Serge Lifar arrived in Paris in January 1923 - a nineteen-year-old Russian from Kyiv with almost no ballet training. Bronislava Nijinska, with whom Lifar studied in Kyiv, called her students to Diaghilev's "Russian Ballet." Two years later, he was a soloist, and by 1929 - the company's leading dancer and the favorite of Diaghilev himself, who entrusted him with his first production: Stravinsky's "The Fox Tale."

Diaghilev's death in Venice in the summer of 1929 ended an era, but not Lifar's career. In the fall, he joined the Grand Opera - and stayed there for almost thirty years as a premier and choreographer. By that time, the Paris Opera was a sleepy institution where ballet served as an addition to opera evenings. Lifar restored its independence: over two hundred productions, a cult of male dance, a rejection of cumbersome plots in favor of pure form. "Icarus" (1935) was performed without music - only the rhythm of percussion. "Suite in White" and "Phaedra" with Cocteau's design became classics of the repertoire. He turned the young Yvette Chauviré into a star.

The occupation cost him dearly: for the Opera continuing to operate under the Germans, Lifar was accused of collaboration, dismissed in 1944, and only rehabilitated and reinstated in 1947. In 1958, he left for good. That same year, he had an absurd duel with swords against the Marquis de Cuevas - one of the last in France's history.
His second life was as a collector. Lifar acquired a significant part of Diaghilev's library and archive, owned letters from Pushkin, organized Pushkin exhibitions and balls in Paris, and wrote books about dance and his teacher. He died in Lausanne in 1986 and was buried in Saint-Genèvieve-des-Bois. The inscription on his tombstone reads: "Serge Lifar from Kyiv."