Serge Lifar, the celebrated dancer, choreographer, and premier of the Paris Opera, who led the ballet troupe of the "Grand Opera" for many years, and was a close friend of the legendary founder of the Russian ballet, Serge Diaghilev, wrote two memoirs about him. For the first time, Serge Lifar's book about Diaghilev was published in Paris in 1939 in Russian, with a print run of 615 copies, and immediately became a bibliographic rarity. The era of the "World of Art," the first Russian seasons in Paris, which brought world fame to the Russian ballet, and, of course, the truthful and revealing pages of the memoirs about Diaghilev and their personal and creative relationships. "In my memoirs, the image of Diaghilev remained alive and, as I dare to think, truthful, but this image was too intimate: it was a sketch of the portrait of Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, not S. P. Diaghilev, the great man, creator of a new artistic culture, creator of a new aesthetics, creator of the 'World of Art' and the Russian ballet. I imagined this so vividly that alone with myself, I blushed profusely and immediately dismissed the possibility of this for myself. No, anything but this — I will never become a 'favorite'! But what then to do? I knew that if I continued to meet with Diaghilev, I would not be able to roughly and sharply push him away, I would not be able to refuse him anything, even if it was my suicide..." Serge Lifar
