Nicholas Sergeyev

Nicholas Grigoryevich Sergeyev (1876–1951) (Russian: Никола́й Григорьевич Серге́ев, variously written in the Latin alphabet as Nicholas or Nikolai Sergeev, Sergueev or Sergueeff etc.) was a Russian ballet dancer, choreographer and teacher, and regisseur of the Imperial Ballet at the Maryinsky Theatre, St Petersburg. He fled Russia in 1919 and spent the rest of his life in the west, producing ballets for many of the leading western companies of the time. He is best remembered for preserving what is now called the Sergeyev Collection for future generations.

Sergeyev was born September 15, 1876 in St Petersburg. He was accepted for training by the Imperial Ballet School and he graduated and joined the company in 1894. He was promoted to soloist and régisseur in 1904 and régisseur-général in 1914. He was thus the last ever régisseur-général of the Imperial Ballet.

In 1919 he and his wife fled Russia, as did many Russian ballet professionals after the Bolshevik revolution. It was a hazardous journey and the last leg was from Riga on a British warship. He was not the only one the Royal Navy helped to escape. Tamara Karsavina escaped from Murmansk with her husband, the British diplomat Henry James Bruce, with the aid of sailors of a British cruiser stationed in the White Sea, and Mathilde Kschessinskaya escaped from the Black Sea port of Novorossisk with her lover and future husband, the Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, with the aid of sailors at a British base there. Not for nothing did Soviet Russia describe the British and other nations that interfered in the Russian Civil War as the “foreign interventionists”.

Sergeyev brought with him the records of the Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov choreographies of some 20 classical ballets in the Stepanov notation, what is now known as the Sergeyev Collection, fearing that these invaluable records would be lost to posterity in the upheaval of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War that followed. He used these records in his subsequent employment by many of the leading Western ballet companies of the time, and after his death they finished up housed at the Harvard University Library Theatre Collection.

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