Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  He had grown a whole head taller than Albert Aslanov, with whom he spent a good deal of his time; one night they walked until sunrise with Albert doing most of the listening as Rudolf held forth.

  He told me that on the journey to Ufa he had practiced in the train with everyone in the carriage watching him. “Well, so you haven’t changed that much, my friend, you always needed nothing but ballet!” He laughed and then he started talking passionately about Vienna: the theater, the architecture, the culture, and the atmosphere.

  They went several times together to see A Flight with a Soul, the film featuring Rudolf’s 1958 Corsaire duet, which was showing locally. “I was really impressed. I said, ‘I remember that you wanted to jump like Yasha Livshiz [a Bashkirian principal], but now you’re doing it better. I’ve never seen chaînés like those!” At the theater where Rudolf took class while he was in Ufa, his ex-colleagues were also amazed by the huge improvement in his technique. “Some already knew about his success, because they had friends in Leningrad,” said Sveta Baisheva, his partner from Pioneer days. “He was just beautiful, and people looked on him very differently now.”

  From Ufa, Rudolf went to spend a few days by the Black Sea. He had asked his Vaganova ex-classmate Marina Vasilieva where she was going for her vacation, adding vaguely, “Maybe I’ll come to see you.” Her mother, of whom he was very fond, ran a students’ summer dacha situated on a long deserted beach backed by distant hills. Marina was sunbathing one day when she heard Rudolf calling her name. He didn’t stay there long, but joined in all the fun, posing for photographs by performing showpiece duets with Marina in the sand. When he returned to Leningrad, Xenia was among a group of fans waiting for him at the station—she never failed to come and meet him—but spotting a favorite of his, a young girl who attended every one of his performances, he brushed straight past her. “And that was my great mistake. Since that time, Xenia Josifovna changed her attitude to me one hundred percent.”

  Petite and pretty, with a round face and large plaintive eyes, Tamara Zakrzhevskaya was a student in literature and philology at Leningrad University, and also had an encyclopedic knowledge of ballet. Their growing attachment was already resented by Xenia, who could feel her influence on Rudolf ebbing away.

  She got very jealous when she felt anyone coming too close to him; she thought he belonged to her. She was a very kind woman but a tough one, who gave you no possibility of escape. “You must only think about tomorrow’s classes,” she used to tell him. She was like a dictator. She had to know everything, to control everything—not just everyday routine but also his private life. To be Xenia’s friend you needed to dance her dance and not everybody could do that.

  Attempts to resist her hold brought out the worst in Rudolf. When Alla Sizova went into the studio one day, she saw him with Xenia and overheard him being “very unpleasant.” As Sizova came closer to ask him something, he whipped round, hissing, “This is not for your ears—get out!” “The situation with Xenia was very uncomfortable for Rudik,” remarked Liuba. “He couldn’t push her away because she loved him and did everything for him.” And he couldn’t do without her. Not only did Xenia take care of day-to-day practicalities, she was much more adept than Pushkin at helping him deal with theater politics. Encouraging him, as Baryshnikov put it, “not to pay attention to the assholes,” she gave him the confidence to be himself.

  Rudolf was pushed around because he didn’t play normal games. His way of dealing with people was totally unorthodox. He was a wild man compared with the standards of Leningrad behavior: He said exactly what he thought. Xenia had a very rational approach to things. She sorted out his problems, told him how to behave, and calmed him down.

  Although their liaison was no secret in the theater, no one gossiped about it out of respect for Pushkin, who “gave the impression that it was taking place in someone else’s family.” Nevertheless the teacher’s undiminished devotion to Rudolf struck fellow pupils as extraordinary; they looked on in disbelief as Alexander Ivanovich brought a tub of water into the studio one day to make him a footbath. “It’s not difficult for me to do and he needs to save his feet,” he felt obliged to explain. Quietly, patiently, always loyal, Pushkin allowed Rudolf the independence and liberty he craved. “In Russia he met a wall, but Alexander Ivanovich encouraged and inspired him to do something new.” Like Chaboukiani collaborating with his teacher Vladimir Ponomarev to change the old order of things, together they reworked the famous male variations to make the dancer appear more brilliant, introducing in La Bayadère, for example, a coda of double assemblés circling the stage, which is still performed today. “It was a real example of how much a teacher could give his pupil and how a pupil could develop the teacher,” said Oleg Vinogradov.

