And Then Came Dance

" 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. "--