Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  On the night of November 20 expectations in the theater were at fever pitch. “Many of us remembered the brilliant creator of Frondoso,” said Faina Rokhind, a Chaboukiani fan who was bereft when the dancer left Leningrad. “I was amazed that Rudolf didn’t copy Chaboukiani, who had always been the leader and soul of this ballet. Instead, he brought elements of his own temperament and made the character seem much more of a loner.” Friends in the audience sat holding their breath, and for a second during a pirouette, in which Rudolf supported his partner with one hand, they thought he was going to let her fall. “But Dudinskaya was such a technician that she held herself up.” Before their entrance, the ballerina had told Rudolf to think only of himself, Laurentia was her most popular role and he should not concern himself with her. Intuiting this, one critic would write, “In his duets with N. M. Dudinskaya, Nureyev dances too much on his own, forgetting that it is to Laurentia that his fits of passion should be directed, to her and her alone.” But for most of the audience, Rudolf’s performance was thrilling—like “an eruption of Vesuvius”—though some purists complained that his boiling bravura “disturbed the subtle choreography.” Others were uncomfortable about the disparity between the dancers’ ages—Dudinskaya was twenty-five years older than the twenty-one-year-old Nureyev. “She was a prima ballerina on the decline; it was a privilege for her to dance with him,” remarked dance writer Igor Stupnikov, who remembered sitting in a box silently urging her to complete a notorious series of diagonal turns. “A friend sitting beside me whispered, ‘At this moment, she has no enemies in the world.’ ”

  Rudolf gave Dudinskaya a new lease on life—as he would later do with Margot Fonteyn—but he would always acknowledge his debt to her. “It was not just Pushkin who influenced my outlook on dance. Dudinskaya gave me the idea of classicism: musicality, attack, sense of time suspended.” From her he absorbed qualities that cannot be taught, such as stage magic and the power “to sparkle, to make performance.” She was steeping him in an ideal, as the dance writer Elizabeth Kaye has noted. “This was the nineteenth-century ideal of classicism.”

  When his teacher Anna Udeltsova heard that they were screening a news item on Rudolf’s Laurentia in Ufa, she rushed to the cinema, where she watched the “inimitably delicate dashing Spaniard” as if spellbound. Immediately writing a letter to Rosa in Leningrad, she suggested that they should both start making scrapbooks of Rudolf’s newspaper photographs and clippings. “Previously, when I spoke about his talent, people used to mock me and said that I was probably carried away by him … [but] now the whole world can witness what was clear to me then, so let God give him good health and strong nerves.”

  Offstage Rudolf’s life was just as exhilarating. By now his friendship with Menia Martinez had developed into a romance; friends noticed how happy and excited they were in each other’s company, always tender and demonstrative. “It was the first experience for both of them to be in love. Although Rudolf was always a little self-mocking—he was very proud and didn’t like to be seen to be sentimental—he was obviously very pleased that such a fabulous, sexy girl would give him her love.”

  He also felt confident and stable in the company of the Romankov twins—the Sportivniks, as he and Menia called them because they were sports crazy. Having been nervous at first about joining in conversations that would expose his provincialism, Rudolf was now unintimidated by his intellectual friends, “although it was obviously much easier for Rudik with our sports-oriented crowd.” On weekends he often joined them in Gorskaya, on the Gulf of Finland, where Liuba’s volleyball teammate had a dacha. Rock and roll was just catching on in Russia, and one night they held a contest in which the winner was the couple whose partner left her footprints on the ceiling. Rudolf enjoyed showing a couple of jocks who had mocked his slight physique how to lift a girl high above their heads, but he never took part in any activities that might cause him injury, choosing instead to sit alone on the beach watching the young madcaps at play. “He was both with us and at the same time not with us.”

  Early one evening as the sun was beginning to set, Rudolf walked away from the group and down toward the water. He had discovered an almost pantheistic fascination for nature, for the sea in particular, which would grow more intense throughout his life. He was gone so long that when he failed to return to the dacha, Liuba went in search of him. She had no romantic interest in Rudolf but felt a certain responsibility for him, and always made sure that he was not being left out. When she arrived at the edge of the shore, she found him staring out over the horizon. “Rudik, what are you doing? Everyone’s looking for you!” “Ssh!” he whispered. “Look how beautiful it all is.” As the enormous red ball of a sun slowly sank behind the gulf, the two stood watching until it had disappeared and the sky began to darken. “We turned away and, without saying a word, plodded back to the dacha.”

