I was taking a look at Rosemary and Donald Crawford's book 'Michael and Natasha' in order to find something else and came across the following on p11.
'Dina was entitled , of course, to insist on nothing less than marriage. Nevertheless, to be the mistress of a Grand Duke was not necessarily the worst that could befall a woman. And for those in doubt, there was the brilliant example of the prima ballerina assoluta Mathilde Kschessinska. Over the past seventeen years she had been mistress successively to three Grand Dukes, beginning in 1890 with Michael's brother Nicholas, then Tsarevich. Nicholas was twenty-two and the tiny Kschessinska just eighteen. After two years together, they set up home in St Petersburg, at 18 English Prospekt, Nicholas renting in her name the two storey house then owned by the composer Rimsky-Korsakov; and it was there that they spent much of their time together, leading 'a quiet retiring life' as Kschessinska would recall afterwards.
But in real life a swan can never be turned into a princess, and in 1894 Nicholas became engaged to Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt and a miserable Kschessinska had to accept the inevitable. In his farewell letter to her, Nicholas wrote: 'Whatever happens to my life my days spent with you will ever remain the happiest memories of my youth.' As consolation, Nicholas also bought from Rimsky-Korsakov the house on English Prospekt and gave it to Kschessinska as his parting gift.
Kschessinska's other consolation was then to become mistress to Grand Duke Serge Mikhailovich, who kept her for the next eight years, before losing her to the boyish Grand Duke Andrew Vladimirovich, seven years younger than Kschessinska. Showered with jewels by all three imperial lovers, and bought houses by each, Kschessinske proved that the role of mistress had its compensations for those who remembered that the bedchamber was not the route to the bridal chamber.'
Fact or fiction?
