[2] His paternal grandfather Cesare Pugni was a famous Italian composer of ballet music who moved to Russia in 1851 to work for Imperial Theatres.

At the age of nine Alexander entered the Saint Petersburg Imperial Theatrical School where he studied under Marius Petipa, Pavel Gerdt, Platon Karsavin and Lev Ivanov.

During the studies he already managed to learn almost the entire repertoire of Mariinka, thus he easily substituted solo performers, both in classical and character roles.

Shiryaev's musical talent and extraordinary visual memory gained him a place of Marius Petipa's assistant and tutor.

He was the first performer of the Buffoon part in The Nutcracker (the role was edited out from later productions) which he also staged, gaining praise from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky himself.

Some of his famous ballet performances include Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty, Ivanushka in The Little Humpbacked Horse, Quasimodo in La Esmeralda, Harlequin in Harlequinade, Dr. Coppélius in Coppélia and Abderakhman in Raymonda.

Among his students were such acclaimed artists as Michel Fokine, Fyodor Lopukhov, Pyotr Gusev, Galina Ulanova, Yury Grigorovich, Nina Anisimova.

[3] After that he built an improvised studio at his apartment where he carefully recreated various ballets by staging them using hand-made dolls which he created from either clay or papier-mâché; they were 20–25 cm (7.9–9.8 in) tall, and their body parts were connected by thin wire which provided plasticity.

In the process he also made thousands of sketches, catching every movement, also turning them into a filming reel so that one could watch the entire dance in form of a cartoon.

Although Shiryav didn't hold much interest in animation as an art form, but rather saw it as an instrument in studying human plastics, using his films for educational purposes.

For a Hindu dance from La Bayadère he prepared clay figures and made them repeat every movement on camera; his film was later used during the restoration of Marius Petipa's ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre.

[2] In 1995 a Russian documentarist and ballet historian Viktor Bocharov started researching information on Shiryaev's animation experiments.