  Toward the end of 1959, just before Rudolf was due to partner Dudinskaya in Laurentia for the second time, he tore a ligament in his leg so badly that he was hospitalized and declared unfit to dance for two years. When Pushkin visited the ward and saw his pupil lying on his bed in black despair, he invited Rudolf to move in with him and his wife. Since the Moscow contest when Rudolf’s sudden success had brought home to the dance world how great a teacher Pushkin actually was, the two had grown closer than ever. And now, from the moment that Rudolf was taken into Pushkin’s home, he became more of a son than a pupil. “There, thanks to Pushkin’s and his wife’s vigilant care, and the doctor’s daily visits, after twenty days I was able to go to class.”

  Pushkin and his wife, Xenia Jurgenson, a forty-two-year-old Kirov coryphée coming to the end of her career, lived in a typical Soviet communal apartment opposite the school in Rossi Street. They shared a bathroom with six other families, and their room—twenty-five square meters—was unbearably hot in summer, as a chimney from the canteen below passed along one wall, but more than compensating for the discomfort was the cultivated atmosphere they had created around them. “Here, in the Pushkins’ household, Rudolf found not only the traditions of St. Petersburg but also a home environment and ballet university all rolled into one.” The couple, who had no children of their own, were renowned for their kindness to young people—when one of the students’ father died, it was the Pushkins who nursed him through his period of mourning. And three times a year—on Alexander Ivanovich’s birthday, after final exams, and on New Year’s Eve—they would invite the whole class for a meal. Xenia considered the care of her husband’s pupils an integral part of her duty to him; she darned their socks and shopped at the market for fresh vegetables and the best cuts of meat, which she cooked superbly. “That’s what impressed the boys so much: her taste and style—the trouble she went to for them. Alexander Ivanovich taught and Xenia Josifovna cared.”

  She was also a born teacher in her way, drawing out youngsters by getting them to talk about themselves, and giving them advice, lending them books, and encouraging them to analyze what they had read—“unobtrusively, never showing up their ignorance.” When shy young Galina Barunchukova arrived in Leningrad from Siberia, it was Xenia who took her under her wing, teaching her how to dress, how to shop:

  She set a wonderful example, saying how you should always buy things that were good even though they are expensive—there is no use in having cheap bad things—and teaching Alexander Ivanovich’s pupils how to be gentlemen. When Xenia Josifovna came into the room after cooking in the kitchen, she would say to the boys who were sitting waiting for their dinner, “So who is going to give me his chair?”

  A tall, attractive Baltic blond, Xenia looked half the age of her husband (who was ten years older), and was as earthy and extroverted as he was spiritual and mild. One day, soon after Rudolf had moved into the Rossi Street apartment, all three went to Tchaikovsky Street for one of the Romankovs’ Sunday dinners, joining the usual group with Elizaveta and Veniamin Pazhi among the older guests. As the meal was coming to an end, Xenia, who was sitting beside Rudolf, r
eached across the table for a banana, which she slowly and suggestively began to peel. Just as she was about to put it in her mouth, she whispered something laughingly to Rudolf who, clearly embarrassed, snapped back one word in reply. Liudmila Romankova, the twins’ mother, who heard what he had said, was shocked: “Doura!” (fool) was not a term that a young man should apply to an older woman. She waited until everyone had left, and when she and her daughter were alone together, said, “I do believe that Xenia is having an intimate relationship with Rudik.” “Mama!” protested Liuba, “how could you think such a thing?” In her eyes Xenia was “an old woman.” But then, over the next few weeks as she observed them together, she began to realize that her mother must be right.

  *In his autobiography Rudolf describes this as a conversation he had with Shelkov, not Ivanovsky—possibly because it made a more dramatic anecdote.

