Ballet's magic kingdom : selected writings on dance in Russia, 1911-1925 / Akim Volynsky ; translated, edited, and with an introduction and notes by Stanley J. Rabinowitz.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

We find out not only about the vicissitudes of Pavlova's alimentary canal but also about the skeletal structure of her knees, the size of her arch, the height of her jumps, her "sensuous" lower lip and the slope of her "ravishing" shoulders. All this and a clear explanation of the layers of her ample soul. What more could one want to know about the ballerina, long dead, whose name evokes, more than any other, the art she practiced - the art that plumbs the depths of the physical to reach, on occasion, the mystical? "Ballets Magic Kingdom" is the first English-language edition of the dance writings of Akim Volynsky, one of the greatest writers on ballet (don't worry, nobody has heard of him) in the whole 350 or so years of the art form's relatively brief history. The book, covering the years 1911-25, has been lovingly edited and translated by Stanley J. Rabinowitz, a professor of Russian at Amherst who directs the college's Center for Russian Culture and holds the Henry Steele Commager professorship there. The list of great writers on dance is short; a three-dimensional, nonverbal art, existing only in transient live performance, provides an excellent disincentive to use language. Not since the precise and furious writings of Lincoln Kirstein have we read (in English) such informed, cultured, and unapologetically opinionated prose on ballet.