Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Later that summer Rudolf had just packed his bags to go on vacation when he was told that he and Ninel Kurgapkina had been chosen to dance before Nikita Khrushchev at a gathering of high-ranking politicians with Russia’s artistic and intellectual elite (clearly the scandal of his opening night and ill-advised rendezvous with foreigners had not been held against him). On a beautiful day in June 1960 he and Ninel were driven to a dacha outside Moscow owned by Nikolai Bulganin, the former Soviet premier. In idyllic wooded surroundings an extravagant Sunday picnic was taking place; guests could go swimming, fishing, or boating, and there was even a fair with shooting booths. “It was very gay and absolutely informal,” recalled Rudolf, who did not recognize any of the government officials except for Khrushchev; his wife, Nina Petrovna; and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, one of the few friends of Stalin to have survived the purges. As the Soviet premier and his entourage sat eating their dinner at a table just in front of them, Rudolf and Kurgapkina danced the adagio from Don Quixote (the stage was too small and makeshift to accommodate anything more virtuosic). Another artist appearing that day was the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, playing Rachmaninov’s Preludes with a passionate intensity Rudolf felt he “could understand.”

  When dusk fell the requisite speechmaking began, and Shostakovich was given the honor of making the return toast. Then, as the party’s vodka-mellowed mood drifted into sentimentality, Voroshilov stood up and gave an impromptu recital of melancholic Ukrainian folk songs in a beautiful bass voice, soon accompanied by Khrushchev: “They both knew every word of every folk song.” When the dancers returned and described the occasion to their friends, Ninel was almost speechless at the grandeur of it all—the champagne cooling in ponds and streams—“You just had to reach down and pick up a bottle,” the buffet tables all over the garden covered with starched white cloths and laden with cornucopias of food. “I can’t express it even—it was like going to the White House: it was such a beautiful place with so much wealth on show.” Rudolf, on the other hand, was deeply cynical. “Now finally I understand what Communism is,” he told Tamara on his return.

  For his vacation that summer Rudolf wanted to go the Black Sea, and had written to his parents suggesting that they join him. The letter Hamet sent back in reply declining his offer was affectionate enough, but it brought the unsettling news that Farida’s declining health would not allow her to make the journey. Hamet urged his son to come instead to Ufa to see the family, but Rudolf had set his mind on going to Sochi, a subtropical resort with an arts-festival atmosphere in August much like those in Edinburgh or Saratoga Springs. Many young people came from Moscow and Leningrad to attend concerts and see Chaboukiani’s Georgian Group as well as the Novosibirsk Ballet. Giving a recital one evening was the famous violinist Yakov Flier, joint winner with the American pianist Van Cliburn of the first Tchaikovsky Competition the previous year. Rudolf, who was in Moscow at the time, had managed to get tickets for the dress rehearsal—“He played full out and we were in heaven!”—but on this occasion, he was in no mood to pay homage to a fellow artist. When Van Cliburn was spotted in one of the boxes and the whole audience rose to their feet to applaud him, only Rudolf remained seated. “His face grew very dark as he looked from the audience to Cliburn and back,” said Faina Rokhind, who was there. “I could read in his eyes what he was thinking: This is the kind of glory that I must get! He looked at what was going on and he wanted it so much.”

  His mood had not improved when he wrote to Tamara complaining about his vacation:

  I have sold my voucher for the hostel. The Sh. K. Sanatorium is terrible, and I live in Dudko’s apartment [a teacher in the Georgian theater] where I have almost a separate room. It is far from the sea, and the water in the sea is dirty. It rains night and day and when it stops we go and swim. It was so nice in the Crimea and I will go back there if Xenia answers.

  I’ve been to see the Georgian Ballet’s Gorda—rubbish, and I was surprised that the Moscow and Leningrad fans came specially for such shit. There is no Vakhtang [Chaboukiani]. He will appear only on the 12th in Othello. How can I trust the audience after that, and especially the fans? Their love can’t come from any aesthetic perception.… When it’s good, it should be good for everybody.

  In general my hopes for the Caucasus haven’t been satisfied and I will not return to Sochi [although] I live in Dudko’s house in a very pleasant family.… That’s all for now. I’ll wait for an answer.

  Rudik

  The letter he wrote from Sochi to Xenia has not survived, but the fact that he wanted to return to the Crimea to stay with her suggests that tensions between them had eased. She had become less possessive, confident that there was no one at the time with whom he was seriously involved, and unaware that Rudolf was still hoping to visit Menia. (“There is no invitation for the competition in Cuba,” he wrote to Silva Lon the following spring.) She knew that Tamara—her only rival for Rudolf’s time and attention—was no more to him than a confidante. And Xenia had also made peace with herself. Resigned to the fact that Rudolf would never reciprocate the passion she felt for him, she was more able now to accept her role of taking care of him, finding she could identify with the married woman in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, who “sighed after another” but was able to find contentment of sorts by submerging herself in daily domesticity. In one of her letters to Rudolf sent soon after his defection, she says, “I became so used to looking after you,” and quotes a couplet from the poem:

  Habit to us is given from above:

  It’s a substitute for happiness.

