Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Xenia began coming to the school to watch classes, rehearsals, and examinations. She had great authority with Pushkin and his boys, and would criticize and advise in a manner that was much more direct than her husband’s. “If one of the pupils couldn’t do some complicated combination, she’d say, “Hey, how can you not do such a thing? It’s simple! Try!” One afternoon, after taking Rudolf to task for bungling a double pirouette in arabesque, she presumed when he didn’t come home for dinner that she must have offended him. Eventually, just before midnight, he turned up. “Rudik, where have you been?” cried Xenia with a mixture of exasperation and relief. “Getting your two turns in arabesque,” came Rudolf’s gruff reply.

  To allow Rudolf to devote the maximum amount of time to his work, Xenia instigated a rigid schedule, persuading him to renounce any aspects of his life which did not relate to the theater. He obediently followed her regime, keen to avoid any dispute; he knew how emotional and temperamental she could be—anything could make her explode. Overseeing whom he saw as attentively as what he read, she tried to dissuade him from going out at night, although from time to time, feeling “overfed with her care,” he managed to slip away. He was anxious to keep in touch with Elizaveta Pazhi, whom Xenia rarely invited for dinner as she resented their closeness. “She tried to create a real wall between them.” She was also “very against” Menia Martinez, whom Rudolf was able to meet only when Liuba and Leonid covered for him. “He would tell the Pushkins that he was seeing us.” Although never jealous of Liuba, because she posed no threat, Xenia became “like a lioness” if she found out that Rudolf had been with the beautiful young Cuban.

  Xenia and Menia had virtually no contact with each other. It was impossible for the twenty-year-old student to consider a woman twice her age (and one she saw as “large and looking like a man”) as a rival. “When Rudik told me he had been to bed with her, I thought: What! With that monster!” With Menia herself, Rudolf was so affectionately tactile that friends presumed theirs was a physical relationship, too. “When Estelle Volkenstein asked me, I told her, ‘No, it’s not what I want, but I love him.’ ” Even when the opportunity was there, Rudolf did not attempt to take things further, telling Menia—“the only virgin in Leningrad”—that he respected her for holding back. “It’s good, Menia. Good not to.” Once after dinner with Nikita Dolgushin and his wife-to-be, a rehearsal pianist eighteen years his senior, they decided to spend the night at the couple’s apartment as it was too late to travel home. “They thought our situation was the same as theirs and put us in a room with a single bed. We couldn’t stop giggling because we were so squashed and had to hold each other so as not to fall out, and then we were giggling even more, thinking that they were thinking we were making love.”

  By the early spring of 1959, Menia’s course was over, and the time had come for her to return to Cuba. On the day she was due to leave, Rudolf had a rehearsal scheduled with Dudinskaya to prepare for their next performance of Laurentia. When he failed to appear, the ballerina feared the worst: “She was so nervous that Rudolf had eloped with me.” But Rudolf was not among the group of friends at the station who had gathered to see Menia off, and while she was glad to be returning home, as she hadn’t seen her family in years, Menia boarded the Red Star to Moscow feeling badly let down. The train had barely pulled out of the station when the door to her compartment slid open and there stood a beaming Rudolf, who announced, “I’m coming with you!”

  Throughout the journey they talked almost without a break: “About how we were going to stay in contact, how we could be together. Rudolf was very emotional—it wasn’t like before.” In Liuba’s opinion, it had always been Menia who was the more committed of the two. “She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She was totally in love and dreamed that he would marry her. I had a lot of sympathy for Menia and tried to push Rudolf into proposing to her. ‘Oh, I know,’ he said, when I told him he should make a commitment to her, ‘But it would spoil my biography.’ ”

  Now, however, realizing that he was about to lose Menia, Rudolf began talking seriously about their future. In the middle of the night, stirred by the romantic atmosphere and rhythm of the train, he came down into her bunk and began to make love to her. “But at that moment, I had no desire for him. I was stupid.… A little girl.”

