It turns out, however, that Petipa was working along quite different lines. Soon after his arrival in Russia at the age of 29 in 1847, he began making ballets that were peak artistic expressions of the czarist regime: royalist, hierarchical, elitist.

Dynastic succession is a recurring theme in their scenarios. Peasants, when they reach the stage at all, are generally happy, except sometimes in affairs of the heart. Russia is almost never the location. The worlds depicted so intensely by Petipa’s Russian contemporaries — Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Repin — might have come from another planet.

Ms. Meisner’s book, the first full-length Petipa biography in English, is by far the most detailed and complete survey of his life and work to date. Not all its fascinations are cheering, however. Ms. Meisner retells, in all seriousness, many of the stories of Petipa’s ballets, even though their narratives are all too often dismayingly absurd.

And though dance made an important contribution in most Petipa ballets, in several it was far from their raison d’être. “King Candaules” (1868) ends, after its title character has died, with a scene in which his queen is haunted by his ghost until she drops dead; that, Ms. Meisner writes, is followed by a tableau in which, amid the other gods in the cloud-filled heavens, Venus-Astarte points “at the corpse of the hubristic queen who had dared to compete with the goddess of beauty.”