After a distinguished career as a dancer, Nicolai Serrebrenikov became one of the leading teachers at the Vaganova Choreographic School in St. Petersburg. In this major work on pas de deux, the students and teachers are taken step by step through the fundamentals of double work to the most complex enchainements of the classical repertoire. The translator and editor, Joan Lawson, studied dance with Margaret Morris and Serafina Astafieva, and later became of of the first English ballet dancers to study in Soviet Russia, subsequently becoming a distinguished and much-loved teacher at the Royal Ballet School in London.