Of
Frank Nienhuysen
The war did that too. He made it so that Olga Smirnova had to put the music of the rehearsals out of her head, which she otherwise even masters while eating. The dance variations she thinks about even when she goes to sleep. “It’s an addiction,” she once said. And the war managed that the Russian prima ballerina at the Moscow Bolshoi stops. “She simply never leaves the theater,” said her famous teacher Marina Kondratieva, herself a ballet legend, about Smirnova’s willingness to work. Now she even leaves Russia.