  They spent their second night together in Moscow in a communal apartment near the Kremlin owned by Menia’s friend Bella Kurgina, who was amazed to see Rudolf standing behind Menia at her front door. The two girls were as close as sisters, and Menia confided that he had proposed to her, adding excitedly, “If we’re together we can conquer the whole world!” Bella, who had never warmed to Rudolf—“I found him very closed and uninteresting”—was concerned. “I felt he was using her as a way to get out of Russia without a scandal, and yet I could see it was complicated—that he was genuinely attracted to her, and that there was great sympathy and feeling there.” The room where Bella lived with her husband and mother-in-law was only 15 meters square; Menia slept on a camp bed with Rudolf beside her on the floor. “Most of the night he was kneeling, kissing her hand and being so loving. From the way he behaved with Menia I could never have imagined that he would turn out to be homosexual.”

  The following morning Rudolf insisted on going to the airport to see Menia off. When she was told that she would have to pay for the excess weight of her luggage—crammed with books and records—Rudolf reached for his wallet. “It’s not a problem,” he said protectively. When her flight was called, and the time came for him to say a final farewell, he had tears in his eyes and would not let her go. “He thought he would never see me again.”

  Rudolf went back to work. Since his triumph in Laurentia the previous fall, he had resigned himself to accepting the frustrating regime of the Kirov, under which principal artists must wait, study, and rehearse for performances that are few and far between. He had appeared onstage only twice in three months, on both occasions—March 13 and 25, 1959—joining a quartet of cavaliers in Raymonda and acting, according to one observer, “as if he’d been sentenced to hard labor.” The dance calls for perfect synchronization among the ensemble, but conformity was not in Rudolf’s nature. “It seemed to me that he was trying to jump higher, to make more pirouettes, irrespective of the other three.” In April his second performance of Laurentia came in for more criticism than praise. Neither he nor Dudinskaya was in top form, and fans detected an element of disrespect toward her. “Everything seemed to disturb him that night, and we sensed he was thinking: I’m so young and pretty, but here I am dancing with an old lady. It was never put in words, but the audience understood, and everybody said, ‘This Tatar boy is so tough.’ ”

  Almost immediately Rudolf began preparing for his debut with the virtuoso ballerina Ninel Kurgapkina in Gayane. Nearly a decade older than he, and renowned for her spitfire temper, Kurgapkina proved more than a match for the brazen young star. First rehearsals took the form of a contest of wills until Rudolf realized he had met a fellow fanatic, and converted his initial combativeness into compliance and respect. Without protest, he repeated at least a dozen times a lift in which, crossing the stage, he carried Kurgapkina balanced on one hand above his head—until he had won her confidence. “He was a little bit afraid of me, but he liked my attitude to work and life. I was obsessive in rehearsals but a normal person outside.” It was not long before the pair really had fun dancing together. Kurgapkina’s “amazing quality of earthiness and energy” excited him, and he admired her autonomy (during supported pirouettes she turned herself, and if ever he was overattentive, she would snap, “Don’t mess!”). “He saw real professionalism in Kurgapkina. She gave him a lot of advice and he listened to her, whereas there was nobody among the men that he took any notice of.”

  In Gayane, a showy Soviet propaganda piece set on a collective farm, Rudolf performed the part of Armen, a hot-blooded worker-hero in the mold of Laurentia’s Frondoso. At his debut performance the verdict among the fans was that his rendering
of the famous variation with flaming torches had been much better at his graduation performance. “Surprisingly, the role did not suit his individuality, he’s still very green. It was adequate but there was no courage,” noted his young fan Galina Palshinas in her diary. But by the next performance two weeks later, she had changed her mind. “Everything went perfectly—I wanted to cover his path with flowers! If he had Diaghilev behind him he would be world famous tomorrow!”

  Within the Kirov company itself there was no such enthusiasm for Rudolf’s dancing. “I didn’t like his crazy technique onstage,” said Alla Osipenko, one of the new stars. “I valued different aesthetics—the kind of good breeding [Nikita] Dolgushin had. At that time Rudolf was just a boy, he wasn’t shaped. Pushkin gave him a base, but everything he became took place in the West. I was an admirer only later when I saw tapes of him.” The attitude of his male contemporaries was much the same. “As an artist he didn’t really reveal himself here” (Boris Bregvadze). “He stunned Europe, but here nobody thought he was very special” (Serge Vikulov). “We didn’t appreciate what he was doing, because he based himself very much on ballet in the Western world which in those days we didn’t know much about” (Vadim Desnitsky). Others found something distinctly disturbing about Rudolf’s dancing. “You didn’t like it, but you couldn’t stop watching it.”