  Around this time, other mentors besides the Pushkins began to exert their influence, particularly Sergei Sorokin, a well-known balletomane and collector. “Serioso,” as his friends called him, ran the House of Books on Nevsky Prospekt, which specialized in foreign literature and art and dance books during a period when books were rarer than nylon stockings. Speaking several languages and able, due to Polish connections, to travel without restrictions, he seemed to know everyone in the ballet world, and would speak to Rudolf about Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Frederick Ashton, and Margot Fonteyn—all of whom he claimed to have met. When artists from visiting companies were in town, they would come to the shop or to one of his tea parties. “Serioso knew everything about everybody, but people adored him because he was very discreet.” His elegantly furnished apartment was “a choreographic Hermitage,” crowded with dancer figurines, postcards, documents, photographs, and Western ballet magazines—an archive so comprehensive that it is now housed in the Vaganova school museum. “It was here, in Leningrad, that Rudolf’s passion for collecting first began,” said Vadim Kiselev, a young curator and ballet fan who lived next door. His room on Sousa Pechotnikov Street also housed a trove of antiques, art books, Meissen figurines, old English prints, tapestry screens, and—his most prized possession of all—an eighteenth-century harpsichord that mesmerized Rudolf each time he came to visit.

  Rudolf was still a student when Kiselev, who worked opposite the school at the State Museum of Theater and Musical Art, first spotted him throwing snowballs in the adjoining yard. “Even then I could see the beautiful catlike plasticity of his movements.” Encouraged by his tutor, Vera Krasovskaya, to befriend Rudolf, he invited him to view the collection. As they stood together in the beautiful, gold-paneled room, looking at engravings of Taglioni and Camargo, Rudolf made various comments such as, “Oh—so already they knew how to do cabrioles!” and asked the kind of questions that would only interest a connoisseur. He was particularly fascinated to learn about early photography, wondering aloud how Nijinsky could have held his poses for the length of time the exposures required.

  Five years older than Rudolf, with wavy blond hair and Cupid’s-bow lips, Kiselev was “an exotic” by Leningrad standards, one of a coterie of homosexual friends that also included Sorokin.* He says that they, together with Marietta Frangopoulo, the curator of the Vaganova school museum, were already aware of Rudolf’s true orientation. “We understood that his volatility came about partly as a result of this. Marietta used to talk to him about it, she would tell him that he shouldn’t be ashamed.” One night Kiselev, who “just fell in love with him and that’s it,” invited Rudolf to his apartment. With seduction in mind, he had bought a bottle of Armenian cognac and two hundred grams of caviar, which he served on bone china to impress Rudolf. But the evening did not go according to plan. His delicate sensibilities already affronted by the young Tatar’s gross table manners, Kiselev then found his advances rudely repelled. They parted “almost enemies,” and had no further contact until Rudolf turned up at the museum one day, saying, “I think I offended you.” He apologized, and while continuing to flirt with Kiselev (addressing him as “Adonis”), resumed an acquaintance free of sexual ties.

  Sorokin was also smitten with
Rudolf, but much more timid about expressing his interest. An amateur dancer in a Palace of Culture troupe, and uninhibitedly camp, he was known as Zub za zub, “a tooth for a tooth,” because of his prominent, crisscrossed teeth. “Rudolf felt pity for Serioso because he was as ugly as Quasimodo, and he appreciated his kindness.” Lavish with his gifts of gloves and expensive scarves, Sorokin would take Rudolf on long walks around Leningrad, pointing out places of special interest and beauty. A Platonic figure, he often drew his young protégé into intellectual debates. Among subjects they discussed was Tchaikovsky’s death, Rudolf being convinced that the composer had commited suicide to save his family from the shame of his homosexuality. But although his endorsement of this theory suggests that male love was starting to occupy Rudolf’s mind, he was not yet willing to consider it as an option for himself. (Years later he told a lover in London that when he found himself attracted to a boy on a Leningrad bus he had felt so ashamed that he got off at the next stop.)

