The high-back soft sofa belonged to Isadora Duncan, the ‘great barefoot dancer’ and free dance matriarch. Sergei Esenin wrote about her: ‘She is a real Russian woman, more Russian than all of them there. She has our soul and she understood me very well…’. This sofa is bedecked with a decorative bronze overlay and swan-shaped elbows. Sometime the sofa was kept at the flat of Ilya Shneider, the manager of the Isadora Duncan school in Moscow, but before that it was located at the mansion of ballet dancer Alexandra Balashova, where Duncan was living during her stay in the USSR.
Shneider remembered one of evenings in this mansion: ‘I remember that at a much later date guests gathered in the Prechistenka mansion toward the evening. Poet Rukavishnikov wearing a long goatee beard was among them. Everybody were waiting for Lunacharsky. I was busy downstairs in the school and did not go upstairs, though Isadora twice sent somebody to call me there. At last somebody came for the third time: Isadora urgently called me to come there. Having entered the room of Isadora, I so such a situation: Esenin was sitting on the sofa with golden swans in a stiff and belligerent pose with the angry and resolute expression on his face. Rukavishnikov was quietly sitting hunched up near him. Sergei was tightly holding his goatee beard by gripping the whole of it in the fist. — Why did not you come? — whispered Isadora. — He is holding him so for twenty minutes. When I came to the sofa, Yesenin broke into a smile, let Rukavishnikov go, and greeted me’.
The Duncan Dance School was also located at the house in the Prechistenka. The first students were recruited in October 1921. The dance students studied foreign languages, gymnastics, singing, painting, and moulding. Sergei Yesenin also moved there after wedding.
‘At Prechistenka 20 a section of ancient Hellas was functioning, — remembered poet Emmanuil Herman. — Next morning after the wedding of Sergei and Isadora, while leaving her (now their) mansion, I run straight into a procession of children’s white chitons moving to the washroom. In the early morning light they seemed to be phantoms to me. В свете раннего утра они показались мне призраками. Sergei lived in this American-Hellenic world. It was hard not to smile at this thought’.
Shneider remembered one of evenings in this mansion: ‘I remember that at a much later date guests gathered in the Prechistenka mansion toward the evening. Poet Rukavishnikov wearing a long goatee beard was among them. Everybody were waiting for Lunacharsky. I was busy downstairs in the school and did not go upstairs, though Isadora twice sent somebody to call me there. At last somebody came for the third time: Isadora urgently called me to come there. Having entered the room of Isadora, I so such a situation: Esenin was sitting on the sofa with golden swans in a stiff and belligerent pose with the angry and resolute expression on his face. Rukavishnikov was quietly sitting hunched up near him. Sergei was tightly holding his goatee beard by gripping the whole of it in the fist. — Why did not you come? — whispered Isadora. — He is holding him so for twenty minutes. When I came to the sofa, Yesenin broke into a smile, let Rukavishnikov go, and greeted me’.
The Duncan Dance School was also located at the house in the Prechistenka. The first students were recruited in October 1921. The dance students studied foreign languages, gymnastics, singing, painting, and moulding. Sergei Yesenin also moved there after wedding.
‘At Prechistenka 20 a section of ancient Hellas was functioning, — remembered poet Emmanuil Herman. — Next morning after the wedding of Sergei and Isadora, while leaving her (now their) mansion, I run straight into a procession of children’s white chitons moving to the washroom. In the early morning light they seemed to be phantoms to me. В свете раннего утра они показались мне призраками. Sergei lived in this American-Hellenic world. It was hard not to smile at this thought’.
