And then came dance : the women who led Volynsky to ballet's magic kingdom / translated, edited, and with an introduction and notes by Stanley J. Rabinowitz.
Machine generated contents note: -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- A Note on the Text -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Akim Volynsky's Female Portraits -- PART ONE: BODIES IN SITU -- Russian Women: A Retrospective (1923) -- 1) Amoureuses and Druidesses -- 2) A Belated Druidess (on Lyubov Gurevich) -- 3) The Sylph (on Zinaida Gippius) -- 4) Pandora's Box (on Ida Rubinstein) -- 5) A Bouquet (on Lou Andreas-Salome and others) -- Amor (co-authored with Lou Andreas-Salome, 1897) -- The Mona Lisa (from Volynsky's book: Leonardo da Vinci (1898) -- 1) Nastasya Filippovna (1900) -- 2) The Infernal Woman (Grushenka) (from Volynsky's writings on Dostoevsky 1901) -- Madonna (Introduction to the Russian edition of Otto Weininger's Sex and Character, 1909) -- BODIES IN MOTION -- The 'Russkaya' (Ekaterina Geltser) (1912) -- The Young Generation (1912) -- The Dancing of Isadora Duncan (1913) -- The Dancing of Anna Pavlova (1913) -- Three Ballerinas (Pavlova, Preobrazhenskaya, Kshesinskaya) (1913) -- A Legendary Talent (Agrippina Vaganova) (1913) -- The Russian Dancer (1913) -- The Pupil of Mariya Savina (Olga Spesivtsva) (1913) -- The Performances at Krasnoe Selo (1913) -- The Broken Harp (Olga Preobrazhenskaya) (1913) -- The Snowflake (Olga Spesivtseva) (1913) -- Anna Pavlova (1914) -- A Pre-eminent Talent (Mathilda Kshesinskaya) (1914) -- Vain Precautions (Tamara Karsavina) (1915) -- Kseniya Makletsova (1915) -- Moscow and Petrograd (Geltser, Makletsova, et al) (1915) -- Agrippina Vaganova's Farewell Benefit (1916) -- The Testing of a Ballerina (Elena Liukom) (1916) -- Yuliya Sedova's Farewell Benefit (1916) -- Tamara Karsavina (1916) -- Vera Karalli (1916) -- Liubov Egorova's Final Benefit Performance (1917) -- The Classical Dancer (1922) -- Elsa Vill (1922) -- Classical Fouette and Leonardo da Vinci's Contrapposto (1922) -- Giselle and The Little Humpbacked Horse (Elena Liukom) (1922) -- The Animated Flower (1923) -- Ballet's Lily (Elizaveta Gerdt) (1923) -- Kseniya Petrovna Makletsova (1923) -- Elena Liukom (1923) -- Our Moscow Guests (Viktorina Kriger) (1923) -- The Gemstones of Benvenuto Cellini (1923) -- On the Russian Ballet (1923) -- The Fairy of Deer Park (Mathilda Kshesinskaya) (1924).
Summary:
" At 49 years old, Russian literary scholar, art historian, and journalist Akim Volynsky (1861-1926) experienced a turning point in his intellectual and emotional life, embarking on a journey to become the foremost ballet critic in Russia of his time. His corpus of nearly 300 reviews of women dancers, as well as the performances that graced St. Petersburg's storied Maryinsky Theater between 1911 and 1924, helped catapult two generations of exceptional women achievers to a status they had not previously enjoyed. But Volynsky's depiction of the body beautiful on stage, represented here by 34 previously untranslated articles about a dozen ballerinas, was preceded by his earlier attention to women in literature, in art, and in real life. Presenting for the first time Volynsky's pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering interest in dance, and in female dancers in particular. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical dance, George Balanchine. Indeed, with an undeniable proclivity toward ballet's female component, Volynsky's dance writings, illuminated here by examples of his earlier gendered criticism, invite speculation on how truly ground-breaking and forward-looking this understudied critic is. "-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.