Daria Khitrova, a respected scholar of Russian literature and culture at Harvard and an authority on Russian poetry of the Golden Age, introduces a new interdisciplinary methodology with the recent publication of her book, Impossible Project: The Story of Russian Ballet and Its Survival. Exporting a nuanced literary frame to nineteenth and early twentieth century Russian ballet history, customarily the domain of Dance Studies, Khitrova argues for a new regard of words in the cultural histories of the performing arts. Her animating premise is that the archives we choose, and the sources we use, determine the histories we write. Positing that words merit more attention than they customarily receive in ballet histories, Khitrova’s narrative privileges verbal texts for documenting dance and imparting a sense of changing values that define ballet histories. Her book is a spirited demonstration of both her theory in action and her simultaneous testing of it.

A meticulous reader of literary texts, Khitrova’s archival research and nuanced parsing of discourse about ballet, including little-known works of prose, poetry, caricature drawings, and letters is impressive. She positions Russian Ballet as engaged in an epic struggle for relevance and survival. In the process a hidden story of how the shifting values and allegiances of the intelligentsia shaped this survival unfolds. She complicates the more customary story portrayed in the west of Russian ballet’s less contested ascension to preeminence on the world stage.

Drawing data points from lexical shifts in “ballet lore,” the phrase she coins to describe “thoughts and texts about ballet,” Khitrova argues ballet’s survival in Russia over two centuries was anything but certain and that it was legitimized in part because it was embraced by literary intellectuals. Works ranging from Letters on Dancing and Ballets by eighteenth-century theorist Jean-Georges Noverre to Russian critic André Levinson’s reviews, Lev Tolstoi’s descriptions of dance in War and Peace (1869), and Viktor Shklovskii’s little known 1922 essay, “On the Lofty Shore,” are read for their revelations of tensions and debates surrounding the public and intellectual reception of ballet.

In her choice of the word “Project” in the title of her book, Khitrova wisely invites us to think of history as both a tool of prediction and a form of cognition rather than just a record of the past. Complicating this are the many verbal and literary asides and detours she makes along the way resulting in linguistic tangles that at times take us further from the dance itself, presumably the end point of all the words. While noting that in ballet any act of repetition is also an act of recreation, Khitrova says little about the role of teaching and training dancers as essential parts of how progress/evolution/change, and, yes, survival, is enacted.

Khitrova is not shy about questioning some of the major received histories from leading historians of Russian ballet. She calls Vera Krasovskaia’s multi volume history, Ballet Theatre in Russia (1958–72) “A Khrushchev-era account of nineteenth-century ballet … a brilliant, if biased, piece of historiographic lore” because it conceives of ballet history in Russia from the standpoint of ballet’s historic triumphs (6). Instead, Khitrova asks us to regard as “double jeopardy” the tensions that threatened ballet as an art form in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Russia by highlighting how the democratic press decried it as socially and aesthetically irrelevant and an institution that was running at a fiscal loss. “How would or did ballet survive against all odds?” she asks rhetorically. Prominent among the voices displaying “hostile suspicion” are figures on the margins, including the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, whose sharp-edged parody questioned the very status of ballet as a true art.

In arguing that cultural histories, especially those about Russian ballet, are doomed to be partial if they rely too heavily on “ballet-as-a-show” over “ballet lore,” Khitrova sets up a dialectic. This premise productively complicates a story commonly thought of in the west as one of ascent rather than a struggle for survival played out through words. A constraint is that the dance itself can get lost in Khitrova’s parsing of literary texts, as bodies are read as imitating and reflecting language rather than initiating and speaking independently through movement. Khitrova casts a wide net as to what constitutes the verbal. “Ballet is verbal, first on the strength of its incessant lore and second, because of its uncanny ability to convey messages, albeit by nonverbal means,” she writes (197).

