The Mariinsky, circa 1910

The Ballet was given every Sunday and Wednesday in the Marinsky Opera House, nearly all the stalls and boxes being taken by abonnements, which were themselves not always easy to obtain as they were very often hereditary and handed down from father to son. For the Opera one could sit in any part of the house one liked, but for the Ballet no lady could sit anywhere but in a box, and it was also considered highly unseemly to remain sitting in the box during the entr'acte, so, directly the curtain went down, everybody retired to the little ante-room at the back of each box where one could smoke and talk and receive the visits of young men who had been sitting in the stalls.

When I shut my eyes I can still feel the individual atmosphere of that huge theatre, the scent of ambre and chyprc, of chocolates and cigarettes, the faint smell of heating, of leather and of the age-old dust raised by hundreds of dancing feet. I can visualize the white and blue and gold of the decorations, the four tiers of boxes, the dim far-away gallery, the parterre of stalls crowded with artists, musicians, young diplomats, officers in brilliant uniforms, old bald-headed Generals. Now and then, defying convention, a young girl would lean from a box to smile a greeting at some young man below, a few old men, grouped together in earnest discussion, would for once not be talking politics but would be arguing about the technique of some dancer's step, shaking their heads mournfully as they agreed that the true art of choreography was deteriorating, and that the last ballets lacked the beauty of the older productions. Fat ladies of the merchant classes munched chocolates brought to them in beribboned boxes by portly men with smooth faces, outside in the foyer young girls and boys from the gallery seats would walk solemnly round and round, watched by some anxious mother, sitting eating cream cakes and drinking weak sugared tea.

Then the orchestra would come trooping back, a bell would shrill loudly, people would hurry along the corridors, the doors of the boxes would open and shut, there would be a rustle and a stir as the lights slowly faded out and the great curtain went up once more on the land of "Make Believe".

The Dissolution of an Empire by Meriel Buchanan. (1932). Pages 24-5.