6 FEBRUARY 1959, Page 29

Pas de Trois

The Three Graces: The Legends and the Truth. By Serge Lifer. (Cassell, 21s.) THIS account is no part of the ballet-popularising literature that floods out of publishing houses today; it is wholly concerned with fixing fresh values to the personalities of the Three Graces of twentieth-century Russian Ballet—Pavlova, Kar- savina and Spessivtseva. Its background is that of the highest professional ballet—the Russian academy of sixty or seventy years ago—and one needs, therefore, to be well versed in the recorded minutile of the lives and activities of the whole hierarchy to suck the honey out of M. Lifar's assorted bouquet of occasions, conversations, per- formances and intrigues. The triple account of these careers which were, at times, intertwined with the author's own makes an attractively pathetic, if somewhat longwinded, story. On Pav- lova the author has little new to say, though he confirms suspicions about her lack of musical sense and the reasons for her appallingly naive repertoire. Whether she toured world-wide for the love of it or at the insistence of her very managing manager-husband is still debatable. Karsavina, with her continuous and effortless perfection as a performer remaining fresh in our memories, also resists Mr. Lifar's inquiries. She seems to be the one Grace whom he unconditionally admired and with whom he had only the most tenuous contact. But in his account of Spessivtseva he does add a good deal of revealing detail about her early life in Russia. Her illegitimacy preyed on her all her life, and may well have been the root cause of that mental decline which finally overwhelmed her completely. She had, with her gorgeous exotic. Cossack beauty, a streak of peasant primitiveness and a kind of nice simplicity of mind; these qualities gave her dancing its remoteness and purity and made her Giselle probably the greatest of our century.

A. V. COTON