Attitudes.

Maintaining ballet's repertoire is miserably difficult compared with the ease with which those allied theatrical arts, opera and drama, secure and honor their own pasts. The recording and reconstruction of choreography have always been a problem for dance. Now, with more viable systems of notation and better videos available, the future of dance's past should be far brighter than it is at present. Meanwhile, every major work retrieved from the dry dust of history books is a victory.

Recent months have produced almost a plethora of resuscitations in classical ballet, some more successful than others, and some more worthy, for eventually the intrinsic worth of what is being resuscitated comes into play. After all, most ballets--most works of art in general-richly deserve the short life and long death fate provides. Also, how do you restore? Do you try to keep to the letter or to the spirit of the original, or perhaps hopefully both?

Consider a few of the reproductions of the last few months: Ashton's 1952 Sylvia, Balanchine's 1965 Don Quixote, Fyodor Lupokhov's 1935 The Bright Stream, and Petipa's first great success, his 1862 The Pharaoh's Daughter, with its marvelously ornate Romantic story. First and last, what are we looking for: letter or spirit, text or texture?

For me, the most valuable of these grave-snatches was Ashton's Sylvia. Here was a great ballet, created by a master at his best, restored with an astonishing accuracy for steps and fidelity in atmosphere. It was like Shakespeare's Hermione brought magically back to life in The Winter's Tale. This resuscitation from a lost masterpiece to a living treasure was a joint production by Britain's Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, and it rightly provided the season's highlight for both companies.

The heroes here were the veteran Royal Ballet regisseur, Christopher Newton, who, together with the design restorer Peter Farmer, created a kind of miracle, and the artistic director of The Royal Ballet, Monica Mason, who had faith in the venture's practicality.

Perhaps even more faith was needed by Michael Kaiser, head of Washington's Kennedy Center, in encouraging Suzanne Farrell to forge ahead with a restoration of Balanchine's great white elephant of yore, Don Quixote, for her own modestly scaled Suzanne Farrell Ballet. Despite the assistance of dancers from the National Ballet of Canada, the Farrell company had a tough task in meeting even the ballet's logistic, let alone artistic, demands.

Now, this is a work I have always admired more than loved, and although I can respect the part it plays in the Balanchine canon, its descent into the mists of legend never caused me to lose a wink of sleep. I was perhaps grateful that my first over-enthusiastic reviews could never come back to haunt me. Never say never, as James Bond apparently remarked. Farrell has done-like Newton with Sylvia--an exceptional job in bringing this Don Quixote back to life. But with its still torpid Nicolas Nabokov music, its murky story line, and paucity of choreographic invention, it remains, despite the occasional glint of genius, a work brought back more dead than alive.

Both Sylvia and Don Quixote aimed at authentic facsimiles of their first versions, rather than any subsequent revisions. Authenticity is a word that seems to stick in the craw of any Russian company. It comes as no surprise that Pierre Lacotte (a choreographer of many steps but no phrases who specializes in pallid 19th-century pastiches) decided with his Bolshoi version of the Petipa/Pugni The Pharaoh's Daughter to ignore the Stepanov notation of Petipa's choreography in the Harvard Collection, and to choreograph and design a completely "new" version of his own. Presumably he thought he knew better than Petipa. The resultant tasteless farrago demonstrates that he did not.

Yet since the turn of the last century, Russian ballet has emphasized the dancer over the dance, with little more importance placed on choreography than the art of opera places on stage direction. As a salutary result even its old-fashioned premier companies, the Bolshoi and Kirov, have loads of dancers but no real repertoire and are now forced to go on fishing expeditions to the West, picking up what they can.

Still, Alexei Ratmansky's completely new version of The Bright Stream is a flesh and hopeful sign. Faced with no text, other than the story and the Shostakovich score, the Bolshoi's new artistic director has choreographed a beautifully satirical comedy, funny in itself, and also helped by Boris Messerer's spot-on period designs, affectionately commemorating the Soviet ballets of the 1930s. Way to go! If you can't be authentic, at least be imaginative.

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes also covers dance and theater for The New York Post.