Maya Plisetskaya — ballerina with roots in the USSR
Maya Mikhailovna Plisetskaya was born in Moscow on 20 November 1925 into a Jewish family at the centre of Soviet ballet. Her mother, Rachel Messerer, born in Vilna in 1902, was a silent-film actress; her mother's brother Asaf Messerer and sister Sulamith Messerer were principal dancers and teachers at the Bolshoi. Her father, Mikhail Plisetski, born in Gomel in 1899, was a Soviet official who in the 1930s was consul general on Spitsbergen and head of the Soviet coal concession there. Her younger brothers, Alexander and Azari, also became dancers and ballet masters.
In April 1937 her father was arrested; he was executed on 8 January 1938. In March 1938 her mother was arrested and sent with her infant son to a labour camp in Kazakhstan, and Maya was taken in by her aunt Sulamith until her mother's release in 1941.
She had entered the Moscow Choreographic School in 1934, studying with Yelizaveta Gerdt and Agrippina Vaganova, and joined the Bolshoi Ballet on graduating in 1943. Her roles included the Dying Swan, Raymonda, Odette-Odile in Swan Lake, Kitri and Aurora, and she was admired for her technique, the expressive use of her arms and the joining of acting with dancing. She first danced abroad in 1959 and became prima ballerina of the Bolshoi in 1960. In 1958 she married the composer Rodion Shchedrin, whose arrangement of Bizet's music was used for the Carmen Suite, choreographed for her by Alberto Alonso in 1967; Maurice Béjart created Isadora for her in 1976. She danced opposite her protégé Alexander Godunov in the films Anna Karenina (1975) and Carmen Suite (1978).
She was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1959, received the Lenin Prize in 1964 and was made a Hero of Socialist Labour in 1985. She danced with the Bolshoi until 1990, and directed the Rome Opera Ballet in the mid-1980s and the Spanish National Ballet from 1987 until 1989 or 1990, sources differ. In her autobiography, I, Maya Plisetskaya, she wrote about her father's execution, her mother's exile and her own struggle for artistic freedom.
She died of a heart attack in Munich on 2 May 2015, aged eighty-nine.
"Danced with the Bolshoi until 1990; directed the Rome Opera Ballet and, from 1987, the Spanish National Ballet; in later years lived abroad and died in Munich in 2015."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Moscow (Russian SFSR, USSR)
Born in Moscow in 1925 into the Messerer-Plisetski family of dancers, she trained at the Bolshoi school, danced with the Bolshoi Ballet from 1943 to 1990 and received the Lenin Prize in 1964. Her father, a Soviet official born in Gomel, was executed in 1938.
Iconic Bolshoi ballerina.[web:54]
Moscow (Russian SFSR, USSR). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
"I never retire. I just dance more slowly."