Ballet´s Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 191

Akim Volynsky was a Russian literary critic, journalist, and art historian who became Saint Petersburg´s liveliest and most prolific ballet critic in the early part of the twentieth century. This book, the first English edition of his provocative and influential writings, provides a striking look at life inside the world of Russian ballet at a crucial era in its history.Stanley Rabinowitz selects and translates forty of Volynsky´s articles - vivid eyewitness accounts that sparkle with details about the careers and personalities of such dance luminaries as Anna Pavlova, Mikhail Fokine, Tamara Karsavina, and George Balanchine, at that time a young dancer in the Maryinsky company whose keen musical sense and creative interpretive power Volynsky was one of the first to recognize. Rabinowitz also translates Volynsky´s magnum opus, "The Book of Exaltations", an elaborate meditation on classical dance technique that is at once a primer and an ideological treatise. Throughout his writings Volynsky emphasizes the spiritual and ethereal qualities of ballet, argues Rabinowitz in his critical introduction which sets Volynsky´s life and work against the backdrop of the principal intellectual currents of the time.