  He spent the early fall of 1959 preparing for his debut in La Bayadère with Dudinskaya. Her original partner had been Vakhtang Chaboukiani, who had virtually rechoreographed the role of Solor as a showpiece for himself. Now a director of Tblisi Ballet, the fifty-year-old Chaboukiani was on a visit to Leningrad when he suddenly appeared in the Kirov’s Ballet Hall number 2, one of the Kirov studios, to watch Dudinskaya rehearsing with the young Nureyev. Up until this point, the backgrounds of these two male stars were almost identical. Born with the same wild determination to achieve his goal, Chaboukiani also came from a poor family in the south. He had set his heart on studying in Leningrad where he arrived late in his teens, and within three years, had caught up and covered the entire syllabus. “They both gave themselves to dance with soul, with passion,” says Vera Krasovskaya. “Chaboukiani and Nureyev were the type of performers who with their appearance onstage changed its whole spirit.” The opportunity, therefore, to show off in front of his idol would have been a thrilling experience for Rudolf, had it not been for the fact that the veteran star hardly paid him any attention. “He was looking at him with only half an eye, and later we heard that he had said, ‘That boy is too big for his boots.’ ” Dudinskaya was also said to be displeased with Rudolf’s attitude during rehearsals, and it was around this time that he received a letter from a fan-turned-friend warning him that he was getting a reputation for being impossible.

  When he was in Moscow for the 1958 student competition, Rudolf had forged a close rapport with Silva Lon, known as the “ninth pillar of the Bolshoi”* because of her unbending support of the company. Responding to Silva’s comment, he replied: “I don’t know what people are saying, but I myself don’t feel above it all because there is no reason. I don’t provoke Vakhtang … we don’t have any contact, but his courtiers [at the Kirov] have decided to keep me in the corps de ballet.” Then came word that Dudinskaya was not going to perform with Rudolf as scheduled. His fans “knew for sure that Rudik had offended Natalia Mikhailovna,” but the ballerina insisted that she canceled because of a leg injury. “It was such a pity for me, I really wanted to dance it with him.” Olga Moiseyeva, a ballerina of Kurgapkina’s generation, was at home one afternoon when she received a telephone call from the company office, telling her to get to the theater as quickly as she could: She was dancing La Bayadère with Nureyev in a few hours’ time. “No, I’m not.… I’ve never so much as shaken his hand,” she protested. But dance together they did, “and it was perfect.” Unlike the peasant heroes Rudolf had danced to date, La Bayadère’s Solor is an Indian warrior of royal caste whose nobility Rudolf conveyed with extraordinary eloquence; never had his Oriental sinuosity and ballerina borrowings been seen to greater effect, elongating his line and refining it with astonishing beauty and lightness.

  In the audience that night were Hamet and Farida, watching entranced as their son flew across the stage “like a god of wind.” “It was then,” says Razida, “that our father realized Rudolf had made the right choice.” However provincial his parents may have appeared amid Leningrad’s cultural elite, Rudolf was eager to introduce them to his circle. Worlds apart, and with nothing but Rudolf in common, the Nureyevs and the Pushkins formed a bond of sorts; Alexander Ivanovich congratulated Hamet on his gifted son, while Xenia went out of her way to befriend Farida, keeping in touch with her over the years with letters and postcards.

  At Rudolf’s suggestion, his friend Tamara accompanied his mother to another Bayadère performance, but Farida could hardly concentrate on what was taking place onstage, so agitated was she that the fur coat Rudolf had given her would be stolen. The minute the curtain fell she rushed off to the cloakroom to find out.

  She was a dear little thing. She spoke Russian badly and would converse with Rudik exclusively in Tatar. I even learned one phrase by heart, so often did I hear it spoken. Akcha bar? (Got any money?), which is what Rudik would ask every time I saw them together. Iok (No) would come the reply, and without a word Rudik would reach into his pocket for money.

