- She assisted in the establishment of The Royal Ballet and was a founder member of the Royal Academy of Dance, which is now the world's largest dance-teaching organisation.
- She was the daughter of Platon Konstantinovich Karsavin - a principal dancer and mime with the Imperial Ballet -. He also taught as an instructor at the Imperial Ballet School (Vaganova Ballet Academy). He counted among his students Michel Fokine, a future dancing partner and paramour of his daughter.
- In 1904, guided by her mother, Anna Iosifovna, Karsavina rejected a marriage proposal from Mikhail Fokine. This led to a simmering unease between the two, which coloured their future relationship. She later said that Fokine rarely spoke to her outside the ballet studio.
- In 1907, once again guided by her mother, she married the civil servant Vasili Vasilievich Mukhin (1880 - post 1941), in the chapel of the Ballet School.
- She was the first ballerina to dance in the so-called Le Corsaire Pas de Deux in 1915.
- She was a Russian prima ballerina, renowned for her beauty, who was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and later of the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev.
- After settling in Britain at Hampstead in London, she began teaching ballet professionally and became recognised as one of the founders of modern British ballet.
- Due to his own bitter experiences, her father initially refused to allow Karsavina to study ballet, but her mother interceded.
- Karsavina's most famous roles were Lise in La Fille Mal Gardée, Medora in Le Corsaire, and the Tsar Maiden in The Little Humpbacked Horse.
- She danced the whole of the Petipa repertory.
- At her mother's urging, Karsavina chose to graduate ahead of schedule in early 1902. It was unheard of at that time for women to begin dancing professionally before the age of eighteen, but her father had lost his teaching position at the school in 1896, leaving her family in dire straits financially. They desperately needed the small income Karsavina would receive as a dancer with the corps de ballet.
- After graduating from the Imperial Ballet School, Karsavina enjoyed a meteoric rise through the ranks, quickly becoming a leading ballerina with the Imperial Ballet.
- In 1959, Karsavina advised Sir Frederick Ashton on his important revival of La Fille Mal Gardée for the Royal Ballet.
- In 1894, after a rigorous examination, Karsavina was accepted at the Imperial Ballet School.
- Karsavina moved to Hampstead, London, where she continued to socialize with luminaries from the ballet world. She occasionally assisted with the revival of the ballets in which she had danced, notably Spectre de la Rose, in which she coached Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev.
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