Tamara Platonovna Karsavina (10 March 1885 – 26 May 1978) was a famous
Russian ballerina, renowned for her beauty, who was most noted as a Principal Artist of the
Imperial Russian Ballet and later the
Ballets Russes of
Serge Diaghilev. After settling in
England, she began teaching ballet professionally and would become recognised as one of the founders of modern British ballet. She assisted in the establishment of
The Royal Ballet and was a founder member of the
Royal Academy of Dance, which is now the world's largest dance teaching organisation.
Karsavina was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, the daughter of the dancer Platon Karsavin. Stunningly beautiful and talented from an early age, Karsavina quickly moved through the ranks of professional ballet. After graduating from the Imperial Ballet School, she was a leading ballerina of Tsar's Imperial Ballet, dancing the whole of the Marius Petipa repertory. Her most famous roles were Lise in La Fille Mal Gardée, Medora in Le Corsaire, and the Tsar Maiden in The Little Humpbacked Horse. She was the first ballerina to dance in the so-called Le Corsaire Pas de Deux in 1915.
The choreographer George Balanchine said he had fond memories of watching her when he was a student at the Imperial Ballet School. It was during the late 1910s that she began traveling regularly to Paris to dance with the Ballet Russe of Sergei Diaghilev. It was during her years with the company that she created many of her most famous roles in the ballets of Mikhail Fokine, including Petrushka, and Le Spectre de la Rose. She was perhaps most famous for creating the title role in Fokine's The Firebird (a role originally offered to Anna Pavlova, who could not come to terms with Stravinsky's score) with her occasional partner Vaslav Nijinsky.
She left Russia in 1919 after the revolution, and subsequently continued her association with the Ballet Russe as a leading Ballerina. (Her brother Lev Platonovich Karsavin moved to newly independent Lithuania, where he acquired a university chair in cultural history; when the Soviets occupied Lithuania in 1940, he was arrested and died in a gulag.)