  Back at work, still full of pride over his son, Hamet told factory colleagues of Rudolf’s plans to move the family to Leningrad. (When news came the following summer that the dancer had been picked to perform at a private gathering before the Soviet premier and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the usually taciturn Hamet could hardly contain his excitement: Success of this kind in the family was beyond even the utopian dreams of his youth.)

  With the most important debut of his career coming up—that of Albrecht in Giselle—Rudolf, who was determined to revitalize every aspect of the role, began thinking of ways to enhance his appearance. His interest in costume had begun at school when he would beg his roommate Leo Ahonen to bring back Western tights from Finland (being nylon, they fitted much better than Russian ones, which were made of silk and wrinkled at the knees). “He wanted them so badly that he used to pay me in installments.” Once in the Kirov, Rudolf turned for advice to its leading designer, Simon Virsaladze, who started teaching him about color and the texture of materials, as well as helping him contrive ways of disguising his physical disadvantages. “Rudolf understood very early that with his middle height and short legs he had to do something to overcome this and to improve his line.” Virsaladze, who saw himself as a descendant of Diaghilev’s designers, with a similar mission to inject his work with contemporary resonance while maintaining a reverance for the past, began to work with the dancer in the redesigning of his costumes, much as Alexandre Benois had done with Nijinsky.

  With Virsaladze among them, a small group of intelligent and artistic homosexuals now surrounded Rudolf, each eager to contribute to his development. “He very much wanted to get rid of his Tatar cheekbones,” remarked Vadim Kiselev, who demonstrated ways of using makeup to shade the face, and suggested that he try out different wigs because he would look more beautiful with a smaller head. “Small head, big cock!” Rudolf joked provocatively. Through an acquaintance in the Paris Opera Ballet, Sergei Sorokin imported a dance belt that enabled Rudolf to wear tights with a short jacket, Western-style, just in time for his Giselle. Walking into the Kirov’s costume department one day, the dancer held out a sample of gray material and a pair of white tights, instructing a wardrobe mistress to dye the tights exactly the same shade; Virsaladze, a “genius with colour,” had encouraged him to aim for a more subtle combination of tones than the traditional Albrecht outfit. When the woman refused, telling him that she was not authorized to alter anything, he exploded, reducing her to tears. “We never saw such impudence in the old stars,” she complained. But Rudolf got his way. “Naturally people would say, ‘Why is this permission given just for Rudik?’ ” commented Sergiu Stefanschi. “And they resented it when he came onstage looking so beautiful. But the rest of us, we loved it. And the public adored him.”

  December 12, 1959, the Kirov Theater was packed to capacity with people jostling for standing room. “Everyone, let me tell you, knew something was happening, something new and wonderful.” Audiences were accus
tomed to seeing Albrecht played in Sergeyev’s image: a nobleman who dallied with the pretty peasant girl Giselle, and when tragedy struck, signaled his emotions in exaggerated, old-fashioned passages of mime. But from Rudolf’s first entrance—“like a hooligan boy” with a ragged, rebel mop of hair—Kirov traditions were instantly overturned: What people saw instead was a thrilling embodiment of modern youth, “a sparkling, beautiful, healthy young man,” whose acting was natural and sincere. Rudolf’s Albrecht was no urbane womanizer from a more elevated world, but a recklessly romantic kindred spirit who loses his head to love with all the ardor and impulsiveness that come with first experience. Even more remarkable was the way that he adapted the role to fit his own abilities, making the drama speak through his own spontaneous style—and even through his technical limitations.

  In the second act he introduced an innovation that “had not been inserted without a struggle.” When the French star Michel Renault performed Albrecht to Yvette Chauviré’s Giselle in Russia he substituted a long series of entrechat six beats for the usual brisée sequence.* Struck by how effective this was, Rudolf decided to borrow the idea, having first convinced his coach, Yuri Grigorovich, “that they were a logical and natural part of my interpretation.” They certainly were. “What we saw was not an exhausted dancer but the character of Albrecht who has to dance until he almost drops dead,” remarked Faina Rokhind. And because Rudolf was now featuring, rather than attempting to hide, his growing loss of control, critics found they could excuse his “blurring of correct form,” as he had made it completely integral to his performance.