  Well aware of his own worth, Rudolf cared nothing about the opinion of “the Salieris,” except that he believed that within the company there were cabals of “life-long enemies” who actively wanted to get rid of him. When he learned that he wasn’t among the dancers being called to Moscow for selection in the Seventh Communist World Youth Festival, to be held in Vienna, he suspected discrimination, and wanted to know why. He had refused to become a member of Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Pary—“I didn’t want any group of people to decide my fate”—but had this made him too much an object of suspicion to be allowed to travel to the West? Or perhaps it was his impetuous dash with Menia to Moscow that had led the authorities to believe he might leave with her for good. When his mother told him that she had been “grilled” about whether or not he was likely to defect, he decided to appeal to the unbiased Boris Fenster to plead his case. Not long afterward, his name was added to the list going to Vienna.

  That summer’s trip to Vienna not only consolidated Rudolf’s partnership with Ninel Kurgapkina, it marked the beginning of a lasting friendship. He had found a soul mate—“Ninel had balls under her, so to speak,” remarks Baryshnikov. “He liked that”—and one who similarly refused to toe the party line. On the long bus journey from Moscow, when the Komsomol representative instructed everyone to join in with a song, the pair remained silent; when everyone else was quiet, they sang out loud. The convoy stopped in Budapest for a short break, but half an hour later, when the dancers had settled back into their seats, there was no sign of Rudolf. “This time he even ran away from me,” said Ninel. With some agitation the Komsomol official began searching the other buses while the group waited with increasing impatience. Eventually Rudolf appeared, to be greeted with wails of protest. “How do I know when I’ll be in Budapest again?” he declared. “I wanted to see the opera house.”

  When, on July 25, the Russian convoy of forty buses arrived in Vienna, it was met by a crowd of émigrés who started trying to throw books through the windows of the buses. These were copies of Dr. Zhivago (banned in the Soviet Union), every one of which was immediately confiscated. With their placards and protest songs the demonstrators made their presence strongly felt throughout the week, but failed to mar the sense of celebration and solidarity. The cafés, restaurants, and dance halls of Vienna, “the gayest, most beautiful and hospitable city” Rudolf had ever seen, were teeming with cosmopolitan young people—dancers, sportsmen, musicians—who had come from as far afield as the Americas and Australia. On one of their free evenings Rudolf suddenly said to Ninel, “Let’s run away and go dancing!” She changed into her favorite taffeta dress, which made a schish, schish sound as she moved, and looked simply stunning. As they took to the floor and started to jive, they created a kind of vacuum as everyone moved to the sides to watch. “Nobody in the company ever found out. It was our secret.”

  It was during a march past by the Cuban delegation that Rudolf suddenly spotted Menia Martinez: “He was so happy to see me. He came to our hotel, to our classes, and spent so much time with me that my friends were saying, ‘Menia, this must be love.’ ” She remembers Rudolf talking so openly about freedom that she feared for him. “Ninel Kurgapkina came and begged me to tell him to stay with the Russians.” Although Rudolf insisted years later that defection was not on his mind at the time—“Not then”—the urgency with which he kept proposing to Menia in Vienna suggests that he was at least keeping the option open: “He was much more insistent, saying, ‘We have to do it here.’ But Rudik at that moment was not very important for me.”

