I, Maya Plisetskaya

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 448 pages
• Published by: Yale University Press October 1, 2001
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0300088574
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0300088571
• Book Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Weighs: 1.5 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
This is much more than an artistic memoir it is a courageous account of an era. Plisetskaya was born in Moscow in 1925, joined the Bolshoi Ballet in 1943, and became one of its most acclaimed prima ballerinas (and one of the best-known in the West), performing into the 1990s. But as she makes clear, her life has been one of daily struggle. Plisetskaya's father, a rising apparatchik in the coal industry, was executed in 1935. Her mother, an actress, was then sentenced to eight years in prison. Taken in by a ballerina aunt, Pisetskaya was allowed to continue her dance training; but a pattern of persecution by authorities had been established. Even after she was well established at the Bolshoi, and despite years of pleading, Plisetskaya was forbidden to tour outside the country until 1959, and then she went under tight guard, always returning home, even during the years of the notable defections of Nureyev, Makarova and Baryshnikov. In Moscow, she was trotted out to perform for visiting dignitaries (Mao, Ribbentrop and Tito among them) and was routinely humiliated and artistically encumbered by a punitive bureaucracy. Plisetskaya says she's unable to put into words exactly why she never defected her marriage to a Russian composer was part of it. Every page attests to bitter, poignant regrets. Her account is sometimes rambling, sometimes garbled in translation; but Plisetskaya makes horrifyingly clear the life of an honored artist in her homeland: the artistic paucity (in contrast with the "Balanchine years" in the U.S.) is one element; the degradation of daily life for Soviet citizens is another; and Plisetskaya, as is her reputation, pulls no punches here. (Oct.)Forecast: Plisetskaya is a major ballet star, and her memoirs will sell well among dance lovers.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker
In 1937, when the Bolshoi's acclaimed spitfire ballerina was eleven, the K.G.B. came at dawn to arrest her father ("My mother, unkempt, pregnant with a big belly, weeping and clutching… My father, white as snow, dressing with trembling hands"). They shot him, and sent his wife to a prison camp. Such events were common under Stalin. What is new in this memoir is the description of the death-by-inches humiliation of life in the Soviet theatres: the dancers informing on each other in order to get a little something (a role, a place on the tour list); the dog food these supposedly glamorous Russian artists ate in their American hotel rooms in order to eke out their per diems; and, at every turn, some apparatchik, violent and fearful, blocking one's way. The book is bitter and shrieky, but no more than is just.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Reader Reviews
Read this and know what a great artist is all about. She is the ballerina par excllence, and Makarova would agree. Her dying swan was so overwhelingly great in person, which I saw three times, that audiences yelled for thirty minutes for her to just bow to them again and again. She repeated the dying swan or part of it at one performance I attended and there was pandemoinium. Her arms are perfect wings, waving naturally in the winds that she made you belive in. She metamorphosed herself into a swan before our eyes. Indeed, her other ballet scenes were of the smae magnitude. Her examples from Giselle, Manon Lescaut etc. made huge fans out of haters of ballet. When we went back stage to get autographs there were over a thousand people waiiting to see her, touch, applaud her once more. To read her book is to know the horrors of the Soviet system of old, with its repression of people like her. We had only small samples of her art, and now her great Autobiography...Plisetskaya will live forever in the records of ballet, even Nureyev and Barishnikov in thier spheres can only touch her greatness..Makarova is the closet , very much so, but Madame Plisetskaya is the ballet Diva of the universe, and this book will help you see why. There are films of her dancing that mezmerize, even through the weirdness of TV imagery and snow. Buy this book and begin to know about the art of ballet by its supreme practioner.