Igor schwezoff autobiography for kids

Igor Schwezoff, Borzoi (1938)

Igor Schwezoff was a famous Russian ballet dancer who experienced the horrors of the Russian Revolution, defected to the West, and went on to have a stellar career.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1904 to a well-connected military family, Schwezoff received an extensive education that included being tutored in six languages. The drawback of such luxurious beginnings was that his prosperous family were natural targets of the Bolsheviks’ anti-bourgeois campaign. Just 13 years old when they came to power, his father suffered terribly before fleeing the country and his abandoned mother soon died of ‘misery and starvation’ as the family was stripped of all its worldly possessions. Amidst this despair, Schwezoff found redemption in dance, recalling that:

‘although they mistrusted me because I was a bourgeois, although I had no clothes, little food, no money, I could live for my dancing. And I thought, stupidly, that if I could but get out of Russia and c