Russian Ballet

In this well-developed flagellant novel written in the form of a memoir, Mariska, a dancer and votary of the rod, reminisces about the rigorous discipline that characterised her early life as a servant on a rich landowner’s estate in the Ukraine, her experience as an apprentice dressmaker, and her training in the ballet of the Imperial Theatres.

Memoirs of a Russian Ballet Girl is a translation of Memoires d’une Danseuse Russe, which was published c. 1894, by Augustin Brancart, and is attributed to ‘E. D.’, the ostensible author of The Callipyges. (The authorship of this flagellant text, which is also available from Birchgrove Press, is uncertain: it has been attributed to Edmund Dumoulin and to a writer by the name of Desjardins.) The first English translation of Memoires d’une Danseuse Russe, complete in two volumes, was published by Charles Carrington in 1901, in a limited edition of 350 copies. It was published in three volumes by Charles Hirsch in 1903. The translator is not known.