Her first appearance at the Empire, in Leicester Square, long the home of such ballet as London had at that time, was under her own name as Lydia Kyaksht. When the Empire’s manager in dismay inquired: “How _can_ one pronounce a name like that?” he welcomed the suggestion that the pronunciation would be made easier for British tongues if the second “k” were dropped. So it became Kyasht, and Kyasht it has remained. Kyasht was the first Russian dancer to win a following in London, and in her first appearances there she was partnered by Adolph Bolm, later to be identified with Diaghileff and still later with ballet development in the United States. The Empire ballets were, for the most part, of a very special type of corn. Kyasht appeared in, among others, a little something called _The Water Nymph_ and in another something charmingly titled _First Love_, with my old friend and Anna Pavlova’s long-time partner, Alexandre Volinine, as her chief support. There was also a whimsy called _The Reaper’s Dream_, in which Kyasht appeared as the “Spirit of the Wheatsheaf,” seen and pursued in his dream by a reaper, the while the _corps de ballet_, costumed as an autumn wheatfield, watched and wondered. Most important, however, was Kyasht’s appearance in the first English presentation, on 18th May, 1911, of Delibes’ _Sylvia_. _Sylvia_, one of the happiest of French ballets, had had to wait thirty-five years to reach London, although the music had long been familiar there. Even then, London saw a version of a full-length, three-act work, which, for the occasion, had been cut and compressed into a single act. It took forty-one more years for the uncut, full-length work to be done in London, with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet production, staged by Frederick Ashton, at Covent Garden, in the Royal Opera House, on 3rd of September, 1952. The original British Sylvia, Lydia Kyasht, was, by this date, a member of the teaching staff at the famous Sadler’s Wells School. Lydia Kyasht remained at the Empire for five years. At the conclusion of her long engagement, she sailed for New York to appear as the Blue Bird in a Shubert Winter Garden show, _The Whirl of the World_, with Serge Litavkin as her partner; Litavkin later committed suicide in London, as the result of an unhappy love affair (not with Lydia Kyasht).