Bit too long and hard work keeping track of all those names - like a Russian novel! But a fair amount of well-researched stories that takes it above the gossip level. What remains? The story of Plisetskaya's elbowing her way to the top, playing the Soviet system note-perfect. And why the modernising, worker-orientated Communists kept those aristo-bourgeois shows in the repertoire but made so few about tractors and Stakhanovites. Seems they could never agree on the correct marxist message: new ideas died in the committee rooms. And of course there was hard currency potential in Swan Lake and the like. Nonetheless the ballet discipline remains, and the vicious competition behind the scenes. ( )

This was an ok read, but I'm not sure who the target audience is. It goes into way to much historical detail to be interesting to people who enjoy the arts, and if you enjoy history the timespan of the book is too long, glossing over years at a time. It is well written, well researched, and, well, dull.

I won this from a goodreads giveaway ( )

This was one of those books that was so nearly very good, but somehow the author just kept missing open goals, snatching a work of mediocrity from the cusp of success.

The basic premise was certainly enticing. In January 2013, Sergei Filin, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet was attacked in a Moscow street. This prompted considerable interest throughout Russia, dominating the press for several weeks, before it emerged that the attack had been organised by a former dancer in the Bolshoi, driven by years of resentment and jealousies seething within the company.

Simon Morrison uses this incident as the launching point for a history of the Bolshoi Ballet since its foundation in 1776, as if to demonstrate that this was merely the latest in a long series of such scandals. I found this rather contrived, however, and felt that he was struggling to spin a story out of rather weak material. A simple history of the ballet company without the search for recurrent scandal would have been far more interesting. ( )

Mostly about how the politics of Russian interfered with the art. ( )

The title is a bit of a marketing gimmick. Because of it, I was expecting a lot of gossip, but the book turns out to be a serious history of the Bolshoi theater's ballet company. It starts with the foundation of the theater, during the reign of Catherine the Great, and it takes us through wars, fires and revolutions to modern day Russia. It is a very interesting history, particularly when it focuses on the artists, their rivalries (dead cat included), their ambitions and their accomplishments. I found the chapters on the Soviet years to be fascinating, especially the one exposing all the obstacles that were put in the way of great composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich and the great dangers that could face anyone displaying too much creativity. It is a very well researched book, as one can tell from the 50 pages of reference notes at the end. I recommend it. ( )