The Memoirs of George Zoritch

Memories of George Zoritch as a versatile and elegant dancer with the Ballets Russes and de Cuevas companies surface with the publication of his Ballet Mystique. By writing this autobiography, Zoritch has done more than chronicle his own life; he has offered an illuminating picture of the world of all the itinerant Eastern-European ballet artists of his time. Their diverse origins, their displacement, their struggles to survive and succeed in new circumstances, their adaptation to different countries, to cinema and stage musicals, and eventually to teaching have never been more thoroughly and clearly reflected. Zoritch was born in Moscow in 1917 to an aristocratic family, but his parents' marriage was not a happy one. He was only a year and a few months old when his mother, Elena, left his father because of his infidelities, going with her two small sons to her mother in Lithuania. Elena was a talented mezzo soprano and earned money by singing, first at a nightclub in Kovno, and then at the Kovno State Opera Theater. The first ballet Zoritch saw was Coppelia, and his first ballet teacher was Pavel Nicholaievitch Petroff (not to be confused with another Paul Petroff, a Dane who became a principal Ballets Russes dancer). When he was fourteen Zoritch and his mother moved to Paris (leaving the older brother Oleg with his grandmother), and there his ballet studies continued with Theodore Vasilieff and later Olga Preobrajenska. At her studio he met his gifted contemporaries Tamara Toumanova (a very special friend until her death

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