Interview with Maya Plisetskaya, a famous Russian ballet dancer Maya Plisetskaya is 85, but she is slender, active and witty, and meetings with her gladden both old-time ballet admirers and the new generation who are just learning the ABC of worshipping Terpsichore. Without Diplomacy and Retouch “AiF”: - Maya Mikhailovna, you have recently published your third book, “Reading My Life”, which combines two you’d written earlier. What did rouse you to write all your memoirs? M. P. – The first book “I, Plisetskaya” was based on my diaries. A great amount of entries has amassed, and of course I wouldn’t be able to write anything without them. Unfortunately, human memory can’t retain everything. In my diaries there was everything, even dates, which are quite impossible to memorize! I wanted to tell what and how happened to me in fact. I wanted to call a spade a spade, show everything in its true colours, without diplomacy and retouch. “AiF”: - Right, at the beginning of 90-s it was enough for you to say “I, Plisetskaya”, and your autibiography was snapped up. The second book was entitled “Thirteen Years Later”, but it had luck, too. Why is it so? M. P.: - This book had a subtitle “Angry Notes in Thirteen Chapters”. I wasn’t going to write it, but then suddenly made up my mind for it. As I had conjectured, my first truthful book didn’t please the people I wrote about. But the thing that surprised me most was that it offended people I didn’t write about at all! And I had to take up a pen again and continue writing. I wrote everything myself, and it’s quite a toil. I had been writing these thirteen chapters for four years.