Profile of Lydia Lopokova on Famous Like Me

Lydia Lopokova (October 21, 1892-June 8, 1981; Russian: Лидия Васильевна Лопухова) was a famous Russian ballerina dancer during the early 20th-century. She is known also as Lady Keynes, the wife of the economist, John Maynard Keynes.

Lopokova was born in St. Petersburg, where her father was a theatre usher. All his four children became ballet dancers, and one of them, Fyodor Lopukhov, was a chief choreographer of Mariinsky Theatre in 1922-1935 and 1951-1956.

Lydia trained at the Imperial Ballet School. She left Russia in 1910, joining the Diaghilev ballet (the Ballets Russes) for the first time. She stayed with the ballet only briefly, however, leaving for the United States after the summer tour, where she remained for six years. She rejoined Diaghilev in 1916, dancing with the Ballets Russes, and her former partner Vaslav Nijinsky, in New York 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 Leonide Massine in the Can-Can of La Boutique Fantasque.

When her marriage to the company's business manager, Randolfo Barrochi, broke down in 1919, the dancer abruptly disappeared, but she decided to rejoin the Diaghilev for the second time in 1921, when she danced the Lilac Fairy and Princess Aurora in 'The Sleeping Princess'. During these years she became a friend of Stravinsky, and of Picasso, who drew her many times.

In London she came to know her future husband John Maynard Keynes. They married in 1925, once her divorce to Barrochi had been obtained. Although Keynes was quite involved in the Bloomsbury set, most other bloomsberries, like Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, never really accepted Lydia as one of their group. 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.

Besides being involved in the early days of English ballet, Lydia Lopokova appeared on the stage in London and Cambridge from 1928, and broadcast on the BBC. She lived with Keynes in London, Cambridge and Sussex until his death in 1946, and continued to live in the same places thereafter, although she largely disappeared from public view. Lydia Lopokova Keynes died in 1981, aged eighty-eight.

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