Lydia Lopokova
Lydia Vasilyevna Lopokova, Baroness Keynes of Tilton (
October 21,
1892-
June 8,
1981; ) was a famous
Russian
ballerina dancer during the early 20th-century. She is known also as Lady Keynes, the wife of the
economist,
John Maynard Keynes.
Lopokova was born in
St. Petersburg, where her father was a theatre usher. All his four children became ballet dancers, and one of them,
Fyodor Lopukhov, was a chief choreographer of
Mariinsky Theatre in 1922-1935 and 1951-1956.
Lydia trained at the
Imperial Ballet School. She left Russia in 1910, joining the
Diaghilev ballet (the
Ballets Russes) for the first time. She stayed with the ballet only briefly, however, leaving for the United States after the summer tour, where she remained for six years. She rejoined Diaghilev in 1916, dancing with the Ballets Russes, and her former partner
Vaslav Nijinsky, in
New York and later in
London. She first came to the attention of Londoners in 'The Good-humoured Ladies' in 1918, and followed this with a raucous performance with
Leonide Massine in the
Can-Can of
La Boutique Fantasque.
When her marriage to the company's business manager,
Randolfo Barrochi, broke down in 1919, the dancer abruptly disappeared, but she decided to rejoin the Diaghilev for the second time in 1921, when she danced the Lilac Fairy and Princess Aurora in 'The Sleeping Princess'. During these years she became a friend of
Stravinsky, and of
Picasso, who drew her many times.
In
London she came to know her future husband John Maynard Keynes. They married in 1925, once her divorce to Barrochi had been obtained. Although Keynes was quite involved in the
Bloomsbury set, most other
bloomsberries, like
Virginia Woolf and
Lytton Strachey, never really accepted Lydia as one of their group, although she was friends with
T. S. Eliot.
[Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004] Lopokova is represented as
Terpsichore, the muse of dancing, in
The Awakening of the Muses, a mosaic at the National Gallery, London, laid by
Boris Anrep in 1933.
Besides being involved in the early days of English ballet, Lydia Lopokova appeared on the stage in
London and
Cambridge from 1928, and broadcast on the
BBC. She lived with Keynes in
London,
Cambridge and
Sussex until his death in 1946, and continued to live in the same places thereafter, although she largely disappeared from public view. Lydia Lopokova Keynes died in 1981, aged eighty-eight.
Her self-titled biography was written by her husband's nephew
Milo Keynes.
