Anna Pavlova

Nationalism of the Russian ballet; pedagogic principles of the Russian school; French and Russian schools compared—Begutcheff and Ostrowsky; history of the Russian ballet—Didelot and the Imperial ballet school; Petipa and his reforms—Tschaikowsky’s ‘Snow-Maiden’ and other ballets; Pavlova and other famous ballerinas; Mordkin; Volinin, Kyasht, Lopokova.

I

The celebrated saying of the German poet, ‘Und neues Leben blÜht aus den Ruinen’ applies better than anything else to the Russian ballet, which has risen out of the West European choreographic ruins. The Russian ballet marks a new era in the history of the art of dancing. The Russian ballet is a new word in the dance world. It brings the smell of trees and flowers, the songs of birds, the leaps of gazelles and lions and the very soil of nature to the stage. It breathes the spectral shadows of the trees and mountains; it begins with the simplest mushroom and ends with the most complicated hot-house plant. It emanates nature with all its uncouthness and grace. Like the Russian composers and poets, the Russian dancers strive to echo Nature with all its majesty and mystery.

Even with the beginning of the nineteenth century the Russian ballet begins a course entirely different from that which the schools of Western Europe were preaching and teaching. Though the ballet-masters and instructors are foreigners, yet they are actuated by outward circumstances to apply their academic theories to the conditions of a different school. With the advent of a national school of music and drama, at the head of which stood Balakireff, Borodine, Seroff, Moussorgsky, Tschaikowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff in music, and Ostrowsky, Turgenieff, Gogol and others in the drama, the Russian ballet is forced in the same channels. The Russian ballet grows gradually into a new nationalistic art, and separates itself altogether from the French-Italian aristocratic academicism. The frequent remarks of the foreign critics, suggesting that the Russian ballet was and is a direct offspring and copy of the classic French-Italian schools, are absolutely wrong. It is true that the Russians borrowed from the French the skeleton and from the Italians the mechanic contrivances, but they built up the body themselves and created something entirely different from what Western Europe knew of the ballet.

A born dancer, the Russian could never stand the prescribed poses, smiles, tears, steps and gestures, that were and are still practised outside. He is ready to undergo the most strenuous training, and follows microscopically the instructions of the teachers, in order to acquire the necessary technique; but when it comes to a performance, he will put his spontaneous ideas and impulses above the technique and act according to his emotions and inspiration. This is a peculiarity of the Russian. He is and remains an individual. No school can put him on the same level with his fellow-students. Is not Pavlova quite different from Fokina or Karsavina?

No other nation cares so much for racial beauty as the Russian. And in this it is essentially democratic. All Russian art is based on the peasant, and not on aristocratic ideals. It expresses this by being simple, direct, spontaneous and rugged. The greatest factor in separating the Russian ballet from the western, is the Russian folk-dance. It owes everything to folk-art. No outside influence has ever been able to change the Russian Æsthetic taste. In art, particularly in the ballet, the peasant ideals force themselves upon all aristocratic and bureaucratic classes. Already as a youth he sucks from the atmosphere the innumerable forms of dance expression. In his blood lives unconsciously the whole choreographic code, as his ancestors have known and practised it for centuries. The design of a peasant is the Æsthetic scale of a Russian artist, particularly of a dancer. Aristocratic ideals never amounted to anything in Russia. The fact is, the nobleman follows in matters of Æsthetic taste the moujik, but never vice versa. The benefit of this has been that neither the court nor foreign academicism could influence the Russian art of dancing.

Besides the racial motives, the question of scientific education has been a hobby with the Russian art pedagogues since the early part of the last century. The Russians are almost fanatic in this respect and have specialized their educational institutions to such a degree that they stand unique. The method of training the dancers in other countries was centred mainly in training the step technique and was, so to speak, purely choreographic. The Russians took into consideration all the arts that are related to dancing, and made a rule that all pupils in the dancing schools should have at least an elementary training in human anatomy, in sculpture, drama, architecture, painting, music and in general educational subjects. To know every branch of art correspondingly well—this made it necessary that children be educated in an institute from their childhood on. Thus the education for the Russian ballet is given in the two Imperial Ballet Schools, one in Petrograd, the other in Moscow, both being connected with the dramatic departments in which children are trained for the stage. The course in the school lasts eight years, with an extra one or two years’ post-graduate practice at some opera stage, after which a graduate receives his ‘Free Artist’ degree which places him on an equal rank with the graduates of a college, university or musical conservatory.

