Taking into consideration the fact that her mother was a silent-film actress, this exile practically meant the end of her professional career as well as her life at large. At the same time, the future of Maya Plisetskaya herself was also quite vague because of such a family history she could hardly achieve anything in her future life. Nonetheless, she did not give in. Basically, due to her aunt, who adopted a little girl that, in actuality, became an orphan after the Stalinist repressions, Maya had managed to keep living and found a new goal in her life when she started to study under a great ballerina of imperial school, Elizaveta Gerdt. In fact, ballet was quite a natural choice for the little girl since she had already attended Chorographical school in Moscow before, and, what is more, her own aunt, who actually replaced her mother, was a gifted ballerina Sulamith Messerer.
It is necessary to underline that ballet practically saved the life of Maya Plisetskaya because it made a new sense of her life after she had lost her parents. In such a way, her studies was her personal response to the cruelty of the Soviet regime and it was a symbol of her resistance and boldness to keep a normal life. Not surprisingly that many years later she remarked in her interview to Washington Post: “I don’t think art saved only me, it saves everyone” (Finn 23).
In actuality, ballet really save Maya in an extremely difficult period of her life and probably created the basis for her further progress. Anyway, later it became obvious that regardless all repressions, the Stalinist regime did not manage to destroy the greatest ballerina of the epoch. In fact, her ballet dance became her life and the means of the struggle with the regime.
Remarkably, but her talent could not fail to remain unnoticed even in the epoch when the family history was of a paramount importance. Nonetheless, despite her past, Maya Plisetskaya’s performance was so perfect that unlike many, if not to say all, other ballet dancers of the epoch she did not spend any time in the corps de ballet but immediately became principal ballerina after graduation.