  *Dudinskaya gives a different version in Radik Kudoyarov’s documentary The Myth of Rudolf, claiming, “I didn’t ask him—he asked me.”

  *Rudolf’s habit of using anti-Semitic asides as obscenities, although common enough in Russia, was a practice for which he would be seriously condemned in the West.

  †Technique came so easily to Sizova that she hardly needed to work; Rudolf would set her challenges when they danced together, getting her to substitute a sequence of Italian double fouettés instead of the usual sixteen singles in her Don Quixote variation.

  3 XENIA AND MENIA

  When Xenia fell in love with Pushkin she was a student at the Vaganova Academy and he was her pas de deux teacher. As relationships between pupils and staff were forbidden, they met in secret outside school—“She was always running to a room somewhere to see him”—and as soon as Xenia graduated, they married. It was 1937: “Ksusha,” as Pushkin called her, was twenty and he was exactly ten years older. After a quiet wedding, they spent their honeymoon in the Ukraine—an eye-catching couple with their tanned, athletic bodies and stylish clothes. Pushkin sported a little skullcap to disguise his thinning hair, and dressed whimsically in pajama-striped silk shirts or an all-white ensemble of shirt and flannels. As the daughter of a St. Petersburg couturier, Xenia was even more fashion conscious: She might wear jaunty white ankle socks with character shoes, a bow tied round her head, or jewelry with her two-piece swimsuit, the white beads of her necklace highlighting her dazzling smile. Her vivacity and sense of fun affected everyone around her. That summer, she and her “Sashinka” played like teenagers, lying in the shallows or practicing lifts from their pas de deux classes. Barefoot on the beach, the teacher held his lovely young wife high above his head as she arched her back, her wavy blond hair falling in a Rita Hayworth mane.

  Xenia’s first job in Leningrad was as a dancer with the Maly Theater, but with Pushkin’s help she was able to join the corps de ballet of the Kirov the following year. She had a good jump and was given the occasional key role, such as one of the two “big swans” in Swan Lake, but being unusually tall for a ballerina, she did not progress beyond the next rank of coryphée. Nevertheless she took her work seriously, spending days in the studio preparing for a new role, often under Pushkin’s guidance. At home their roles reversed, and it was Xenia, a formidably strong character, who was in charge. As Pushkin’s closest friend, Dimitri Filatov, remembered:

  He was a very modest man, she was a motor. Xenia Josifovna was very supportive; she tried to help him, to protect him, as there were people who took advantage of his soft, kind nature and he would be hurt quite often. Alexander Ivanovich was a teacher from God, but he was never rewarded because he was so shy: if you want medals and prizes, you have to push.

  Pushkin’s diffidence could exasperate Xenia at times—she resented the fact that colleagues in the theater had been given decent apartments while they were still living in one room. He would not even appeal to Konstantin Sergeyev, artistic director of the Kirov Ballet during the early fifties, who, with his first wife, the dancer Feya Balabina, had been among their closest friends. But then Xenia herself refused to exploit the Sergeyev connection—“She didn’t want to put herself in the position of begging; she was too independent and saw it as going against her honor.”

  It was Xenia, rather than the unworldly Pushkin, who minded about their inappropriate living quarters; her husband’s thoughts were totally absorbed by his profession. “Alexander Ivanovich worked too hard. He worked with his soul—never half power. He really loved his pupils; even when they were onstage, he’d be there in the audience, helping with his eyes.” Theirs was a good marriage, and they showed each other great affection, but after twenty years of conversations that invariably reverted to dance, Xenia “wanted to hear something else.” As the granddaughter of Pyotr Jurgenson, Tchaikovsky’s music publisher, she came from a wealthy family, and considered herself among Leningrad’s intelligentsia. Her husband’s parents, on the other hand, were simple people, and he had had only a basic education. When Liudmila Romankova went to Philharmonic Hall with Pushkin one night, Xenia asked her afterward, “Was Alexander Ivanovich a very dull companion for you? He only knows ballet.”

