A False Step

...In any case, it didn't matter because she had so adapted her dancing to her abilities that she made virtues out of everything she did, and there are some technicalities in those brief dances which no dancer today could equal...

...Absent altogether is any discussion of Pavlova's relationships with the dancers in her company...

...Fonteyn further explains that the volume she is presenting consists mainly of extracts from interviews with Pavlova and other previously published materials . In fact, it is scarcely more than a glorified scrapbook taken in part from the subject's own press clipping albums and then lavishly illustrated with photographs—familiar and unfamiliar, onstage and off...

...This book's solution to such problems is to ignore them...

...This was accepted by Richard Buckle in his 1979 book, Diaghilev, and by Keith Money in his 1982 Anna Pavlova: Her Life and Art...

...The English Fonteyn has been seen by millions who never experienced a live ballet performance but discovered her art on the screens of movie houses and television sets...

...Neither one owed her success primarily to virtuosity in high jumps, long balances or extra-long, rapid spins...

...Both preferred to conceal ability in the service of art...

...To begin with, Dame Margot's Introduction reveals that she had "collaborators" : Roberta and John Lazzarini, the devotees and founders of the embryonic Pavlova Museum in London who came out with a big book of their own, Pavlova: Repertoire of a Legend, in 1980...

...The editors would have done well, I think, to include Fokine's account and his recollections of Pavlova creating the waltz duet in Chopiniana, subsequently better known as Les Sylphides...

...One gets merely a passing reference to the "small enigma" of her marriage from this compilation...

...It has often been said that she had poor technique and weak feet, criticisms also made at times of Dame Margot...

...As she showed in her autobiography, though, Dame Margot is no introspective, self-analyzing artist...

...Yet they could pull off amazing feats...

...There is, in sum, far too little Fonteyn in this book to justify her name being used to imply authorship...

...Any such expectations are dashed, however, as soon as one opens this book...

...What Fonteyn has supplied is an italicized linking commentary that is extremely brief and occasionally trite...

...True, it is not Dame Margot's fault that she has nothing fresh to tell us...

...The two are the only ballerinas whose names are household words, their male equivalents ofcoursebeingVasilyNijinskyandRu-dolf Nureyev...

...Fonteyn does report that when she was young she used to sew thick stitching on the toes of her ballet slippers, a la Pavlova, "to preserve the satin and soften the sound of blocked toe on stage...

...Despite numerous visits to her homeland, the Lazzarinis do not seem to have come up with new information on Anna's father or, indeed, on other unanswered questions about her early life...

...Dame Margot Fonteyn may be the best of our time, and is definitely the best-known...

...It contains no description at all of the origin of The Dying Swan...

...My own biography, Anna Pavlova, suggested 10 years ago that her real father was the wealthy banker Lazar Poliakoff...

...or which "technicalities" present-day dancers, so renowned for athletic technique, could not equal...

...If doubts about Fokine's accuracy were an objection, the same applies to much that Pavlova wrote and said about herself...

...how she managed to reach St...

...It is unclear, for example, whether she and Dandre married, although she often claimed they did...

...We probably will never know exactly what Pavlova owed him, or to what extent she helped him escape from Russia when he was threatened with prosecution for financial irregularities...

...it may have first been performed by another dancer...

...I was less than six," she explained in a Ballet News interview...

...And here, at the least, is a missed opportunity to discuss how Pavlova "adapted" her dancing...

...She did—once...

...As the number of works on the ballerina that I have already cited should suggest, there is little point, short of new scholarship, in yet another one...

...For instance, after she quotes Pavlova saying, "When I am doing such hard labor, I need my little comforts," Fonteyn comments, "Ah, yes, don'twe all know that feeling...

...The Russian Pavlova introduced ballet to audiences across the globe, touring India, Japan, Australia, Europe, and the United States...

...Because of their similarity, Fonteyn seems exceptionally well qualified to find the secret of Pavlova's success...

...Its first item, recording her birth, gives her father's name as Matvey Pavlov, although she is now generally thought to have been illegitimate and partly Jewish...

...Pavlova's mother was a washerwoman...

...a noisy shoe was a sin...

...Petersburg's Maryinsky Theater at the time of its highest standards without the turn-out normally regarded as a sine qua non for a classical dancer...

...Yet surely Pavlova would have known how "turned in" she was from mirrors or her teachers...

...Still, she might have been persuaded to compare her career with Pavlova's, or to reflect on the differences between ballet then and now...

...if her actual father was Matvey Pavlov, an Army private, these luxuries need explaining...

...The "selective chronology" at the back of Pavlova, Portrait of a Dancer is overly selective, occupying only one page...

...Fonteyn does not even indicate in this patchwork whether she ever saw Pavlova dance...

...A "portrait" of Pavlova by Fonteyn therefore raises high hopes of a great ballerina's unique insights into her greatest predecessor...

...Dandre was unable to provide proof after her death when he unsuccessfully claimed to be her legal heir...

...Keith Money's life of Pavlova is quite detailed, possibly overdetailed, while the Lazzarinis' book is as complete a record of her repertoire as has been done...

...I can't pretend I was overwhelmed...

...The one technical observation in the book is thus based on Pavlova's films, where she was "amazingly 'turned in.'" Fonteyn adds that "very possibly" Pavlova herself "didn't realize just how much until she saw those films...

...One looks in vain through these notes for some clue to Pavlova's special appeal, lasting fame, technical strengths and weaknesses...

...The book does mention her childhood country holidays, as well as private lessons with Enrico Cecchetti, the famous Italian ballet master then on the staff at the Maryinsky, but it fails to consider how they were paid for...

...Reviewed by Oleg Kerensky Contributor, "The New Statesman" Anna Pavlova, possibly the outstanding ballerina of all time, is certainly the most famous...

...Quite apart from Pavlova's private life, there is uncertainty about the date of the initial performance of The Dying Swan, Pavlova's most famous solo...

...The possibility exists that Michel Fokine did not create it for her, as he states in his memoirs...

...I wish she had gone on to tell us when or why it ceased to be a sin, or if she approves of the tapping noise made today by sylphs and swans and even by some ballerinas...

...Nor is any note taken of the widespread reports that various people—including the influential critic Valerian Svetlov, who praised Pavlova's first performances, and businessman Victor Dandre, later her life-companion—were her lovers and protectors at the beginning of her career...

...So it is perhaps hardly surprising that she can no more explain Pavlova than she could explain herself...

...Many of her students went on to train today's dancers...

...I cannot resist pointing out that Sir Frederick Ashton's evocative Preface, too, is remarkably similar to the one he kindly wrote for my brief work...