What is most innovative about Khitrova’s argument is the prominence she gives to words as not just chronicling but reshaping and maintaining ballet. She argues that ballet lore should be counted on par with steps (pas), and mime (narrative), as essential to the complex dynamics sustaining the art form. “Deprived of the verbal tradition,” she avers about early Russian ballet, “the art of ballet would not survive. Ballet equals ballet plus reflections on ballet: on this, I am in agreement with Noverre” (16). Yet, Noverre in his revolutionary eighteenth century treatise was also advocating an evolved ballet that would no longer need the verbal support of narrative but would instead be spoken through movement of a silent, but sentient body, one that would be as fluent as a “beautiful language.”

One of the more interesting innovations of Impossible Project comes from Khitrova’s tracing the etymology of specific terms beginning with the word “ballet” itself. Reading back through numerous editions of the Dictionary of the French Academy, she identifies what she calls the cutting of the umbilical cord between “ball” and “ballet” in the 1718 edition. She dates the awakening of dancers’ expressive capacities of their bodies from the severing of these two terms allowing them to represent through movements and poses rather than merely costumes and masks.

However, at times Khitrova’s word-centric approach elides a more nuanced reading of the communicative capacity of the dancing body. “The default setting of ballet was the convention of muteness,” she writes (187). Yet the common meaning of mute as being unable to speak and express is a misnomer when applied to dance. A nonverbal text, dance’s fluency lies elsewhere: in physical expression. It is like calling a violinist mute because she draws her bow over the strings rather than talks. This privileging of more literal definitions of terms leads to other confusions. For example, Khitrova uses the word “virtuosity” as synonymous with flashy showiness, what she calls “turning every step into a feat,” but in dance the term is generally used positively to describe excellence (33). Similarly, regarding the common praise given to a neatly executed ballet movement as “clean,” Khitrova curiously surmises that anything less must thus be “dirty” (174). At other points her reading of Russian texts in relation to the political moment is richly insightful. Commenting on edits Ivan Vsevolozhskii made in Perrault’s fairytale, The Sleeping Beauty, she says: “(it) worked like a crystal ball, reflecting back to you what you wished to see when gazing into it: the joy of eternal awakening or the torpor of a hundred years’ sleep” (141).

One of the liabilities of Khitrova’s frame of “ballet lore” is that if the texts are unreliable, arguments based on them do not work. Examples are her entries on Vaslav Nijinsky and Isadora Duncan. Writing about Nijinsky, whose major creative career unfolded outside of Russia, Khitrova relies heavily on his widow Romola Nijinska’s unauthorized revision of his diary that chronicles his descent into madness. Widely discredited because of Romola’s edits and the introduction she commissioned and controlled from psychotherapist Alfred Adler, Khitrova nonetheless uses this as the basis for her argument that Nijinsky stopped talking when he stopped dancing. Scholar Joan Acocella’s definitive translation of the diary and psychiatrist Peter Ostwald’s book based on his medical assessment of Nijinsky’s hospital records tell a different story. They quote from his Bellevue asylum medical records documenting that Nijinsky talked and repeatedly questioned staff after he went mad, asking Why am I locked up? Why are the windows closed? Why am I never left alone? and, if approached: Don’t touch me.

Khitrova makes useful additions to our knowledge about Isadora Duncan’s reception in Russia and the cultural curiosity about dance her performances inspired. But her essentializing of Duncan as “the embodiment of amateurship,” “Unschooled in dancing sur les pointes,” and “Oblivious of cultural hierarchies” because she danced to Ludwig van Beethoven and Frédéric Chopin, puts a falsely negative lens on her (192). Duncan scholars Ann Daly, Elizabeth Kendall and others have documented Duncan’s early training in ballet. Her dancing to Beethoven and Chopin was transformative for dance and especially ballet in Russia. It was after seeing her that Michel Fokine created his romantic reverie, Les Sylphides, using the music of Chopin.

The Impossible Project shows how much is possible if we dig deeper into archives adjacent to dance. While we cannot all reread War and Peace to ferret out brief descriptions of dance, we can give more regard to how a wider range of verbal texts nest around histories of dance.