  In 1959 she gave up her career, but not by choice. “It was very painful for her to stop; she felt she was still able to perform and had a great desire to do so, but Kirov dancers of her level were obliged to leave at a certain age.” This forced retirement affected Xenia bitterly—“she never again came backstage to see us”—and with Alexander Ivanovich at school all day, and at the theater most nights, she felt lethargic and isolated. Then Rudolf arrived. “He was such an excitement in her life. After that, she had no other interests: Rudolf became her project,” says Liuba.

  Determined to broaden his education by giving him only the best, Xenia cooked him delicious meals, guided his reading, took him to the theater and concerts, and introduced him to their circle of friends—“intelligent people with fascinating professions and a passion for the arts”—such as Pavel Vult, a professor of psychology, and Arno Gofren, an eminent surgeon with a scholar’s knowledge of the architecture of St. Petersburg. Every meal at the Pushkins’ was a lesson in the finer points of etiquette: Even when Xenia served just a snack, there would be a white linen cloth, candles, bone china, and crystal glasses on the table. Rudolf had already been exposed through Anna Udeltsova and others to the niceties of St. Petersburg manners, but it was clear that he still had a lot to learn. One evening, sitting with Xenia beside him as usual, he listened to a couple of guests praising a performance by the dancer Askold Makarov, who was also there. Unable to contain himself, Rudolf suddenly burst out with, “When I leap, I leap right over Askold Anatolievich!” “Puppy! You’re such a puppy!” Xenia laughed, breaking the embarrassed silence by making everyone see the funny side.

  With Rudolf, as with all her husband’s pupils, Xenia played the role of both mother and coquette. Although no longer the beauty Pushkin had married, she had a good figure and liked to make an impact, continuing to dress modishly in clothes made specially for her. As Dimitri Filatov recalled:

  She knew how to be attractive and how to make eyes at people. Alexander Ivanovich wasn’t jealous, he understood. In their world it was normal for ballerinas to have admirers. They loved each other and had stayed together for a long time. Alexander Ivanovich knew that Xenia wouldn’t do anything serious; he was sure she would behave properly.

  In a clip of home-movie footage taken during dinner at the Pushkins’ apartment, Xenia’s deference toward her husband is clearly apparent. On her right sits a good-looking youth to whom she pays a lot of attention, but when the group stands up to make a toast, it’s toward Pushkin that she instinctively turns first to clink glasses. With Rudolf’s arrival, however, everything changed, and Xenia became fixated in a way she had never been before. “She fell totally in love with Rudik and wanted to fill her soul with this feeling,” Liuba says.

  Xenia was more than ready for a romantic escapade. All Pushkin’s emotion was invested in his pupils, he was rarely at home, and when he returned late at night, he was alwa
ys tired. “She told Rudolf that Alexander Ivanovich no longer made love to her,” said Menia Martinez. “And he was afraid, because he knew that she wanted him, and he had so much respect for Pushkin.”

  To Rudolf, the strong-willed, sophisticated Xenia with her dancer’s body and flirtatious ways was an irresistible force. However much he recoiled from the implications of what was taking place—the betrayal of a man he loved who had invited him into his home—he found himself in her thrall: She was a woman of “enormous sexual appetite and great sensuality,” he a twenty-one-year-old virgin who “wanted to know.”

  A close friend believes that Pushkin had no idea of his wife’s transgression. “He loved Rudik as a son and he thought that Xenia Josifovna shared his attitude.” If he did know, it may have been the reason he went out of his way to try to matchmake Rudolf with a Vaganova school contemporary, Gabriella Komleva: “He wanted us to be together, and often invited me to Rossi Street, but nothing came of it.” Or he may have viewed Xenia’s seduction as just another facet of his pupil’s education, a timely initiation into the art of love. (Rudolf told Menia that the first time Xenia made love to him she’d said, “I want you to know about this part of life.… And also, I want you to feel like a man.”) It caused no apparent rift in the marriage; the couple continued to work together as partners in Rudolf’s development. Xenia was one of very few people from whom Rudolf would accept notes on his dancing. His contemporary Nikita Dolgushin remembers how he would watch her demonstrate original variations from rarely performed ballets, “her husband correcting her when she couldn’t remember a forgotten step.” Often after dinner Rudolf would stand—boots off, legs in position—in front of their antique oval mirror, practicing his port de bras.