Maya Plisetskaya

Maya Plisetskaya was a dancer, choreographer, director, and actress from the Soviet Union and Russia. After the Soviet collapse, she also held Lithuanian and Spanish citizenship. She performed at the Bolshoi Theatre during the Soviet period, first under Leonid Lavrovsky and later under Yury Grigorovich, with whom she eventually clashed openly. When Galina Ulanova retired in 1960, Plisetskaya became the company's prima ballerina assoluta.

Her childhood was shaped by political persecution. Her father, a Soviet official named Mikhail Plisetski, was arrested in 1937 and executed the following year during the Great Purge. Her mother, actress Rachel Messerer, was arrested in 1938 and spent several years imprisoned and then in a concentration camp with her infant son. The older children faced being sent to an orphanage but were taken in by relatives. Maya was adopted by her aunt Sulamith Messerer, while her brother Alexander was raised by their uncle Asaf Messerer; both Alexander and Azary later became Bolshoi soloists.

Plisetskaya began ballet training at the Bolshoi Ballet School at age nine and first performed at the Bolshoi Theatre at eleven. She studied under Elizaveta Gerdt and her aunt Sulamith Messerer. After graduating in 1943 at eighteen, she joined the Bolshoi Ballet and quickly became a leading soloist. In 1959, during the Thaw, she started touring abroad with the Bolshoi and later on her own. The Soviet Union used her fame as a national ballerina to showcase its achievements during the Cold War. Nikita Khrushchev called her not only the best ballerina in the USSR but the best in the world.

As an artist, she was endlessly curious about new roles and dance styles and enjoyed experimenting onstage. She remained with the Bolshoi until 1990, gaining international exposure and raising the standard for ballerinas in both technical skill and dramatic presence. She created many leading roles, including Juliet in Lavrovsky's *Romeo and Juliet*, Phrygia in Yakobson's *Spartacus* (1958), and several in Grigorovich's ballets: the Mistress of the Copper Mountain in *The Stone Flower* (1959), Aurora in *The Sleeping Beauty* (1963), and Mahmene Banu in a 1965 work. Alberto Alonso's *Carmen Suite* (1967) was choreographed specifically for her, and Maurice Béjart's *Isadora* (1976) was another signature piece. Her most acclaimed roles included Kitri in *Don Quixote*, Odette-Odile in *Swan Lake*, and *The Dying Swan*, which she first danced as a student under Sulamith Messerer. A fellow dancer said her dramatic portrayal of Carmen, reportedly her favorite role, cemented her legend and made the ballet a landmark in the Bolshoi repertoire. Her husband, composer Rodion Shchedrin, wrote scores for several of her ballets.

Though she became an international superstar and a continuous box-office hit worldwide, the Soviet Union treated her as a favored cultural emissary. She toured extensively during the same years when other prominent dancers—Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, Alexander Godunov, Mikhail Baryshnikov—defected, but she always refused to do so. In 1991, she published her autobiography, *I, Maya Plisetskaya*.

She was born on 20 November 1925 in Moscow to a prominent family of Lithuanian Jewish descent, most of whom worked in theater or film. Her mother, Rachel Messerer, was a silent-film actress. Her maternal uncle Asaf Messerer was a Bolshoi principal dancer, and her maternal aunt Sulamith Messerer was a Bolshoi prima ballerina. Her father, Mikhail Plisetski, was a diplomat, engineer, and mine director who loved ballet but was not in the arts. Her brothers Alexander and Azari became renowned ballet masters, and her niece Anna also became a ballerina. She was a cousin of theater artist Boris Messerer.

In 1938, her father was arrested and later executed during Stalin's purges. Ballet scholar Jennifer Homans noted that he was a committed Communist who had been proclaimed a national hero for his work in the Soviet coal industry and was given one of the USSR's first manufactured cars by Vyacheslav Molotov. Her mother was arrested soon after and sent with her seven-month-old baby Azary to a labor camp in Kazakhstan for three years. Maya was taken in by her aunt Sulamith Messerer until her mother's release in 1941. During those years, while barely a teenager, she faced terror, war, and dislocation, and took refuge in ballet and the Bolshoi Theater. She had lived with her family in Spitzbergen from 1932 to 1936 while her father supervised coalmines in Barentsburg. She later studied at the Bolshoi School under former Mariinsky ballerina Elizaveta Gerdt. She first performed at the Bolshoi at eleven, graduated in 1943 at eighteen, and joined the Bolshoi Ballet, where she performed until 1990.

From the start, she was a different kind of ballerina. She spent very little time in the corps de ballet after graduation and was quickly named a soloist. Her bright red hair and striking looks made her glamorous on and off stage. She was remarkably fluid in her movements.