Elizaveta Surits Archive

The archive of the Soviet and Russian ballet historian Elizaveta Surits was formed between the 1950s to the 2020s and reflects her academic interests and her connections with Soviet, Russian, and international ballet and dance creators and choreography theorists. The archive will be of interest to researchers studying ballet and contemporary dance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 2025, the archive was transferred to Garage Archive Collection by Elizaveta Surits’ daughter Irina Gruzdeva.

The archive includes a large body of documents related to Surits’ academic texts and her work as a teacher and reviewer; manuscripts of her articles and books, including unpublished texts and versions; texts by other authors featuring commentary by Surits; and correspondence in Russian and foreign languages. It also contains a selection of theater press cuttings in various languages, with a focus on Soviet and foreign ballet and dance performances of the twentieth century; nineteenth- and twentieth‑century photographs and negatives related to Surits’ studies, as well as a number of family photos. In addition, the archive includes a collection of ephemera from theater events in the USSR and other countries from the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty‑first centuries.

About Elizaveta Surits

Elizaveta Surits (1923–2021) was a Soviet and Russian ballet historian, critic, and translator. She graduated in theater history from the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS) in 1949. From 1964, she was a researcher, and from 1989 to 2021 a senior researcher the theater department at the All‑Union Scientific and Research Institute for Art Studies (since 1995, the State Institute for Art Studies). In 1970, she defended her Candidate thesis The Bolshoi Theater Ballet in the 1920s. Her academic interests focused on Russian ballet in the nineteenth century, the history of the Bolshoi Theater, dance studios of the 1910s–1930s, Russian émigré ballet, and European and American ballet. She is the author of books on Alexander Gorsky (with Ekaterina Belova; 2000), Mikhail Mordkin (2006), and Léonide Massine (2012) and the monograph Ballet and Dance in America (2004). She was a consultant for ballet encyclopedias, guides, and catalogues, including the Theater Encyclopedia, the Large Soviet Encyclopedia, the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Dance (1998), and the French ballet dictionary published by Larousse (1999). She was a member of the editorial board at the journals Balet (Moscow) and Dance Chronicle (New York), a member of the European Association for Dance History, and an honorary member of the Society of Dance History Scholars (USA). She received the de la Torre Bueno Prize of the Dance Studies Association for the best book published in English in the field of dance studies (1991) and the International Stanislavsky Prize (2019). She was awarded the title of Honored Art Worker of the Russian Federation (2000). She lived and worked in Moscow.