Celebrating two Russian greats. (Between The Covers).

I, Maya Plisetskaya by Maya Plisetskaya, translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2001. 386 pages, illustrations. $35. ISBN: 0-300-08857-4.

Alexander Pushkin: Master Teacher of Dance by Gennady Albert, translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: The New York Public Library. 2001. 204 pages, illustrations. $22.50. ISBN: 0-87104-452-8

IN 1962, WHEN THE BOLSHOI BALLET CAME TO this country for the second time, my report on prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya mentioned that everything she did elicited hysterical applause and bravos, especially from the standees.

I did not agree with them. Instead, I found her attack aggressive. But this very trait, coupled with her keen intelligence, has made her autobiography, I, Maya Plisetskaya, a strong and honest book. More than honest, it's the image of a major artist courageously butting her head against the furtiveness and sadism of Stalinist and post-Stalinist bureaucracy. She was constantly tailed by the KGB, constantly prevented from performing abroad, even though she had made no effort to defect. Instead, every time a foreign dignitary turned up in Moscow, she was assigned to appear there in Swan Lake. She danced it 800 times.

Why did it take years to earn her first trip abroad? For one thing, she is Jewish. Her mother was Rakhil Messerer, the film actress; her uncle was Asaf Messerer, one of the Bolshoi's leading teachers. When she was still a child, her father, an engineer, was arrested by the secret police. He was executed, and her mother spent eight years in jail for having refused to incriminate him. Too late, the Khrushchev regime exonerated him.

The element of stability in the child Plisetskaya's life was her passion for ballet and her study at the Moscow Choreographic School. She was an exceptionally diligent worker whose only regret, as her classes progressed, was that she had little opportunity to study with Agrippina Vaganova, the most important teacher of her era. (Vaganova spent most of her career in St. Petersburg, where the Maryinsky Ballet school was named after her.) Perhaps under Vaganova's tutelage, Plisetskaya's style would have been more poetic, closer to that of the three dancers she most admired: Marina Semenova, Alla Shelest, and Galina Ulanova. As it was, her performing style, as well as the warp and woof of her life, was one of passionate contrast. The most serene current was and is her marriage to composer Rodion Shchedrin. He is as vivid a composer as she was a dancer.

At the time when most ballerinas retire quietly into teaching, Plisetskaya busily searched for new roles that would offer the challenges she still craved. She also took to choreography. Alberto Alonso created the popular Carmen Suite for her. Roland Petit gave her La Rose Malade. Maurice Bejart taught her his Bolero and then created Isadora and Leda for her. Against enormous bureaucratic opposition, Plisetskaya staged Anna Karenina. Next came Chekhov's The Seagull and Lady With the Dog. She premiered the latter on her sixtieth birthday. Shchedrin did the scores for the last three.

The photographs in I, Maya Plisetskaya include a classroom shot taken in 1987 in New York. Baryshnikov and Plisetskaya are poised in attitude. How much it tells about their individual training: Plisetskaya's raised arm is further back than her ear, while Baryshnikov's is in line with his ear. His arm a la seconde is relaxed, curving easily from the torso, while hers is pulled back, with the chest jutting forward. Her raised foot is higher than the knee; his is in line with the knee. He was trained by Alexander Pushkin at the Leningrad Choreographic School.

What made Pushkin so special? What made him produce virtuosi like Baryshnikov, Nureyev, and Valery Panov? As a Kirov Ballet soloist, Pushkin had been in every way a perfectionist, caring not so much about "how much" or "how many" but "how precisely executed." This extended into his teaching, which began early and continued for thirty-eight years.

Gennady Albert, author of Alexander Pushkin: Master Teacher of Dance, was a Pushkin student (he is currently managing director of the Eifman Ballet), and his book includes fascinating outlines of some of Pushkin's classes. They were aesthetically so logical and yet so challenging that the participants had a true sense of accomplishment as they executed them, and there were always clusters of observers around the open studio doors. What they saw was the very essence of classical dance: its constant attention to line, its flow, and its lightness. They also saw a teacher who enjoyed calling forth each student's individuality, the aggregate of traits that would make him distinctive onstage.

Pushkin was so beloved by his young men that when he died suddenly in 1970 at the age of 63, Albert recounts, Baryshnikov was said to have "smashed his hands blindly at the wall, the door, the glass of the lobby of Pushkin's house."

Both I, Maya Plisetskaya and Alexander Pushkin: Master Teacher of Dance were gracefully translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis. They are generously illustrated, but each lacks an index, an amenity especially missed in these expressive tributes to professionalism.

Senior Editor/Advisor Doris Hering has been writing and reviewing for Dance Magazine since 1945.