The work describes the impact of seeing a performance of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and is based on a series of drawings Bomberg had done around 1914,[1] while associated with the Vorticist group of avant-garde artists in London.

The only surviving example of a vorticist artist's book, the work can be seen as a parody of Marinetti's seminal futurist book Zang Tumb Tumb, using similar language to the Italian's work glorifying war (for example, the phrase "Methodic discord startles ..."[2][page needed]), but instead praising the impact of watching the decidedly less macho Ballets Russes in full flow.

Bomberg was the most audacious painter of his generation at the Slade, proving ... that he could absorb the most experimental European ideas, fuse these with Jewish influences and come up with a robust alternative of his own.

His treatment of the human figure, in terms of angular, clear-cut forms charged with enormous energy, reveals his determination to bring about a drastic renewal in British painting.

After witnessing the carnage of the First World War at first hand, he was to lose his faith in modernism and instead develop a looser, expressive style, based predominantly around landscapes.

[3] The foreword of the Chenil Gallery catalogue, 1914, contained a defiant text not dissimilar to Wyndham Lewis' Manifesto in Blast 1, and one that could just as easily apply to the drawings done around this time that would serve as the basis of Russian Ballet; I appeal to the Sense of Form.

In 1914, when the drawings are thought to have been done, their London programme included Strauss' La légende de Joseph and Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq d'Or, with sets designed by Natalia Goncharova.

If so, the plan failed; Bomberg, his wife Alice Mayes and a friend were ejected from the stalls when Diaghilev discovered them attempting to sell the newly printed book to the assembled patrons; Russian Ballet" was not a programme, nor even a Souvenir.

[14] After being withdrawn from Henderson's Bomb Shop, Charing Cross Road, the remaining stock was bought by Jacob Mendelson, who had helped finance the project in the first place with a £30 investment.

[13] His first version of ‘Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company’[15] retained 'much of the freedom of colour and structure he had developed in the pre-war period, but [introduced] recognizable figures that no longer conform to the mechanistic vision of the Mud Bath.

Russian Ballet has entered a number of prestigious collections including the V&A, British Library, Tate, UCLA and the National Gallery of Australia.