  With her emotions now invested in the political upheavals of Castro’s new Cuba, Menia was no longer the doting young girl whom Rudolf had known in Leningrad; he found her “cold,” and told her, “Now I think I love you more than you do me.” After watching her perform in a revealing costume, he could hardly contain his jealousy. “It’s not good for you to dress like that,” he remarked sulkily. Thinking that her attitude might change if he could find a way of going to Havana, Rudolf asked Menia to introduce him to Alberto Alonso, cofounder with his famous sister-in-law, Alicia, of the country’s national ballet company. “He was hoping for an invitation.”*

  As Vienna was the first place where Rudolf had made any contact with the West, he was determined to exploit every opportunity the festival provided. “I felt that, should I ever stay in the West, nobody would rush up to me to put me on a plate and hand me around like a cake. I understood that I would have to fight for myself.” With a multilingual Bulgarian colleague accompanying him as translator, he went out of his way to meet the French choreographer Roland Petit, whose Cyrano de Bergerac, performed that week, he had found “so very new and strange.” Petit had specifically asked not to be disturbed, but found himself impressed by the “young Cossack’s curiosity and smiling eyes, recalling many years later his shy words of praise in English, and parting remark, ‘I see you again.’ ”

  During the ballet competition itself, staged in the Stadthalle, Vienna’s largest concert hall, before an audience of seventeen thousand, it was once again Rudolf’s performance in the showpiece Corsaire duet with Alla Sizova that created a sensation. They were the only couple to receive the highest score of ten points, but when Rudolf discovered that Natalia Makarova, Yuri Soloviev, and the newly married Vladimir Vasiliev and Ekaterina Maximova were also to be given gold medals, he was far from pleased. To make his point, he refused to appear at the final ceremony, telling Sizova, who had to accept the prize and diploma for them both, “I don’t need that equality.” His behavior offended his peers, but Rudolf didn’t care. He was deliberately distancing himself from the Russian contenders.

  In late August the Kirov arrived in Bulgaria to help mark the fifteenth anniversary of the country’s liberation by Soviet troops. The members of the company were just waking up when their train pulled into the station and they heard a commotion outside. A welcoming party of fans, alerted to the “Unique Phenomenon” of the young Rudolf by an article in the local press, were standing on the platform chanting “Nu-re-yev! Nu-re-yev!” and passing crates of peaches to the dancers through the window. “It was events like this that made me aware of Rudik’s incredible popularity and fame,” remarks Ninel Kurgapkina. On the way back to Moscow, the train stopped for forty minutes in Kiev, just time enough, Rudolf believed, to make a short expedition. He wanted to see the work of Mikhail Vrubel, the Russian painter who, together with Valentine Serov, Diaghilev had admired more than any other. To Rudolf he was a kindred spirit, “a lonely figure in Russian art,” who had broken with St. Petersburg academic traditions and become a pioneer of modernism. On view in Saint Cyril Cathedral were t
he frescoes Vrubel had restored (chosen by Diaghilev to illustrate an issue of the magazine he founded and edited, The World of Art), together with four icons. Accompanied by an aquaintance from the orchestra, he took a taxi both ways, but by the time they got back to the station, the Kirov group had left.

  I told my friend that I was ready to bet he would find the entire orchestra waiting for him in Leningrad, laughing and joking about his missing the train, while my own absence would be construed in a completely different light by the company. It all happened just as I said.… All the dancers had been unanimous in their conviction that this “insubordination” would put an end to my career.

  All it did, in fact, was cause comment: “Have you heard? Rudik’s defected … to Kiev!” quipped one dancer, while Boris Fenster was said to have remarked, “One day he’s going to stay behind somewhere for good.”

  On returning to Leningrad, the company dispersed for the summer. Rudolf spent the first half of his holiday with his family, arriving with presents he had bought on tour: a mountain-goat fur coat for Farida, open-toed stilettos for his sisters. “We had never seen such things in Ufa!” Walking past the Hotel Bashkiri, he spotted Pamira, who ran up to greet him. “We talked for a bit, then I explained that I had tickets for a movie and was already late meeting my friends. He just stood and watched me go, probably not expecting that I would leave so soon.” Rudolf’s schoolteacher Taisiam Ilchinova did not recognize him when he called out to her in the street—“He’d grown up so much, become so handsome”—but they stood and chatted for quite a while. Others were equally amazed by the change in Rudolf. When Alik Bikchurin asked him how the “feeble boy” he remembered could have turned into such an impressive young athlete, Rudolf replied, “Exercise and food! Class, sports, and dinners in the house of Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin.”