One day there must be a book written about Massine. Not that there is not already a considerable literature dealing with him; but there is yet to appear a work that has done him anything like justice. For me to attempt more than a line drawing would be presumptuous and manifestly unjust; but a sketch is demanded. Leonide Massine was born in Moscow in 1894. He graduated from the Moscow Imperial School in 1912. It was a year later that Diaghileff, visiting Moscow, was taken by Poliakov, the famous Moscow dramatic critic, to see a play at the Ostrovsky Theatre. It happened that Massine was appearing in the play in the role of a servant. There is no record as to what Diaghileff thought of the play or the performance. The one fact that emerges from this chance evening Diaghileff spent at a theatre is that he was impressed by the manner in which the unknown boy, Massine, carried a tray. Diaghileff asked Poliakov to take him back-stage and introduce him to the talented young mime. Artistically, Diaghileff was in the process of moving onward from the exclusively Russian tradition that was represented by Benois, Bakst, Stravinsky, and Fokine. He was moving towards a greater internationalism, a broader cosmopolitanism. He was in need of a creative personality who would carry forward this wider concept. Diaghileff’s intuition told him this seventeen-year-old boy with the enormous brown eyes was the person. Diaghileff took Massine from Moscow into his company and fashioned him into a present-day Pygmalion. Diaghileff took over the boy’s artistic education. As part of a deliberate plan, Diaghileff pushed a willing pupil into close contact with the world of modern painting and music, with the finest minds of the period. Picasso, Larionov, Stravinsky, and de Falla became his mentors; libraries, museums, concert halls, his classrooms. The result was a great cosmopolitan choreographer, perhaps the greatest living today. An American citizen, he will always have strong Russian roots. Some of his best works are Russian ballets; but he is no slavish nationalist. He is as much at home in the cultures of Italy, Scotland, or Spain. His was a precocious genius, discovered by Diaghileff’s intuition. Massine began at the top, and has remained there.