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In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya recalls the time she met and became friends with Miliza Korjus, her childhood idol, at the backstage of the Shriner Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1966. Miliza was not aware that Joseph Stalin liked The Great Waltz a lot and had it distributed on Soviet screens. Maya attended rehearsals at school for an important concert to be held at the club of the NKVD. She wondered why Russia's secret police had a desire to see the young ballet sprouts, the sixth- and seventh-class students of Elizaveta Pavlovna Gerdt. Maya and her classmates danced to piano accompaniment by their best school pianist, Ekaterina Shlikhting.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya describes what she was like at five years old. She describes her physical features and recounts how she would run on tiptoe, making holes in her shoes. She naively loved Delibes's waltz from Coppélia and watched a cadet band played it on Sretensky Boulevard during holidays. She attended kindergarten located in the present Moscow City Council building. She had her first trip to the theater when she was five to watch the play entitled Don't Joke with Love.

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.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya recounts how her mother suffered after her father's arrest. Maya continued to attend ballet school, performing on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater. She attended all the dress rehearsals at the Bolshoi, both ballet and opera. She danced the Breadcrumb Fairy in Sleeping Beauty, flowers in Rimsky-Korsakov's Snegurochka, and the cat in The Little Stork. Meanwhile, her mother began selling off things to earn a living. One day, she suddenly disappeared, never to be seen again.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya recounts her early childhood. She talks about how she began walking at eight months, the death of her grandmother in the summer of 1929, and her first ballet message. Her family was renting a dacha, a summer house, near Moscow, Russia at the time. They lived on the third floor of an apartment on Sretenka Street. It was owned by her grandfather, Mikhail Borisovich Messerer, a dentist.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya describes her life at the Bolshoi Theater, which had just returned from Kuibyshev (now renamed Samara, its original name) when she was taken into the ballet company. At the time, Marina Semyonova and Olga Lepeshinskaya reigned supreme on the stage while Viktorina Kriger, Lyubov Bank, Anastasia Abramova, and Lyubov Podgoretskaya were in the twilight of their dancing careers. The repertoire consisted of the usual titles known around the world, such as Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, and The Nutcracker. Maya was chosen as one of the eight nymphs in the Polish act of the opera Ivan Susanin. In order to stay in condition, she began performing at many concerts in Moscow. Maya also offers her impressions about the prima donnas of the Bolshoi Ballet during the period.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya recalls how her father, who was working for Arktikugl (Arctic Coal), was appointed in 1932 by Otto Yulyevich Shmidt to be general consul to Spitzbergen in Norway and chief of the coal mines there. Her whole family embarked on a very long journey, with stops and awkward changes in various countries. They boarded a train which traveled to Berlin via Warsaw. Maya also encountered humanity's meaningless cruelty in Barentsburg, when she witnessed the death of a polar bear after being shot by a man.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya recalls how her father decided to send her to Moscow to study ballet. She was too late for the end of the school year. In the second year, a new teacher, Elizaveta Pavlovna Gerdt, took Yevgenia Ivanovna Dolinskaya's class. For six years, Maya studied with Pavlovna, the daughter of Pavel Andreyevich Gerdt, soloist of His Imperial Majesty. In the summer of 1935, Maya's father was summoned to Moscow. The following year, the Stalin Constitution, written by Nikolai Bukharin, was announced. On April 30, 1937, Maya's father was arrested.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya talks about Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, politics in Russia, the Great Terror under Joseph Stalin, her mother's incarceration in Butyrki Prison near Moscow, and her father's execution by firing squad on January 7, 1938. Maya wrote this memoir in Spain, where she was living at the time. Her mother was moved from the Gulag to a shabby Kazakh place called Chimkent. Meanwhile, Maya decided to go back to ballet.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya recalls the first day of World War II which plunged the entire city of Moscow into darkness as the Germans began bombing the city. Maya left the Bolshoi Theater and ballet school, rode a train with her mother and two brothers for Sverdlovsk, and made friends with fellow evacuees. She worked with Maria Mikhailovna Leontyeva for more than six months as she prepared for her graduation examination in March 1943. She danced the variation of the Queen of the Dryads from Don Quixote and passed the exam.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya talks about her family, headed by her grandfather, Mikhail Borisovich Messerer, a Moscow dentist. She also describes her mother and father. Her father belonged to the Mount Olympus of ballet. She also talks about other relatives.

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.

Chapter 1 discusses the Bolshoi Theater’s first tour of the United States in 1959. While the popular response was rapturous, critics were more cautious. They praised the company’s dancers, particularly the Soviet ballerinas, but disparaged the choreography and music. This split was gendered and allowed critics and audiences to sympathize with the performers while condemning the ostensibly more political works themselves. The chapter focuses on Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Stone Flower. Because Prokofiev’s music was so well known in the West, tour organizers hoped that his music could mediate between American expectations for Russian ballet and newer Soviet models. However, the Soviet performers failed to convince Western critics that their ballet was sufficiently “modern,” a complaint that would permeate American criticisms of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.