- Royce Fellowship
Elizabeth
Stern
Concentration
Comparative Literature/Slavic Studies
Award Year
2007
Ballet was at the center of Russia’s modernist movement during the first part of the 20th century in St Petersburg. Elizabeth's project examined the works of two St.Petersburg ballet critics, Aleksandr Benois and Akim Volynsky, and their significance to the development of Russian ballet. Both critics stood as relatively conservative figures who called for the revitalization of ballet by looking to its classical past. Their critical language fuses the secular philosophy of the West to Russia’s strong spiritual tradition, transforming ballet into a kind of religious experience capable of saving Russia from the excesses (artistic and political) of modernism.