On May 23 the American Ballet Theatre will begin its spring season at the Metropolitan Opera with an opening-night gala that offers a preview of the nine weeks that will follow. No event on that night’s program is likely to arouse greater anticipation than guest star Diana Vishneva’s performance of an excerpt from Petipa’s bravura showpiece “Don Quixote.”

At 28, Ms. Vishneva is one of the world’s great ballerinas, a reigning diva at St. Petersburg’s Kirov Ballet. This explosive, vivacious dancer became an instant favorite with Russian audiences after she joined the Kirov in 1995. Two years ago, she danced a single performance of “Romeo and Juliet” with ABT in New York, as part of an exchange that took ABT’s Julie Kent to St. Petersburg to dance “Giselle.” This season Ms. Vishneva returns for a virtual residency in New York, dancing Balanchine’s “Ballet Imperial,” as well as “Don Quixote” in its entirety, alongside two other 19th-century classics, “Swan Lake” and “Giselle.”

I first saw Ms. Vishneva dance in 1997 during a gala program in New York, in Balanchine’s “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux.” Since then, I have seen her dance many different roles with the Kirov in Russia, Europe, and across America. She is one of the few Russian dancers able to fulfill Balanchine’s dictum that a dancer’s legs and feet should be capable of the speed and articulation of hands. And she steadily has become a nobler figure on the stage, emotionally deeper and capable of fine shading in technique and style, developing what ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie praises as her “sense of self.”

Last month I interviewed Ms. Vishneva backstage at the Kirov’s home theater, the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg – in the dancers’ cafeteria, in fact. Although Ms. Vishneva speaks and understands a great deal of English, she preferred to be interviewed in Russian, and so her Kirov colleague Islom Baimuradov translated. Offstage Ms. Vishneva is very pretty, with large dark eyes and a somewhat angular, gypsy-like cast to her features. Russian dancers tend to retain a distrust of interviews seeded in Soviet paranoia, but Ms. Vishneva was both voluble, poised, and seemingly relaxed.

Although the tempo of Kirov dancing had been getting slower and slower since the 1960s, Ms. Vishneva said that in school, at the Vaganova Academy, she was not aware of herself as having a special ability to dance fast and brilliantly. “Actually,” she laughed, “in school I never thought I would dance anything!” Others had no doubt; she was dancing lead roles on the Kirov stage even before graduation.

“I didn’t know anything,” she said, thinking back to those early performances, “and I didn’t understand anything of what I was doing. I was just dancing my emotional feelings onstage.”

Now she knows – most importantly that the more she knows, the more there is for her to know. I told her that, when she danced Nikiya in “La Bayadere” during the Kirov’s 2002 New York season, the only part of the performance I didn’t like was her appearance in the “Kingdom of the Shades” vision. She was too high-powered, not sufficiently spiritual and otherworldly. But when I saw her dance it with the Kirov a year later in Detroit, her “Shades” had improved beyond recognition. Ms. Vishneva laughed, and said she has entirely rethought the role once again.

Her debut with ABT two years ago was “very difficult,” she recalled. She was dancing not the Kirov’s “Romeo,” created for the company by Leonid Lavrovsky in 1940, but Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 choreography, made for London’s Royal Ballet and acquired by ABT in 1985. “To dance in another country, a different version – it’s not easy,” she said. But Kevin McKenzie “always gave me a big nice smile; I think he was more happy than I was.”

She’s pleased that this time she has the chance in repeated performances to acclimate, evolve, show the full gamut of what she’s capable of. She’s also glad for the experience she’s gained over the intervening two years, “because earlier I probably wouldn’t have been ready.” Since her ABT debut, Ms. Vishneva has taken on more and more guest appearances; indeed, she is one of the very few Kirov dancers who can decide when and where she will dance outside the company without requesting permission.

Ms. Vishneva’s portrayal of Giselle – a betrayed village girl transformed into a wraith – was one of her first attempts to widen her emploi beyond her early successes in the realm of soubrette sparkle and technical virtuosity. At ABT her partner in both “Giselle” and “Ballet Imperial” is Vladimir Malakov, who is also artistic director of the Berlin Ballet, where she is now a permanent guest artist.

Ms. Vishneva has praise for many of her partners but says that of them all it is with Mr. Malakov that she feels most comfortable. They are able to explain what they need from each other, and fill out each other’s performance on stage. “And every time on stage there is something new going on, some sparkle which is different every time,” she said.

At ABT Ms. Vishneva will also be forging new partnerships. In “Don Quixote” she dances the hoydenish Kitri – one of her first triumphs at the Kirov – opposite Jose Manuel Carreno. Dancing the dual role of Odette/Odile in “Swan Lake,” she will be partnered with Ethan Stiefel. “Swan Lake,” in fact, will be the wild card in Ms. Vishneva’s season. She has performed it in Berlin and Japan but as yet never with the Kirov.

The White Swan Odette’s slowly unfurling adagio passages represent Ms. Vishneva’s boldest attempt yet to widen her range, and it is a doubly bold move on her part to begin a new partnership in this as yet somewhat foreign role. She looks forward to the hours and days of work required: “Especially with the duets in ‘Swan Lake,’ it’s very important to have everything perfect.”

The “American” in American Ballet Theatre didn’t appear until 1956,well after the company’s incarnation as Ballet Theatre in 1940. It’s always been an international company with many guest stars, and there is a long tradition of Russian infusion. (Most notably, Mikhail Baryshnikov directed the company from 1980-89.) Currently, ABT is home to Bolshoi Ballet ballerina Nina Ananiashvili as well as Ms. Vishneva’s former-Kirov colleague Veronika Part.

Even though ABT has always been a polyglot company, it was once common to hear its American stars deplore the way Soviet defectors had stolen their thunder. I asked Ms. Vishneva how she would cope with the inevitable resentment toward a guest, Russian or not. “Oh, this is everywhere; you don’t have to look at it,” she said. “On the contrary, I think dancers should be happy to see someone else’s work onstage.”

And she looks forward to her extended immersion in New York City. She has danced here many times but never lived here for any extended period. She wants to explore the Metropolitan Museum, she told me, and also immerse herself in the fabric of the city, not simply its landmarks. “When you come as a tourist, you just see the main parts, but to see the inside, you have to be there,” she said. “You have to live with these people.”

Mr. Lobenthal is assistant editor of Ballet Review and author of “Tallulah! The Life and Times of a Leading Lady” (ReganBooks).