Word: nikita
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...father, there is a great scandal. But nothing can be done and the old Prince is kindly and forgiving, even to the rascally assistant kennelman Peter who left the gate open. And the summer passes with great happiness and much excitement, for it is known that the Grand Duke Nikita, the Tsar's viciously cruel old uncle,† has invited himself to hunt with the Prince in the autumn. He is coming with his whole hunting train-a set of rakehells mostly from the cavalry -and his best hounds and horses, his finest borzois with their terrific jaws...
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...
Moscow approved The Bat. The Tsar saw the show; invited M. Balieff to dinner. Came 1917 and revolution. In 1919 Nikita Balieff was jailed because he "was not consented with their views on poltique." He pointed his fingernails and skulking behind a long square beard escaped to Georgia (southern Russia) as a Persian...
...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...