NUREYEV: His Life
By Diane Solway
William Morrow, 625 pages, $27.50
`More than a dancer, he was a political symbol,” Diane Solway writes in her new biography of Rudolf Nureyev. “As the first Soviet artist ever to defect, he demonstrated at the height of the Cold War that the Iron Curtain could be pierced. Suddenly ballet was front-page news.”
Nureyev’s artistic legacy is mixed, a checkered history of dazzling live performances early on, leading to mediocre choreography and wornout performances later, at an age long after most male dancers (wisely) hang it up.
But his reach extends beyond ballet. He attracted blue-collar fans who felt that if Ed Sullivan found value, then value there must be. As Solway suggests, as the earliest defector, Nureyev proved a Cold War icon and pawn. He infuriated the Soviets–who only last September, nearly five years after his death and 37 years after his defection, finally got around to removing longstanding charges of treason against him. In the meantime, he thrilled the West, implicitly siding with democracy and capitalism, leaving behind an estate valued in the millions. He was ballet’s first superstar, pursuing fame and luxury as he took to hanging out with Andy Warhol, Jackie Onassis and others in the swinging ’60s jet set. Though he enjoyed gay sex and died of AIDS, he kept his homosexuality largely secret. He was the closeted practitioner, as much a man of his time as Rock Hudson.
There are plenty of nits to pick with Solway’s book. Meticulously researched, it seems scholarly to a fault, annotated with countless footnotes that sometimes stumble into laughable triviality. In discussing Nureyev’s early schooling, for instance, she notes, “Nureyev claims in his memoirs to have studied with Pushkin for two years in the ninth grade, but the programs of his performances during his second year all list Nureyev as an eighth-grade student.” Who cares?
Solway’s years as a journalist result in a style that is plodding at best, cumbersome at worst. Minor figures get as much discourse as major ones. But at least she errs on the side of fussy prose instead of gossipy tell-all. She offers plenty of gossip and details of Nureyev’s tortured love life, but she also provides new information about his defection, his psychological experiences as an exile and a dance enthusiast’s history of his work, helpfully explaining to the non-initiate such fixtures as George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Marius Petipa and the Kirov Ballet.
Her discussions of these great figures and how they and Nureyev fit into the history of the art are one of the joyful byproducts of this dense but ultimately addictive work. Best of all, Solway’s massive research provides a truly complex portrait of this moody, gifted, vain and haunted soul, driven by his need to perform and win admiration, even in an alien land.
She is helped by the fact that her subject’s life story is one of the more melodramatic and compelling rags-to-riches sagas of modern times. Nureyev, probably the most peripatetic figure in dance history, was born to run: In 1938, his mother gave birth to him on a train speeding across Siberia to take the family to join her husband in eastern Vladivostok. His father, Hamet, a political officer in the Red Army, started life as a poor peasant.
As a peasant, young Rudolf was certainly misplaced. Father and son locked horns early on, the former disgusted by Rudolf’s passion for dance and perhaps suspicious even then that his son might be gay. (Solway reports that Hamet took his prepubescent son to weekly steam baths but beat him severely one day after he got an erection during his wash.)
Inept at sports, Nureyev found dance at age 7, attending a program at the opera house in Ufa, where the family relocated after World War II. Against unspeakable odds, and outright parental hostility, Nureyev took lessons, came to provincial prominence and joined the Kirov in Leningrad, where he soon emerged as one of its top talents.
But he was stubbornly independent, a late bloomer who lived by his own aesthetic rules and often annoyed his teachers. And when he went on a rare tour of the West in 1961, he disdained Communist Party regulations and hung out with a wild, bohemian crowd, infuriating KGB informants, who initiated plans to send him back from the tour early.
In one of Solway’s more dramatic segments, she reveals new details about his defection, suggesting a dysfunctional farce more than high-stakes political intrigue. The willful Nureyev learned of the KGB scheme after the troupe landed in London, where plans called for him to be whisked off to another plane bound for Russia. He wavered nervously about what to do. Newfound friends from the West rushed to the rescue, plotting his escape by telephone and engineering it in almost Keystone Kops-like fashion. Nureyev himself, though he remembered it differently, comes off a weeping, paralyzed mess.
Nureyev nevertheless took to the West with astonishing ease. Rapidly he became a European and then international celebrity, affiliating with London’s Royal Ballet for many fruitful years, most of them dominated by his partnership with Margot Fonteyn.
Though Fonteyn was already 42, and Nureyev only 23, when they first danced together at Covent Garden in 1962, Lord Snowdon observed, ” `He threw Margot’s game off in a way that stimulated her brain.’ ” Instead of being diminished, the ballerina seemed to rise to the challenge, a dynamic that would survive the next 13 years and render them the most famous couple in ballet history–ovations lasted as long as half an hour.
Solway details not only their ups, downs, conflicts and remarkable affinity, but Nureyev’s early, lasting infatuation with Danish dancer Erik Bruhn, his forays into companies as far-flung as Italy and Canada, his TV exposure and his evolving interest in contemporary choreographers, most notably Martha Graham.
But for all the success, there was torment, including difficulties with company managers and choreographers. Never monogamous, he engaged in long relationships with a series of men, some of whom he treated as servants. The last, Kenneth Greve, a young heterosexual dancer, became an unhealthy, unrequited obsession.
Nureyev was also given to piggish pique: He once tossed a plate of spaghetti against a wall at an elegant party when told guests were to serve themselves, buffet-style, and he walked out of a scene in “The Sleeping Beauty” unhappy with the conductor, leaving the unawakened princess lying uncertain in her onstage bed about what to do. Nureyev was permitted to first return to Russia in 1987 only when both he and his mother were dying (his father was long dead), and she barely recognized him.
Despite owning seven homes, including a farm in Virginia and an island off Italy, Nureyev died something of a homeless figure, his fever to dance tragic by the end. “Three weeks after (a) kidney attack, against the advice of everyone he knew, he went on an exhausting month-long tour of Australia,” Solway writes. “It was to be his last tour as a dancer, and it was another disaster. Thin and depleted, he could barely walk, let alone get through a rehearsal.”
There is greatness and pathos in his infinitely fascinating life. ” `I find the West too sophisticated,’ ” this legendary artist and jet-setter once said. ” `It is full of charlatans.’ ” But, he added, ” `I have not been lonely here . . . because I do not need people. I never needed them.’ “