Marius Petipa, the director and leading spirit of the Petrograd ballet school, has, upon one occasion, said to the writer: ‘We employ the French, the Italian, the Danish and the Russian instructors in order to give the best of every school and style to our pupils. We teach things that no other school would teach. For instance, our pupils must know psychology, which is supposed to be unnecessary for a dancer. But I say, no. How can a girl personify the Snow Maiden when she does not know the psychology of a fairy? It’s ridiculous, you might think, as fairies are only legendary figures. But the very fact that they are imaginary makes it necessary for a girl to know how to avoid showing any human characteristics.

‘The foreign schools do not care in what steps a dancer should express such subtle emotions as jealousy, longing, bliss and sorrow. Abroad they prescribe pirouettes for joy and happiness. They prescribe acting in this, dancing in that phrase. It is not so with us. We teach the pupil to see the various human emotions in historic sculpture and painting. We show them the attitudes of various celebrated actresses in this or that emotion. Then, we go back to psychology and leave it to the artist to formulate the position that he would occupy in various emotions. So you see psychology is very important to a dancer.

‘Dancing is the cream of architecture and sculpture. We teach our future dancers to know the difference between architecture and sculpture and then between a dance and a dramatic pose, which are just as different as opera singing and concert singing. All our graduates must be accomplished dancers, actors, acrobats, architects and designers. We teach the difference between a Gothic and Byzantine line, a Moorish and Romanesque design. We have to analyze music and sculpture to their elementary parts in order to be able to show the manifold manifestations of the human soul, and the manifold forms of beauty. It is in this way that a dancer comes to know which step or gesture corresponds to the emotions of a Romanesque Italian, Gothic German or Byzantine Russian.

‘I have been assailed by our critics and composers as being too strict in demanding technique from our dancers. But tell me, please, can any talent make a man an artist without technical ability, where mathematical laws are required as in dancing and in music? Can there ever be a Rubinstein, Paderewski or Kubelik without the acquired harmonic and melodic skill on the instrument which I call technique? Just as little chance has a man of being a great dancer if he does not possess the ability to control his body, though he be the greatest choreographic genius in the world. Art is technique plus talent. No great artist in dancing was ever produced without technique.

‘Do you know what Lubke said in his immortal History of Sculpture, that applies also to a dancer? I am telling all my pupils when they leave the institution that, like sculptor in the clay, a dancer in himself must seek the “Image of God,” the spark of divine life. When he fails to find this in separate lines, poses, gestures, attitudes and mimic expressions, he must search for it in the whole, and, by thoughtful study and thinking, he will certainly attain the reflex of immortal beauty—the image of deity. This I call artistic creation. In sculpture as in dancing the divine and heroic are the aims of the artistic achievements. Without this striving after the divine spark nothing is produced but lifeless figures and dead forms. A dancer, like any other artist, should aspire after spirit-breathing beauty.’

This briefly expresses the fundamental traditions of the Russian ballet school. To a certain extent it is academic, but it has never interfered with the racial and the individual tendencies of the artists. Though there are only three large independent ballet corps in Russia, those of Petrograd, Moscow, and Warsaw, yet nearly every one of the sixty or more provincial opera houses keeps its local ballet corps in connection with the operatic and dramatic staff. While in foreign countries ballet has been appreciated mainly as an accessory to the opera for its spectacular effects, its Æsthetic appeal being regarded as not possessing a high order of merit, in Russia it is considered a great and independent art of the stage, standing on a plane with opera, both musically and dramatically. When a few years ago the Russian dancers made their appearance abroad the public was startled, as no one could imagine that any good thing could come out of Czardom. It is a great mistake to suppose that the Russian ballet is an aristocratic or autocratic institution. By no means. Like Russian drama and music the Russian ballet is a national institution and a national achievement.

