Volume 13, Number 11 · December 18, 1969
Bad Housekeeping
By Eleanor Clark
Isadora Duncan: The Russian Years
by Ilya Ilyich Schneider
Harcourt, Brace & World, 221 pp., $6.95
She had a Greek phase, along with brother Raymond, dressed and danced in Greek tunics, poured a small fortune in early box-office receipts into Raymond's illusion of a well to go with their temple on a dry hill facing the Acropolis. And long and ardent study of Greek vases, in the British Museum and the Louvre, sometimes when the whole family in their crazy courage were close to starving, as she told it in My Life, did help to shape her views of the human body and her innovations in the dance. But her spirit was quite other, as she well knew herself, naming as her masters in the dance influences as far from the classic world as from the art of classical ballet, which she despised—Rousseau, Beethoven, Wagner, Nietzsche, Walt Whitman, of all people. She recalls ancient Greece to the end, though, in her proneness to accidents, only with some weird inner engineering in place of the divine, and a strange failure to achieve tragic status even under her most tragic blow.
Review, 3947 words
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