The most conspicuous figures in the development of the early Russian ballet were Locatelli, Hilferding and Lessogoroff. To the latter’s efforts are due the reforms that made the Russian school independent from French-Italian influences. But to Charles Louis Didelot is due the thorough and many sided system of training that makes the School a unique institution in Europe. He may be considered the real father of all the pedagogic technical perfection, for it was he who emphasized the importance of a systematic training in a true dramatic spirit, contending that a good ballet dancer should also be a good actress and an artist and a poet at heart. Up to his time lessons had consisted mostly of physical training, fencing and gymnastics, but he insisted that the ballet be put on the same basis as drama. Whereas the dance had been merely a spectacular part of opera he intended that it should become an independent production. This brought upon him a storm of indignation on the part of the clergy and their supporters, the quarrel becoming so intense that in 1801, as one of its effects, the Czar Paul was acclaimed a heretic and was combatted by the ecclesiastic powers until he was strangled in his palace and his son, Alexander I, ascended the throne. The young Czar was religious, but so much an admirer of the ballet that he did not interfere with the plans of Didelot and gave him a still greater authority. It is strange how Didelot, a rather small, insignificant, pock-marked and deformed Frenchman, who had been for some time a ballet teacher in Stockholm, could play a dominating rôle during the twenty-five years that he was director of the Imperial Ballet School. The best known dancers of his school were Istomina, Teleshova and the uncle of Taglioni, who later undertook the training of Maria Taglioni. Miss Novitzkaya was a celebrated pupil of Didelot, but her career was soon destroyed by an affair of the heart. Gedeonoff, the director who followed Didelot, fell madly in love with Novitzkaya and proposed to her, but the dancer, having given her heart to a poor composer, remained true to him and became his wife. This was the end of her art, though critics claimed her superior to Taglioni and Elssler.