In how far the Russian ballet differs from her sister institutions outside is best to be seen in such old-fashioned ballets as Les Sylphides, which was danced by Taglioni, and is danced by the artists of the French-Italian schools and figures in the repertoires of the Russian ballet. Another work of similar nature is the CoppÉlia. Not only are these two time-worn ballets wholly changed in their thematic and musical sense but in the very form of conception. The Russian Sylphides and CoppÉlia are old scenes in modern light, the French-Italian Sylphides and CoppÉlia are pitiable museum shows. Where a French-Italian ballerina would leap and whirl, a Russian acts and poses. Like the art of an actress that of a Russian ballerina is in the first place a personification of the character in whose rÔle she is dancing. Pavlova as she depicts the incomparable fury of Glazounoff’s L’AutÔmne Bacchanale, could not by any means be a Cleopatra as personified by Astafieva. Karsavina with all her dramatic thrill and arabesques is a mediocrity in the rÔles in which Pavlova excels. The dramatic issue is the foremost question in the Russian ballet, often to such an extent that it minimizes the musical significance. The most talented of the foreign ballet dancers do not begin to go into the dramatic details of a dance as the Russians do.

To get an idea of the Russian ballet with all its true atmosphere one must go to Russia. The performances of the Diaghileff company which foreign audiences have seen, belong to the revolutionary school, but not to the typical classic dance of Russia, which we shall discuss later. The Russian ballet dancer is free from all the stiffness, decadent artificiality, preconceived emotions, and fossilized formalities of the French-Italian ballet dancers. This freedom he owes, in the first place, to the thorough training in the school; second, to the distinctly racial traditions of the Russian drama and art; and third, to the serious critical attitude of the audiences. To say that the Russian ballet has not travelled in ideals far from those of Milan in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, as a foreign dance critic has said, is untrue. The difference between these two schools is just as real as that between the Catholic and the Protestant church: the one believes in the form, the other in the spirit.

II

How much the Russian ballet has influenced drama, opera, painting and music can be judged from the fact that almost without an exception all the Russian operas require dancing; thus there are several dramas and orchestra works interwoven with the ballet. On the other hand the dancer has made use of themes and compositions that had been created for other purposes; for all such ballets as the Scheherezade, Prince Igor, Baba Yaga and many others, were written as orchestral suites, symphonic poems or parts of operas. But the choric imagination discovered in them latent music dramas adapted for dancing. We are inclined to think that the Moscow ballet, but not that of Petrograd, is a thoroughly Russian institution, since Begutcheff, who was a director of the Moscow Opera and Ballet at the time of Tschaikowsky and Ostrowsky, banished all foreign influence from that stage, more so than has ever happened in Petrograd.

In 1873 Begutcheff asked Ostrowsky, one of the foremost Russian dramatists, to write a fairy ballet for performance at the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg, exacting that it should be free from any satirical or politically undesirable element. Begutcheff asked the dramatist to submit the scenario to him for approval. Ostrowsky was noted for his bitter sarcasm anent the Russian bureaucracy and for his idealization of the peasants. This he was told he should avoid in the ballet, ‘for such would be not pleasing to the imperial family.’ Ostrowsky smiled, grunting: ‘God be thanked, the imperial family has no business to interfere with the imagination of an artist.’ He finished his libretto without consulting Begutcheff and entitled it Snegourotchka—‘Snow Maiden.’ The director of the Petrograd ballet did not like Ostrowsky’s libretto and refused to consider it. Begutcheff, however, turned the libretto over to Tschaikowsky to compose the music and it was performed with great success in Moscow.

One of the special features of the Russian ballet is its chorovody character—that is, the musical accompaniment, on many occasions, is supplied by the singing of the dancers themselves. This species of vocal ballets evidently originated in the choral dances of the peasants. The Russian ballet is, in fact, an outgrowth of the folk-dance just as Russian music emanates from the folk-song. While watching the Russian ballet, you see glimpses of the racial traits. It is not like the music, however, a picture of the gloom of lonely moujik life, in which only here and there a beam of light breaks through the melancholy. It is a succession of brilliant pictures of the mediÆval Boyars, the semi-barbaric nobility. Every part of the ballet is meant to show the rich Byzantine colors, and primitive passions as set forth in a half-civilized garb.

