When Leonid Massine And Sergei Prokofiev Tried To Get Their Ballet Past Soviet Apparatchiks And Into The Bolshoi

Prokofiev in particular had hoped to turn Le Pas d’acier (The Dance of Steel) from the quasi-folkloric confection Diaghilev had made of it into a real socialist work of art. Didn’t work. It wasn’t pretty. In an excerpt from Bolshoi Confidential, Simon Morrison tells the head-shaking story.