Isadora: A Sensational Life by Peter s> Kurth (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 727 collection of clearly written essays, based on recent research, and including some usefulwebsites,will be welcome. If it helps to bolsterthe studyof Tolstoi in UK Russian departmentsit will be doublywelcome. Department ofEuropean Studies andModern Languages MICHAEL PURSGLOVE University ofBath Kurth, Peter. Isadora. A Sensational Life.Little, Brown and Company, London, 2002. xiii + 652 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Index. ?25.00. THE life and art of the American dancer Isadora Duncan (i877-I927) were intimately connected with Russia. Isadora first visited the country in 1904, and eventually established her Moscow Dance School in I921 , before embarking upon a tempestuous marriage with the poet Sergei Esenin. Seventy-five years after her death, Isadora remains a controversial figure, whose pioneering art and flamboyant life continue to fascinate authors in America and in Russia. SubstantialAmerican monographs in recent years include FredrikaBlair's sympathetic biography, Isadora:Portrait of theArtistAs A Woman (New York, I986), Lillian Loewenthal's conscientious study, The Search for Isadora.The Legend andLegacy ofIsadora Duncan(Pennington,NJ, I993), and the splendidly illustrated volume, Life IntoArt: IsadoraDuncanand Her World(ed. Dor~e Duncan, Carol Pratland Cynthia Splatt,New Yorkand London, I993). Isadora has fared less well, however, in Russia, where the commercial marketsince I989 haslargelybeen floodedby translationsof English-language worksof the I920S and 1930s, such as Isadora'sautobiography,MyLife(New York, I927), and the memoirs of Irma Duncan and Allan Ross Macdougall, Mary Desti and Lola Kinel. Some 'original' Russian-language booklets do little more than rehash familiar material about the stormy relationship between Isadora and Esenin. Such, for instance, are the inessential offerings by Nonna Golikova (Istoriia liubvi.Aisedora Dunkan.Sergei Esenin, Moscow, I998) and by N. E. Makarova (Sergei Esenini Aisidora [Aisedora] Dunkan, in the series 'Legendy liubvi', Minsk, I999). A welcome exception is the wide-ranging, informative anthology, Aisedora:Gastroliv Rossii (comp. T. S. Kasatkina, Moscow, I992). Any foreboding aroused by the subtitleof PeterKurth's new biography ('A SensationalLife')is immediatelydispelledby the author'scalm and measured tone. Isadora is an impressivelythorough, scholarlyyet readable presentation of the dancer's life, supportedby copious illustrationsand over sixtypages of meticulous notes. Kurth declares at the outset: 'This is not a "dance book". Isadora needs rescuing from dancers more particularly, from dance scholars,whose ideas on her impact and contributionto the artrisefrequently to a brilliance of their own but who speak in a language she didn't know, about a subjectshe dismissedout of hand' (p. x). By perusingand evaluatinga mass of published and archival material, Kurth has achieved the fullest and most indispensablebiographyof IsadoraDuncan. The narrative proceeds at an unhurried pace, in six parts and thirty chapters, from Isadora'sbirth in San Franciscoto her death, fiftyyears later, 728 SEER, 8I, 4, 2003 in Nice. The inexpressibly horrible death of her two children in I9I3 is movingly related (pp. 293-302), and her lesbian affair with Mercedes de Acosta in I926-27 is briefly chronicled (pp. 523-27, 543-44). Rightly, the author seeks not to obtrude, although he is not afraid to voice judicious criticism where necessary. Thus, the waywardly brilliant Gordon Craig is exposed in all his awful egoism (pp. I35, I8o, 2I3), while Isadora herself is shown as reprehensiblyracist at times (p. 325, see also pp. 352, 385). Isadora has often been idolized as inspired, exalted, intelligent, cultured, instinctive, emotional, radical and undaunted. Kurth fair-mindedly also quotes a withering counter-claim by Max Eastman, who saw Isadora as 'a smatterer and a mental dilettante':'She had made a cult of impulse and impracticality, rapture and abandon. She had dimmed her own native good sense, drugged her cerebrumconsistently,all her life long, with romantic notions of what her classicart, and artin general, demanded and consistedof' (p. 363). Concerning Isadora and Esenin, this biography offers valuable new informationby quoting extractsfrom the diaryof Irma Duncan (pp. 6iI- I3) and the manuscript memoirs of Joseph U. Milward (see, for instance, PP. 442-43, 452-53, 455, 472, 477, 479). There is the occasional error or misprint. Thus, bosonozhka is wrongly rendered as bozonzhka (p. I5i) and boznozhka(p. 152), dingy(p. 424) is Isadora's approximation of the non-slang word den'gi(money), and Roslavleva is persistentlymisspelled as Roslasleva (PP. 58 I-82, 593...