Love”, published in 1927, Duncan told how, out of a desperate desire to have another child, she begged a young Italian stranger - the sculptor Romano Romanelli - to enter into an intimate relationship with her. As a result, Duncan became pregnant by Romanelli and gave birth to a son on August 13, 1914, who died shortly after childbirth.

In 1917, Isadora adopted six of her wards, Anna, Maria Theresa, Irma, Liesel, Gretel and Erica, whom she taught while still at school in Germany. The team of young talented dancers was nicknamed "Isadorables" (a pun on the name of Isadora and "adorables" ("charming").

After graduating from the school, which was later taught by Isadora's sister Elizabeth (Duncan was constantly on the road), the girls began to perform with Duncan, and then separately, having a huge success with the public. A few years later, the team broke up - each girl went her own way. Erica was the only one of the six girls who did not connect her future life with dancing.

In 1921, in Moscow, Duncan met the poet Sergei Yesenin, who was 18 years her junior. In May 1922, Yesenin and Duncan became husband and wife. The dancer accepted Soviet citizenship. For more than a year, the poet accompanied Duncan on her tour of Europe and the United States, not embarrassed to spend her money on prestigious housing, expensive clothes and gifts for relatives. At the same time, Yesenin experienced a strong longing for Russia, which he indicated in his letters to friends.

After two years of communication without knowledge of languages ​​(Isadora knew hardly more than 30 words in Russian, and Yesenin even less in English), friction began between the spouses. In May 1923, the poet left Duncan and returned to his homeland.

There are no direct dedications to Isadora in Yesenin's poems, but the image of Duncan can be clearly seen in the poem "The Black Man". The poem “Let you be drunk by others ..” is dedicated to the actress Augusta Miklashevskaya, although Duncan claimed that the poet dedicated these lines to her.

Later, Duncan started an affair with the American poetess Mercedes de Acosta - they learned about this relationship from the letters that the girls wrote to each other. In one of them, Duncan confessed:

“Mercedes, lead me with your strong little hands, and I will follow you - to the top of the mountain. To the edge of the world. Wherever you wish."

Death

In her last years, Duncan performed little, accumulated many debts, and was known for scandalous intimate stories and a love of drinking.

On the night of September 14, 1927, in Nice, Isadora left her friend Mary Desty (the mother of Preston Sturges, the director of the film "Sullivan's Wanderings") and got into the car "Amilcar" to the Franco-Italian mechanic Benoit Falcetto, with whom the American was probably had a romantic relationship.

When the car started off abruptly, the wind lifted the edges of the dancer's long, hand-painted silk scarf into the air and lowered it over the side of the car. The scarf immediately got tangled in the spokes of the wheel, the woman was pressed into the side of the car. Duncan died instantly. The body was cremated; the urn with the ashes was placed in the columbarium at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. The car that killed the American dancer was sold for a huge sum at that time - 200,000 francs.

Isadora Duncan died 90 years ago on the Promenade des Anglais

The name of this dancer is known to almost every Russian-speaking person who is at least a little familiar with the work of Sergei Yesenin. And, of course, everyone knows the story of the tragic death of Isadora in a car. Today, September 14, marks 90 years since the day she got into the ill-fated convertible and drove to the Promenade.

Successful in career and unhappy in personal life

Isadora was born in San Francisco in 1878. At the age of 13, she left school and took up exclusively music and dancing. Five years later, the girl surprised the Chicago audience. She moved barefoot and in a Greek chiton, which shocked the conservative public. But later her dance revolutionized the world of choreography, and Isadora herself became an outstanding artist of that era.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Duncan moved to Europe, where she performed very successfully. In 1904, she gave birth to a daughter by her lover, modernist theater director Edward Gordon Craig. The life of the dancer did not work out with him. And soon she met Paris Eugene Singer. The couple lived in Beaulieu-sur-mer, on the Cape Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and in Paris. In 1910, Isadora gave Singer a son. But, unfortunately, this union also broke up.

Three years after the birth of his son, tragedy struck in Paris. The car, in which there were two children of Isadora and a nanny, brakes failed. The car fell into the Seine, and the passengers could not get out. Only the driver survived. After the grief that befell her, Isadora devoted herself completely to work. She has toured all over the world and taught.

"He is red! And me too!"

In 1921, Duncan was invited to the Soviet Union to create her own dance school. Fascinated by the October Revolution, Isadora went to Russia without hesitation, where she met Sergei Yesenin. Their romance broke out from the first meeting, despite the 18-year age difference. Six months later they lived together, and in 1922 they got married. A little later, the dancer went on tour to the United States, Yesenin went with her. In America, Duncan constantly wore a red scarf, chanting: “It's red! And me too!".

This trip was the beginning of the end of a beautiful romance. Quarrels, drunkenness, assault filled their relationship, leaving insane passion and love in the past. Duncan forgave Sergey for all the tricks, but his feelings irrevocably cooled. No longer embarrassed, he said in front of everyone: “Here you are! Sticky like molasses!”

In 1923, the couple returned to Moscow, and a month later Duncan left the Soviet Union forever and alone. She arrived in Nice, where a telegram immediately arrived: “I love another. Married. Happy. Yesenin.

In the heart of the Côte d'Azur, she began to rebuild her life. Duncan opened a dance school on California Avenue, where she taught successfully. According to local newspapers, it was quite difficult to get into her class, there was no end to those who wanted to. Duncan herself settled in a villa near the school. Like any woman, Isadora loved beautiful things. So, the dancer was not indifferent to expensive outfits, jewelry and cars. In Nice, she became a client of Benoît Falchetto, who not only serviced her transport, but also sold interesting cars.

Death on the Prom

September 14, 1927 in Nice was a warm sunny day. Isadora went out into the yard to inspect the Amilcar, a small convertible that mechanic Benoît Falchetto had brought to her house. Her eyes lit up, she certainly wanted to ride on it. Dressed in a light dress and tied with a long white scarf, the 50-year-old dancer sat in the passenger seat. The driver drove to the Promenade des Anglais, where Isadora saw her friends. She waved her scarf at them and shouted "I'm flying to glory!" Then something terrible happened. Not having passed even twenty meters, Isadora was strangled by this very scarf. Its edges got into the spokes of the wheel. Doctors called to the scene could only ascertain death.

Nice, like the rest of the Côte d'Azur, keeps a lot of stories in its streets, houses and squares. Often walking along them, we do not notice and do not hear the echo of the distant past. But if we take a closer look, we will see that on some buildings there are plaques in memory of the people who made the history of our city. For example, if you stop at house number 239 on the Promenade des Anglais, then remember that it was here that Isadora “flew to glory”, and a little further there will be a street named after the famous dancer.

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