It is true the Russian ballet is controlled by the court and therefore is forced to be aristocratic in appearance. The composers and the ballet-masters have been strictly instructed to avoid all undesirable themes; but, strange to say, the ballet is just as much a mirror of the hospitable, good natured, naÏve and emotional peasant as it is of a spoiled Boyar. It is not that all the ballet dancers are children of peasants, educated for the stage by the court, but because the Russian dramatists and composers have unconsciously put their own moujik souls in their creations, for, though most of the Russian composers and dramatists are descendants of the aristocracy, yet in their hearts they have remained one with the people, whose life they live in thought and feeling.

In its principles the ballet is the most aristocratic and the oldest of all Russian arts of the stage. The unwritten history of the enchanting Russian dance would make a thrilling record of more than two centuries. The romances, tragedies, mysteries, and intrigues connected with this sealed drama have often played a decisive rÔle in the affairs of the country. As the result of a romance with pretty Teleshova Griboyedoff, a famous Russian dramatist was killed in Teheran. For having dedicated his ‘Eugene Onyegin’ to the fascinating Istomina, prima ballerina of the Imperial Opera, Poushkin, the poet, lost the love of his wife and was subsequently shot in a duel. The Czar Paul fell in love with Eugeny Kolossova and in consequence was strangled at his palace in Petrograd. Before the present Czar ascended the throne he was said to have been so much in love with Mathilda Kshesinskaya that he made plans to renounce his throne and marry her.

The ballet was introduced in Russia as early as 1672. Czar Alexis Mihailowitch ordered his aid-de-camp, Colonel Van Staden, to have a troupe of Dutch comedians brought to Moscow. Van Staden made a contract with a ballet manager in Brussels, but the foreigner was frightened into giving up the venture because of a rumor that he and his troupe might eventually land in Siberia. After this a German pastor, the Rev. Johann Gregory, undertook the management of the troupe, hiring sixty-four German and Italian dancers and producing in 1673 the first ballet, ‘Orpheus and Euridice,’ with great success. Peter the Great was so fascinated with the ballet that he himself took part and for this purpose received lessons from the ballet-master.

The ballet of this time was, of course, Italian-French in conception and music. But the early foreign masters soon produced a school of native instructors who gradually made use of the peculiarities of national dances. Many Russian ballets were already at this time of national color, one of them, Baba Yaga, having been written by the Czar himself. Baba Yaga is a Russian fairy tale. Like the English ‘Witch on a Broomstick,’ Baba Yaga rides through the sky on a huge mortar, propelling herself with a pestle, while her great tongue licks up the clouds as she passes. The dancers were trained in various military or municipal schools and the teaching was unsystematic in every respect.

The first impetus to a national dancing academy was given by Empress Anna Ivanovna, the sister of Peter the Great, who felt that the education of the dancers was not systematic enough, and regretted that the best dancers had to be hired from abroad. In 1735, she asked Christian Wellmann, a teacher of gymnastics in the Cadet Corps, to found a dramatic dancing school in which girls and boys could be educated for the ballet. The Italian composer Francesca Areja was employed to take care of the music, while Lande, a pupil of Noverre, was to act as ballet director. As the newly formed school could not get children of the nobility to learn dancing, Lande trained a number of poor city boys and girls free of any charge, and with them gave a performance at the palace. The Empress was so pleased with their dance that she instructed that the pupils be educated in the Imperial Dramatic Dancing School free of charge.

III

The most conspicuous figures in the development of the early Russian ballet were Locatelli, Hilferding and Lessogoroff. To the latter’s efforts are due the reforms that made the Russian school independent from French-Italian influences. But to Charles Louis Didelot is due the thorough and many sided system of training that makes the School a unique institution in Europe. He may be considered the real father of all the pedagogic technical perfection, for it was he who emphasized the importance of a systematic training in a true dramatic spirit, contending that a good ballet dancer should also be a good actress and an artist and a poet at heart. Up to his time lessons had consisted mostly of physical training, fencing and gymnastics, but he insisted that the ballet be put on the same basis as drama. Whereas the dance had been merely a spectacular part of opera he intended that it should become an independent production. This brought upon him a storm of indignation on the part of the clergy and their supporters, the quarrel becoming so intense that in 1801, as one of its effects, the Czar Paul was acclaimed a heretic and was combatted by the ecclesiastic powers until he was strangled in his palace and his son, Alexander I, ascended the throne. The young Czar was religious, but so much an admirer of the ballet that he did not interfere with the plans of Didelot and gave him a still greater authority.

