Sadly enough, however, Tatyana Yuryevna Leskova is the last representative of her family, the great-granddaughter of the writer Nikolai Leskov. She lives in Rio de Janeiro and considers herself “Russian by heart”. This is how the Russian people were scattered by the revolution and the civil war of the early twentieth century.
Everything that happened to the Leskov family could not break them. Tatyana Yuryevna says that it all happened precisely because of Russian roots. And because she always remembered where her roots were.
Despite this, Tatyana Yuryevna is considered the founder of the Brazilian ballet - after all, it was she who staged amazing performances at the Opera House of Rio de Janeiro.
Biography
Tatyana Leskova was born in 1922 in Paris. Her father was a diplomat before the revolution, and her mother was a socialite, a baroness. After the Leskovs traveled to different countries in an attempt to return to Russia, they settled in Paris, where their daughter Tatyana was soon born.
Father in France worked as a translator, mother became a fashion model. Soon they divorced, and Tanya stayed with her mother. However, soon the mother died of tuberculosis, and Yuri Nikolaevich took care of his daughter.
Tanya grew sickly, she constantly had to be taken to the waters, to other hospitals. And then her father decided that she needed to be physically tempered. And since he himself was an inveterate balletomaniac, he enrolled his daughter in a ballet school.
And something extraordinary came out of this: the girl suddenly had a talent. And over time, she acquired excellent technique. On the recommendation of her teacher, she was accepted into the famous Ballets Russes troupe, which was the heir to the inimitable Diaghilev's Russian Ballet. Moreover, at that time Tatyana was the youngest member of the team.
Ballerina career
The ballet Ballets Russes was very popular in different countries, he toured a lot. And Tatiana was often in the first roles in productions. But soon the Second World War began, Europe plunged into hostilities, and ballet took almost the last place in the lives of people.
Then the Ballets Russes troupe migrated to Latin America: they performed in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and their work was a great success there.
Tatiana thought that she would spend some time on the American continent until the war was over. However, it turned out that she settled here forever.
In 1944, the Ballets Russes arrived in Rio de Janeiro, where Tatiana stayed, not only because the ballerina did not have a job in Europe - she was stopped by the love of a Brazilian. But the romance was short-lived.
Ballet dancers were welcome in Latin America, but all sorts of times happened. Sometimes they were not paid their salaries, and then they had to dance in nightclubs. It happened that the audience did not accept some kind of performance, and they had to redo it all over again.
Nevertheless, in 1948 Tatyana Leskova organized her own ballet troupe, and in 1950 she was invited to the Opera House of the Brazilian capital, where she first danced and then began to stage performances.
In 1960, she met with the choreographer Leonid Myasin, and he offered her cooperation, which was a great honor. She also knew the ballet stars Balanchin, Nuriev and others, and found a common language with everyone.
Later Leskova restored Massine's ballets together with his son and staged them in Brazil.
In the homeland of ancestors
During her long life, Tatyana Yurievna has traveled the entire globe as a dancer, and later as a choreographer. And only in 1985 she came to Russia - the homeland of her parents and her famous great-grandfather: she was invited to the Bolshoi Theater. And I have been to this theater more than once.
In 2001, Leskova came to the city of Oryol, the homeland of her great-grandfather, visited the house-museum of Nikolai Leskov. Russian roots nevertheless drew her to the Russian land.
