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These qualities alone, however, would not account for their success, and it took me a while to discover the crowning virtue that completes this company's collective personality.

It is a kind of friendliness and frankness of address toward the audience which we have been led to believe was peculiar to the American ballet.

Oh-the-pain-of-it, that convention of Russian ballet whereby the girls convey the idea that they are all the daughters of impoverished Grand Dukes driven to the stage out of filial piety, is totally absent from the Kirov.

This is all the more remarkable because the Kirov is to ballet what Senator Goldwater is to American politics.

But, obviously, at least some things have changed for the better in Russia so far as the ballet is concerned.