How much the Russian ballet has influenced drama, opera, painting and music can be judged from the fact that almost without an exception all the Russian operas require dancing; thus there are several dramas and orchestra works interwoven with the ballet. On the other hand the dancer has made use of themes and compositions that had been created for other purposes; for all such ballets as the _Scheherezade_, _Prince Igor_, _Baba Yaga_ and many others, were written as orchestral suites, symphonic poems or parts of operas. But the choric imagination discovered in them latent music dramas adapted for dancing. We are inclined to think that the Moscow ballet, but not that of Petrograd, is a thoroughly Russian institution, since Begutcheff, who was a director of the Moscow Opera and Ballet at the time of Tschaikowsky and Ostrowsky, banished all foreign influence from that stage, more so than has ever happened in Petrograd. In 1873 Begutcheff asked Ostrowsky, one of the foremost Russian dramatists, to write a fairy ballet for performance at the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg, exacting that it should be free from any satirical or politically undesirable element. Begutcheff asked the dramatist to submit the scenario to him for approval. Ostrowsky was noted for his bitter sarcasm anent the Russian bureaucracy and for his idealization of the peasants. This he was told he should avoid in the ballet, ‘for such would be not pleasing to the imperial family.’ Ostrowsky smiled, grunting: ‘God be thanked, the imperial family has no business to interfere with the imagination of an artist.’ He finished his libretto without consulting Begutcheff and entitled it _Snegourotchka_--‘Snow Maiden.’ The director of the Petrograd ballet did not like Ostrowsky’s libretto and refused to consider it. Begutcheff, however, turned the libretto over to Tschaikowsky to compose the music and it was performed with great success in Moscow. One of the special features of the Russian ballet is its _chorovody_ character--that is, the musical accompaniment, on many occasions, is supplied by the singing of the dancers themselves. This species of vocal ballets evidently originated in the choral dances of the peasants. The Russian ballet is, in fact, an outgrowth of the folk-dance just as Russian music emanates from the folk-song. While watching the Russian ballet, you see glimpses of the racial traits. It is not like the music, however, a picture of the gloom of lonely _moujik_ life, in which only here and there a beam of light breaks through the melancholy. It is a succession of brilliant pictures of the mediæval Boyars, the semi-barbaric nobility. Every part of the ballet is meant to show the rich Byzantine colors, and primitive passions as set forth in a half-civilized garb.