It is strange how Didelot, a rather small, insignificant, pock-marked and deformed Frenchman, who had been for some time a ballet teacher in Stockholm, could play a dominating rÔle during the twenty-five years that he was director of the Imperial Ballet School. The best known dancers of his school were Istomina, Teleshova and the uncle of Taglioni, who later undertook the training of Maria Taglioni. Miss Novitzkaya was a celebrated pupil of Didelot, but her career was soon destroyed by an affair of the heart. Gedeonoff, the director who followed Didelot, fell madly in love with Novitzkaya and proposed to her, but the dancer, having given her heart to a poor composer, remained true to him and became his wife. This was the end of her art, though critics claimed her superior to Taglioni and Elssler.

By 1847 the Russian ballet had taken a leading place in Europe, but in a purely artistic sense it was still foreign in character, the librettos being built mainly on foreign themes or constructed to foreign music. With the advent of the composers Glinka, Dargomijsky, Seroff, Balakireff and Moussorgsky, it was evident that ballet faced a reform similar to that which music had undergone. The ballets of the old school had usually been divided into several acts and figures, each of which had entrÉes and strictly prescribed rules for using various gestures, steps, etc., in certain places. They, however, failed to define the relation of emotion and acting to the plot and made dancing a complicated artificial salon-plant. An uninitiated logic could hardly grasp the hieroglyphic meaning of all the queer gymnastic tricks. With the engagement of Marius Petipa, in 1849, there came a change. Although a Frenchman by birth Petipa was just such a reformer in the ballet as Michelangelo was in sculpture. More powerful than any other master, he entered the sphere of choreographic art, transforming it completely, and assigning it new limits. Petipa was the master of a new ballet, an idealist in the strictest sense of the word. He sought for a universally available expression, and often even ignored questions of racial beauty. He gave himself up for many years to an anatomical study of the dance and the human body. By him the human form in all its majesty was valued for its own sake. To exhibit it in all conceivable attitudes and poses, to display it freely and grandly after the principles of classic beauty, was the aim of his endeavor. The weak decadent movements and the forced forms of the Paris and Milan schools were irritable to his broad views of the art of dancing. Unfettered subjectivity prevailed in his efforts, which admitted no objective realism in their absolute sway. All his method betrays an eternal struggle to introduce into dancing the most sublime ideas, the sway of idea over form. Whether a figure was natural or not interested him little, if it only expressed what was floating before his mind. Petipa infused a new life into Russian ballet. Nevertheless he could not wholly free himself from the mannerism of the time, nor could he yet find the path to perfect purity and naÏvetÉ of conception.

Petipa surrounded himself with the best dance authorities of the time. Felix Kshesinsky, Leggatt, Schirjajeff and Bekeffy became his associates in the task he had undertaken. CoÖperating in harmony and inspired by the new tendency of nationalism in music and drama, they made the ballet typically national by introducing a long repertoire of national themes in the dance. With pretty Kshesinskaya, Bogdanova, Breobrashenskaya, Sokolova, Pavlova, Karsavina, Lopokova and Fokina as the prima ballerinas many new ballets became thrilling novelties to the Russian audiences. The ballet in the eyes of the Petipa school became a mute drama with music, and at once took a high position artistically and poetically. People grew to find the ballet far more alluring than the pessimistic drama.

What Petipa did pedagogically for the uplifting of the Russian ballet, Vsevoloshky did scenically and industrially. Vsevoloshky made himself the spirit of the nationalistic movement by combining with the purely choreographic part the creations of the new school of painters and composers in a highly artistic manner. Rubinstein, Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Arensky and Glazounoff in music, Bilibin, Benois and Bakst in painting, contributed their best works to the ballet. On the other hand, while the West European ballets cared little for training the male dancers, the Russians laid a special stress on training an equal number of boys with the girls in all their ballet schools. The training of a boy is different from that of a girl in that it teaches chiefly those traits that lend virility and strength to expression. A weak masculine element deprives the ballet of its natural effect. A Pavlova, Karsavina or Fokina without a Nijinsky, Mordkin or Volinin, would be like an orchestra without the bass. How repulsive it is to see the ‘boy’ dancer of the English stage, who is always a girl!

