Word: balieff
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Seven years ago the smart and sprightly Russian Bat flapped over U. S. cities with tempestuous and most merited éclat. As each number was introduced by the droll, Cheshire-cat-faced Nikita Balieff, an ticipant audiences rocked with a foretaste of merriment which always followed. The music of the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" penetrated every stratum of U. S. society. Not to have seen the "Wooden Soldiers" or "Katinka" or later "Katerina" was the height of rusticity or indifference...
...other Parisian theatrical event of the week was the appearance of M. Nikita Balieff's famed Russian Bat Theatre, the Chauve-Souris in French for the first time. Heretofore, the troupe has played exclusively in Russian, with M. Balieff introducing each act in excruciating pidgin-English, French, German, or Italian...
...Nikita Balieff is bored with one thing-"The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers." Their famed mechanical march and the tune that went with it has been played, imitated, repeated over most of the civilized world. The idea came from a tradition of the autocracy of Tsar Paul I. Absentminded, the Tsar walked off the parade ground one afternoon, forgetting to give the command to halt. Because he was so cruel, nobody dared remind him. The soldiers went marching on to somewhere in Siberia before he remembered and ordered them to return. They arrived with beards. The Parade based on this...
People ask whether M. Balieff in private really speaks as broken English as he does for public consumption. He does not. But his dialect has become so completely a stock in trade that he uses it in conversation and correspondence. Says...
...Glasgow. I was coming to a pharmacy, and the pharmacist said to me: 'Mr. Balieff, I was yesterday at your show, but I cannot understand in what language you spoke, and I think if you could speak English well you would earn very big money...