Culture January 1, 1

The Russian critic Akim Volynsky came late to the art of classical dance but brought to his seat on the aisle a formidable background in philosophy, aesthetics, and polemics—the perfect background, really. He also brought the kind of inflamed idealism, a love of beauty with a capital b, that one associates with nineteenth-century aesthetes: the German Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Davidsbund. Born Chaim Leib Flekser in 1861, to a family of booksellers, Volynsky resembles a character in a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose surreal stories provided the basis for two classic ballets, Coppélia and The Nutcracker. He possessed