IV

The most typical of the early purely Russian native ballets was the Snegourotchka—‘The Snow Maiden’—which was first performed in 1876 in Moscow. Tschaikowsky took for his musical themes half a dozen folk-songs from Brokunin’s collection, and a few from the lips of the village people near Kieff. This ballet has been of the greatest success on the Russian stage thus far. This is musically and choreographically a dramatized fairy tale. The Snow Maiden is the issue of the union of the gladsome fairy, Spring, with the grim old geni, Winter. The father jealously guards her from the courting Sun-God, who is eager to pour upon her his scorching and destructive rays. Winter would like to keep her in the forest, but the mother, proud of her child’s beauty, wants to send her into the busy world to charm its inhabitants. After a serious conflict of the parents the father yields. The girl feels the strange emotions of love and trembles, singing a thrilling melody. She wanders from village to village in search of a lover, but her numerous admirers are unable to stir her heart, because snow circulates through her veins. She realizes that she is void of real passion. Spring appears to her and endows her with the tenderness of a lily, the languor of a poppy and the desire of a rose. The Snow Maiden’s heart is touched at last, but in the moment when she wishes to fall on her lover’s neck a brilliant sun ray pours its Summer heat on her. She dissolves in vapor and floats into the skies.

The score is wholly Russian in mood and color. The dramatic treatment of the subject is the best that Tschaikowsky has ever done. The Snow Maiden’s theme is very sad and beautiful in the last movement. The pantomime and steps are excellent, and seem to melt into one magic whole. Tschaikowsky, with his peculiar genius for evolving floating, curving dance rhythms and his remarkable gift for lyrical characterization, made ‘The Snow Maiden’ a great success.

Of less success was Tschaikowsky’s second ballet, ‘Swan Lake,’ though it has been in recent years a favorite ballet with the Petrograd audiences. Like the first, it was built on a fairy tale and an old folk legend theme. It was performed in 1876. Another ballet full of imaginary episodes and pretty music is ‘The Sleeping Beauty.’ The finest pages of this score are found in the Adagio misterioso, describing the sleep of the princess. But choreographically the best part is the Pas d’action, in which the prima ballerina seems to melt into one audio-visible beauty that thrills the utmost depths of the soul. The ‘Nut Cracker’ has had less success than the others, yet it is a magnificent work of art. It probably lacks the feminine sentimentality that is always sure of a stage success.

To our knowledge none of Tschaikowsky’s ballets has been given in America. Whether the Diaghileff company ever gave any of them in Paris and London, we have been unable to learn. The Russian ballets that the foreign audiences have thus far seen abroad, are nearly without exception musical patch-works. Neither the Rimsky-Korsakoff Scheherezade nor Prince Igor nor Cleopatra was ever written for dancing. The Scheherezade, for instance, is an orchestral suite of Rimsky-Korsakoff. He never meant it for a ballet. Of all the real ballets that the Diaghileff troupe has given only those composed by Stravinsky and a few by Tcherepnin are meant to be danced.

Among the best Russian ballet dancers of the strictly classic or, as we should say, of the Petipa school, are Kshesinskaya, Breobrashenskaya, Geltzer, Pavlova, Mordkin, Novikoff, Volinin, Kyasht and Lopokova, most of whom are known abroad. But there are quite a number of Russian prima ballerinas, who, for some reason or other, have not been able to display their art abroad, yet who rival the best we know. As with other artists, dancers all have their individual traits of superiority and weakness. In some dances we have seen Kshesinskaya superior to all the rest, in other rÔles she is just a mediocrity. We can imagine nothing more inspiring and beautiful than Pavlova and Mordkin in Glazounoff’s L’AutÔmne Bacchanale. No Russian ballet dancers have surpassed them in this. In the same way we consider Pavlova a goddess of grace and beauty in Drigo’s Papillon and Saint-SaËns’ ‘The Swan.’ We measure her one of the most lyric artists of the Russian classic ballet.

