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This introductory chapter deals with the society that shaped Leonid Yakobson as a rebellious artist during the days of Stalin. Yakobson was born in Saint Petersburg in 1904. A Jew, Yakobson and his family were allowed to live in the city, as a special privilege, though with restrictions. He studied dance from 1921 and experimented with ballet innovation and modernization within a culture that opposed it. The Bolshoi stage was known as the public face of Communist utopia. It was also a place where the stage and politics overlapped. In this light, Yakobson embodied the image of the displaced and culturally exiled Soviet Jew. Yakobson used dance as the ultimate stealth art form—his ballets appeared innocent but had an undercurrent of Jewish subject matter and messages. This book shows how this art form battled against the censorship and suppression of the Soviet authorities, yet was not cause enough to result in its foremost practitioner—Yakobson—to be exiled or imprisoned.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya reflects on her work with Leonid Veniaminovich Yakobson, one of Russia's great choreographers. Maya worked more often and for a longer time with Yakobson than with any other of her contemporary choreographers. She danced Swan Lake under Yakobson's choreography to open the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on December 23, 1961. After yet another Swan Lake, this time for the king of Laos, Maya focused on rehearsing Spartacus with Maria Nikolayevna Shamsheva as coach. Sol Hurok, who had seen Yakobson's ballet in Leningrad, wanted to bring it on Maya's fall tour of America. Yakobson's Spartacus premiered at the Bolshoi Theater on April 4, 1962. Yakobson died on October 17, 1975.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya recounts her mother's release from Butyrki Prison in Chimkent in April 1941 and her return to Moscow with Maya's little brother. Meanwhile, Maya was preparing for her next performance as her mother began asking her about her ballet studies. The school was preparing for its graduation concert, which would be accompanied by the Bolshoi orchestra and held on the stage of its second theater, on June 21, 1941. Maya danced Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Impromptu in Leonid Veniaminovich Yakobson's staging to a rousing applause.

Chapter 3 explores the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1962 tour of the United States, which took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the wake of the crisis, President Kennedy and his family staged numerous public meetings with the Bolshoi dancers to soothe the mounting political tensions. In the critical reception of the Bolshoi, however, a less conciliatory strain emerged. American critics understood the Soviet works through the lens of taste, a framework related to domestic struggles about the positioning of ballet in an aesthetic and class hierarchy. They disparagingly compared the Bolshoi’s new production of Spartacus to Hollywood epic films. These concerns were in turn related to a desire to foster the United States’ status as an emerging ideological empire.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya focuses on the premiere of Spartacus on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on March 11, 1956, and her meeting with Rodion Shchedrin, her future husband. The rehearsal period for the Moscow production dragged on so long that Leonid Yakobson finished his work with the Aram Khachaturian score in Leningrad ahead of Igor Moiseyev. Maya invited a few friends to the Spartacus premiere and reserved two tickets for Shchedrin. The premiere was a success. The following day, Shchedrin told Maya that Vladimir Radunsky was working on a new Little Humpbacked Horse for the Bolshoi Theater and that he was enlightening Shchedrin as best he could about the ballet. By late August Maya was pregnant.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya reflects on her enrollment in the Moscow Choreographic School, the ballet school, in 1934. In 1976 she traveled to America and visited the legendary Olga Spessivtzeva in a home for aged performers near New York. This was when she started studying ballet. She attended Yevgenia Ivanovna Dolinskaya's class. She also met Leonid Veniaminovich Yakobson, who took her to the Disarmament Conference.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya focuses on her experience as a performer under the regime of Nikita Khrushchev, who invited heads of foreign governments at the Bolshoi Theater to watch ballet. In front of them, Maya danced Swan Lake, Fountain of Bakhchisarai, The Stone Flower, and Shurale. The Stone Flower, Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev's posthumous work, was produced by Leonid Lavrovsky, while Shurale was staged by Leonid Veniaminovich Yakobson to music of the Tatar composer Färit Yarullin.