Tamara Tchinarova

She was born Tamara Yevsevievna Rekemchuk (Russian: Тама́ра Евсевиевна Рекемчу́к) in 1919 in Cetatea Albă, Bessarabia.[1] The territory became part of the Kingdom of Romania in 1918 after World War I, but has been part of Ukraine since World War II.

Her maternal grandfather, Kristapor Chinaryan, was an Armenian landowner who survived the Hamidian massacres by the Ottoman Empire. In 1895, Chinaryan fled to Bessarabia, where he adopted the Russified surname of Chinarov. He married a Ukrainian woman and eventually became extremely wealthy, owning three vineyards, three houses and a hotel. Her grandfather, she wrote, "could achieve success in business even on a desert island. He was practical, quick, receptive, generous, envied and loved." During the Kishinev pogroms, he sheltered Jewish families in his basements.[1]

Her mother, Anna, studied nursing and served with the Red Cross during World War I. There she met a captain of Ukrainian and Georgian descent, Yevsevy Rekemchuk, and married him in 1918.[1][2][3]

In the 1920s, her family emigrated to Paris, where she began her dance training with émigré ballerinas from the Imperial Russian Ballet. In 1926, her father returned to the Soviet Union.[3] She describes him as "idealistic"[4] and wanting to help build a new society. Tamara and her mother, staunchly anti-Bolshevik, decided to stay in Paris and never saw him again. She took her mother's maiden name, Chinarova (transliterated in French as "Tchinarova").[5]

Her father's second wife was Ukrainian actress, Lidia Prikhodko, and in 1927 they had a son, Alexander Rekemchuk, who went on to become an accomplished journalist and author. Yevsevy worked for the Soviet Secret police and was shot in 1937 during the Great Purge; he was posthumously rehabilitated after Stalin's death.[3]

In 1940, Tchinarova's grandfather Kristapor, 88, and his wife were murdered by Soviet troops, who stormed their home and bayoneted them. Other family members were exiled to Siberia, where several of them died.[1]

At age 10, Tchinarova began training with renowned instructor Olga Preobrazhenskaya, formerly of the Imperial Russian Ballet. In 1931, while still a young teen, she went on tour to Algeria and Morocco where she was introduced as "the littlest ballerina of the world." In 1932, she performed in Romania, including a show in her hometown. Roma musicians accompanied the tour and Tchinarova learned complex gypsy dances, which she later used in Petrushka and other dances.[1][2]

In Paris, choreographer George Balanchine noticed Tchinarova and her classmates, and chose them for dance performances in their room's operetta productions Orpheus in the Underworld. In 1932, she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo[6] and quickly gained prominence. Tchinarova and classmates Irina Baronova, Tatiana Riabouchinska and Tamara Toumanova were dubbed Balanchine's "Baby Ballerinas" and the "Russians who have never danced in Russia."[1]

In 1936, she came to Australia on tour and two years later returned with the "Covent Garden Russian Ballet". In Australia during those first two tours, she made a strong impression as Action in Léonide Massine's first symphonic ballet Les présages. She was also admired for her portrayal of Tamar the Georgian Queen in Michel Fokine's dramatic ballet Thamar, and was also praised for her dancing in demi-character roles in ballets such as Le Beau Danube bleu.[5]

In 1939, at the conclusion of the Covent Garden Russian Ballet tour, along with a number of her colleagues, Tchinarova elected to stay in Australia. She made an especially important contribution in the 1940s to newly developing Australian companies, which included the Kirsova Ballet, the Polish-Australian Ballet and the Borovansky Ballet. During her time with the Kirsova Ballet she created a number of roles, including that of Satana in Kirsova's three-act ballet Faust, which premiered in November 1941. She was a principal dancer with the Borovansky Ballet in the mid-1940s and worked with Edouard Borovansky to restage ballets from the Ballets Russes repertoire.[2]

Tamara Tchinarova (left) and Nina Youchkevitch (centre) standing with an unknown woman at Bungan Beach, NSW, 1936 or 1937

In 1943, she married actor Peter Finch and worked with him on a number of films. They had a daughter, Anita, born in 1949. Tchinarova and Finch had moved to London, where she was based until 2004, when she retired to Spain to be with her family.[7] They divorced in 1959, after she discovered his affair with actress Vivien Leigh in California.[1][8]

After retiring from dancing, Tamara Finch acted as a Russian interpreter for many English-speaking dance companies, including the Australian Ballet, during tours to Russia, and for Russian companies touring in the West. She also pursued a career as a dance writer and was published in a range of dance magazines, notably Dancing Times. In 1958 she was co-author, with Hector Cameron, of a collection of Russian fairy tales for children, entitled "The Little King: The book of twenty nights and one night". [9]

• Tchinarova Finch, Tamara (2007). Dancing into the Unknown: My Life in the Ballets Russes and Beyond. Dance Books Ltd. ISBN 978-1-85273-114-4.
• Tamara Tchinarova. Tamara Toumanova. (Biography) Dancing times. July 1997, p. 889—891, 893.[10]