REVIEWS 549 forced the dancers to supplement their earnings by performing in cabarets all over Petrograd, innovation became central. It was during this time (NEP) that Balanchine switched from dancing to choreographing, making works for his group, the Young Ballet, as well as for operas and plays in the Maly Theatre. There, in 1923, he choreographed dances for a new production of RimskiiKorsakov ’s Golden Cockerel, working with the ‘soon-to-be-legendary’ (p. 204) conductor Samuil Samosud. According to Kendall, Samosud ‘not only heard the music but saw it’ (p. 205), something for which Balanchine would later become renowned. The aim of the Maly was to bring the arts more in line with the new Revolutionary tradition. Later that year, George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra with music written by Iuri Shaporin was mounted, for which Balanchine again made the dances. By then he had become the city’s ‘go-to guy’ (p. 207). Had Lenin not died in January 1924, leading to the abandonment of the NEP, it is debatable whether Balanchine would have left the Soviet Union at all and American ballet would have been significantly poorer. As Kendall has shown in this well researched and highly readable book, these opportunities for Balanchine to choreograph in stimulating projects showcased his talents and gave him the background he needed for his eventual assimilation into the Ballets Russes in 1924, and ultimately for his work in the USA. Department of Dance, University of Roehampton Geraldine Morris Beasley, Rebecca and Bullock, Philip Ross (eds). Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2013. xv + 309 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £55.00. The thirteen essays in this beautifully produced volume are based on a conference held at the University of London in 2009. The publishers’ claim that it ‘offers the first comprehensive account of the breadth and depth of the British fascination with Russian and Soviet culture’ is misleading. For one thing, it focuses on only sixty or so years of a relationship that goes back several centuries; for another, as Ken Hirschkop notes in the Afterword, ‘most of the events recorded and discussed […] take place in London’ (p. 259); and finally it follows hard on the heels of Anthony Cross’s A People Passing Rude (Cambridge, 2012). Nevertheless, the essays cover a wide range of topics embracing literature, drama, history, art history, film studies, dance and music. The propensity for single volumes arising from conference papers to lack overall coherence is moreover partially offset by a tightly-focused introduction together with the authors’ mutual awareness of their colleagues’ contributions. SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 550 The chapters are organized along chronological lines. After Laurence Senelick’s survey of the presence and influence of Russia on the British stage during the nineteenth century, Michael Newton sets out to show that, although the British often regarded the figure of the Russian nihilist as a representation of Russianexcess,itcouldalsobeadaptedforconcernsthatwereclosertohome,as illustrated by Oscar Wilde’s play Vera; or the Nihilists, based on the trial of Vera Zasulich. Charlotte Alston discusses the impact of the international Tolstoyan movement on Britain, including in particular aspects such as the vegetarian movement and the international peace movement. Robert Henderson charts the history of the Free Russian Library in Whitechapel and the part played by its founder, Aleksei Teplov. Stuart Young documents the range of productions of Russian plays in London from 1900 to 1945, examining in particular the contribution of Fedor Komissarzhevskii. We then turn to two chapters on musical topics. Philip Ross Bullock explores the impact of Russian music in London from 1895 to 1926, arguing that the ‘Russian repertoire owed its success principally to figures who worked outside of and even against scholarship and criticism, and who derived their authority by appealing directly to popular taste’ (p. 116), while Ramsay Burt explores the contrasting British responses to Nizhinskii’s choreographic approach to Le Sacre du printemps within the broader context of the Ballets Russes and their European reception. Further chapters continue to demonstrate the volume’s eclectic approach. Caroline Maclean looks at the modernist magazine Rhythm, published between 1911 and 1913, in particular the...
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Dec 7, 2015
H Ulrich Hoppe 
Open Access