Mme. Pavlova is a graduate of the Petrograd Ballet School and was for years a prima ballerina at the Mariensky Theatre in that city before she made a tour to Riga, Warsaw and Helsingfors. Having been received with greatest enthusiasm on her provincial tour she decided to try her luck abroad and made her London dÉbut in 1910, where she immediately had the city at her feet. It is only in recent years that Pavlova has danced in her own regular ballet, whereas before she appeared exclusively in solo dances, either with Mordkin, Novikoff or Volinin. In our judgment she has not added anything to her reputation or success by her patchy ballet, particularly in America, where the public is least impressed by pantomimic art of the kind they can see with more advantage in the moving-picture show. It is Pavlova’s art that the people admire, not the ballets that are concocted for her. It must be said that the ballets recently produced by her possess little dramatic or choreographic appeal.

In questions pertaining to her dancing Pavlova has been broad and tolerant, and has listened quietly to every eulogistic or critical remark. She has not remained indifferent to the latest choreographic movements but has adapted herself to many suggestions, particularly to those of the movement of the naturalistic school of Isadora Duncan. In spite of the growing influence of the revolutionary new ballet of the Fokine-Diaghileff group, and while keeping in view the changing taste and requirements of the public, Pavlova should, we believe, guard against too great a compromise. She surpasses in her magic swiftness, delicacy, bird-like agility, floating grace and lyric pirouettes all her living rivals. One can see that she has tuned her body to the most delicate pianissimi and the most powerful forti. But when she attempts to use her arms too conspicuously, or produce Greek poses, she is a disappointing failure. We must admit with an English critic that ‘in Pavlova’s dancing we are no longer aware of the conscious and painful obedience of the body to the dictates of a governing mind. It is as though the spirit itself had left its central citadel and, by some unwonted alchemy becoming dissolved in the blood and fibres of her being, had penetrated to the extremities of the limbs. Soul from body is no longer distinguishable, and which is servant to the other none can tell.’

Mordkin and Volinin stand by no means beyond the dynamic beauty of Pavlova. In their virilly graceful gestures and poses lies something heroic and strong, something beast-like in its beauty. Mordkin perhaps more than Volinin is endowed with a robust, massive and splendid physique, qualities which leave some of his less critical admirers blind to the deficiencies of his art. Both dancers have acquired most of their pliancy and manliness by a course of systematic and rigorous training which gives to their dance an unusual abandon and loftiness. Their dancing has a tendency to give a semblance of repose to their quickest motions. They seem to avoid the conventional whirls and pivots with intention, and to prefer the lion-like leaps and chassÉes. Their reckless swing in L’AutÔmne Bacchanale is just as much an expression of manly vigor as Pavlova’s pirouette and rond de jambe is one of feminine grace.

The ranks of the Russian ballet dancers are of a peculiar bureaucratic order, beginning with the simple danseuse and ending with the prima ballerina, which is a rank similar in the hierarchy to that of a full general. Lydia Kyasht, for instance, is a lieutenant in her rank of premiÈre sujet. Pavlova and Karsavina are ballerinas, while only Kshesinskaya and Breobrashenskaya are prima ballerinas. Among the Russian dancers known abroad, Lydia Kyasht and Lydia Lopokova are next to Pavlova brilliant exponents of the Russian classic or so called ‘Old Ballet.’ They have both impressed us as sincere and eloquent artists of their school, the one romantic, the other extremely poetic. The ethereal twists and glides of Lopokova surpass by far those of Pavlova in their peculiar fairy-like lines and poses. Kyasht appeals to us immensely on account of her absolutely classic plastic and enchanting poses, which add an exotic air to her enchanting expressions.

In introducing Pavlova, Mordkin and other more or less prominent exponents of the Russian classic ballet to America and England Max Rabinoff has been the practical spirit behind the scenes. An authority on the dance, Mr. Rabinoff had the conviction, even when the Russian dancers were yet unknown in America, that they would ultimately triumph as they did. To his persistent efforts the Russian ballet owes its success in America.

The classic Russian ballet is a pure Byzantine piece of stage art. It mirrors the bizarre glow and colors of the cathedrals, the mystic romanticism of the Kremlin walls and cupolas, the Tartar minarets, the vaulted teremas (Boyar houses), the lonely steppes, the gloomy penal colonies, the luxurious palaces and twisted towers of a semi-Oriental country. Strongly replete with the character of the passing Boyar life, it is an era in itself.