Lydia Lopokova, Baroness Keynes (born Lidiya Vasilyevna Lopukhova, ; 21 October 1891 – 8 June 1981) was a Russian ballerina famous during the early 20th century.

Lopokova trained at the Imperial Ballet School. She toured with the Ballets Russes in 1910, and rejoined them in 1916 after an interlude in the United States.

Lopokova married the English economist John Maynard Keynes in 1925 and was also known as the Lady Keynes. She largely disappeared from public view after Keynes's death in 1946 and spent her remaining years in Sussex.

Early life

Lopokova was born in Saint Petersburg. She stayed with the Ballets Russes only briefly, knowing that she had little future in Russia ("she was the wrong size and shape for the grand roles and there were already plenty of prima ballerinas in St. Petersburg").

In 1915, while in New York, she had become engaged to the New York Morning Telegraph sportswriter Heywood Broun, later a member of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table coterie. When the Ballets Russes came to the United States in 1916 she broke off her engagement, and soon after married the company's Italian business manager, Randolfo Barrocchi. She danced regularly with the company, including with her former partner, Vaslav Nijinsky.

She toured with the Ballets Russes in America, Europe, South America 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 Léonide Massine in the Can-Can of La Boutique fantasque. When her marriage to Barrocchi broke down in 1919, the dancer abruptly disappeared for a time, as she had done before in America. She also had an on-off affair with Igor Stravinsky, who composed for the Ballets Russes. (Some of them later regretted their snobbery; E.M. Forster, for example, wrote: "How we all used to underestimate her.") However, she maintained friendships with many other members of London's cultural elite of the time, including T. S. Eliot and H. G. Wells.

The couple spent their honeymoon in Sussex in 1925. A fortnight into the honeymoon they were briefly visited by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Lydia remarked to Wittgenstein "What a beautiful tree", Wittgenstein responded glaringly asking "what do you mean?" which caused Lydia to burst into tears.

Later life

Besides being involved in the early days of English ballet, Lopokova appeared on the stage in London and Cambridge from 1928, and was broadcast on the BBC as a presenter and in a number of acting roles; she read "The Red Shoes" over the BBC in 1935 (and a few years later reprised it for BBC television). 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. Also in 1933 she danced her last ballet role, as Swanhilda in Coppélia, for the new Vic-Wells Ballet.

She lived with Keynes in London, Cambridge, and Sussex. "Lopokova was [Keynes's] partner in founding the Cambridge Arts Theatre, and in advising him on the constitution for the Arts Council; with his financial input she became a moving spirit in the Camargo Society, which led to the creation of a national ballet company." After her husband's collapse from an attack of angina in 1937, Lopokova devoted herself increasingly to taking care of his health. She supervised his diet and made sure he had enough rest; "without her constant attention and her joie de vivre, Keynes might not have made it to Bretton Woods." Lopokova died in the Three Ways Nursing Home in Seaford in 1981, at 89.

Lynn Seymour played Lydia in the 1993 film Wittgenstein, directed by Derek Jarman.

Wooing in Absence was performed by Natalia Makarova and Benjamin Whitrow, and directed by Patrick Garland, at Charleston Farmhouse and Tate Britain

The novel Mr Keynes' Revolution () (2020) by E. J. Barnes is about Keynes' and Lopokova's lives in the 1920s.

Lopokova is the central character in 'Firebird', the novel by Susan Sellers, which recounts Lydia's love affair with Keynes, her prickly reception from his friends in the Bloomsbury group, and their marriage, as well as narrating the story of Lydia's earlier life, from her childhood in the Imperial Ballet School through to her tours in America and beyond as a solo artist and celebrity.

Love Letters was performed with Helena Bonham Carter as Lopokova and Tobias Menzies as Keynes in July 2021 at Charleston Farmhouse, with a script crafted by reader-in-residence Holly Dawson..

Biographies

Maynard Keynes's nephew Milo Keynes wrote a biography, Lydia Lopokova (St. Martin's Press, 1983, ). Judith Mackrell published her biography, Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes, in 2008. (Weidenfeld, 2008, ).

See also

  • Keynes family
  • List of Russian ballet dancers

References

  • Lydia Lopokova at National Portrait Gallery
  • Chapter 7 Interactive E-Book John Maynard Keynes: The Lives of a Mind (2016). The Keynes Centre University College Cork