...[a] masterful book ... it offers a rich, fascinating and nuanced examination of the role of the arts in Russian history ... Mr. Morrison recounts this struggle between art and politics, with all its depressing collateral damage, to great effect.
An intoxicating mix of grandeur and gossip, it charts luminous performances on stage and sordid machinations in the wings from the age of Catherine the Great to that of Vladimir Putin ... [a] sweeping and authoritative history.
...delivers what its title promises: struggles and intrigues, crimes and punishments, imperial jewels and Soviet medals ... That this is a backstage view, a look through the keyhole, is both this book’s strength and limitation...The insider look in Bolshoi Confidential is incredibly rich and makes this book a page-turner; the moment it steps outside the Bolshoi, Mr. Morrison’s narrative becomes somewhat cruder and less compelling ... Some of the book’s characters, especially those cast in secondary roles, seem unrealistically flat ... its central figures, like Plisetskaya, jump off its pages complex and alive.
All of this makes for good, even great, fodder. Bolshoi Confidential is a 512-page-long history that includes sex scandals, double-suicide pacts, bribery, arson, executions, prostitution rings, embezzlement, starving orphans, dead cats in lieu of flowers, and ballerinas refusing to shave their armpits ... [Morrison] illustrates the madness well, often doing so with an understated sense of fate’s ironies. The story loses its thread, however, in a forest of facts, the accumulation of which, no matter how interesting, don’t always make history. Sometimes the details lift off the page, arresting the narrative flow in order to reveal the symbolic aura of an act or milieu; often they don’t.
If you are intrigued by Russian history, Bolshoi Confidential will fascinate you. If you love ballet, this story of one of the world's oldest and greatest ballet companies should be a star attraction ... Morrison gives the Bolshoi a first-rate historical treatment. Thoroughly scholarly and simultaneously astute and clear-voiced ... Never ignoring or excusing the horrors of Soviet history, Morrison conveys a grim humor at the thought of officials dictating ballets featuring factory workers and their machines.