  “From the first minute I met you I understood your complicated nature,” she told him. “I was trying to save you from anything that could destroy your equilibrium.” And certainly her influence on Rudolf was as profound as it was long lasting. As Liuba pointed out in a memoir, Rudolf’s habit of attaching himself to someone else’s life in the West, feeling completely at home there and expecting to be taken care of, “sprang from Xenia”; just as when he began to choreograph he remembered her dictum that ballets should be based on literary classics—“Don’t use the primitive tales for ballet, choose only immortal works—Shakespeare, Byron, Homer,” she used to say, which he went on to do by making Romeo and Juliet, Manfred, Washington Square, and The Tempest.

  Yet in another respect, “Xenia wasn’t good for him,” says Liuba, who sees a parallel between Rudolf and the poet Alexander Blok, whose first sexual experience was with a woman twice his age. Her name was also Xenia—Xenia Mikhailovna Sadovskaya. In the summer of 1897, sixteen-year-old Sasha Blok spent a holiday at Bad Nauhein in Germany, where he astonished his mother and aunt by having an affair with a tall, enchantingly elegant widow. But while Xenia Mikhailovna remained in love with her schoolboy to the end of her life, for Blok the experience had a harmful long-term effect. “My first infatuation, if I am not mistaken, was accompanied by a sweet feeling of revulsion for the sexual act,” he wrote, looking back on their affair when he revisited the spa town twelve years later.* Blok developed a dualistic view of women as being either prostitutes or saints, and Rudolf, believes Liuba, “also suffered from this double life. If a very young man has a relationship with an older woman, after the initial passion is over he begins to have other feelings. Rudik associated sex with shame, and women with the dark side of his nature: It’s the reason he began to look for pleasure in other places.”

  *According to Alicia Alonso, they very much wanted Rudolf for their company, and approached the Kirov only to be told, “It’s not possible. He’s not ready.”

  *By bizarre coincidence both men met violent early deaths; in each case their murders were a direct result of their homosexuality.

  *The theater’s classical facade has eight pillars.

  *Renault was also the first male dancer Rudolf saw wear a short jacket.

  *The passivity of Rudolf was almost certainly following the example of Nijinsky, who “stood pensive and bit his nails” during Karsavina’s mad scene. As she wrote in her memoirs, “I
was sadly taken aback when I found that I danced, mimed, went off my head and died of a broken heart without any response from Nijinsky.”

  *He titled the cycle of lyrics he dedicated to her Twelve Years Later.

  4 BLOOD BROTHERS

  Teja Kremke was a seventeen-year-old East German boy with an erotic presence as visible as a heat haze. A student at the Vaganova school, he had shiny chestnut hair, pale skin, full lips, and intense gray-blue eyes—extraordinary eyes whose seductive glint through long black lashes was there even when he was a child. It was Teja whom Rudolf later described as his “first crush,” but in the summer of 1960, with the prospect of a long tour of the GDR immediately ahead, the boy’s main appeal was what he could tell Rudolf about the world outside.

  East Berlin, where Teja grew up, had few luxuries, with food and clothing in short supply, but the arts were thriving, and there was no physical barrier between the two German states as yet. He and his sister would take the U-bahn across the border two or three times a week—“We were part of a crowd that met in theaters and concert halls rather than cafés”—and Teja could talk about anything from recent developments in Western dance to Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble or the latest Hollywood movies. “Rudolf got a lot of information from him. Teja was very smart.”

  The student’s first letters home reveal an outlook that is both mature in its perceptions and surprisingly naive. “I would never have dreamed I would be introduced to great people like Sergeyev and Dudinskaya,” he wrote in January 1960, soon after arriving in Leningrad to begin his course. “It’s a weird feeling to talk to these people. They behave in a very modest way and one feels so small and insignificant next to them.” To Teja, who had seen every Nureyev performance since his arrival, Rudolf was almost as much of a deity as the fabled Kirov stars, and he could hardly believe it when the dancer volunteered to coach him and his partner from Berlin in their Sunday practice sessions. “He would help us with pas de deux,” said Ute Mitreuter, another German student. “Showing Teja where to hold me or how to prepare for a lift. Rudolf was a fanatic, Teja was a fanatic, and so was I.”

  Rudolf admired and encouraged the young students’ drive. Although Teja was not especially gifted, he was determined to absorb everything he could from his surroundings. “The Russian guys took all that for granted,” said Baryshnikov. “Teja was a good scholar and very practical: he was studying for his future.” He had brought an 8-mm home-movie camera to Leningrad, and had begun making a record of classes, productions, and roles, often filming in secret from the wings or the orchestra pit.* As Rudolf’s tour of East Germany was to coincide with the appearance in Leningrad of American Ballet Theatre, he asked Teja to film whatever he could of the performances. In return he agreed to deliver, through a contact in Leipzig, a present of three pairs of ballet shoes to Teja’s girlfriend.

  Rudolf was dismayed to be missing the ABT season for a second time. Three weeks earlier he had cut short his vacation in Ufa to see the company in Moscow, but Pushkin had urged him to return home. “My teacher say to me, ‘Ah, don’t stay there. I’ve got tickets for every performance in the front row when they are in Leningrad. Tomorrow is my birthday. Come here!’ So I abandoned Moscow.” Before he left the city, however, Rudolf went to a Bolshoi performance of Swan Lake, where he spotted the Danish star Erik Bruhn sitting in the audience with his two American partners, Maria Tallchief and Lupe Serrano. Having observed in photographs of Bruhn dancing exactly the streamlined purity he aspired to himself, he longed to go up and talk to the dancer.

  I prepared whatever little phrases I had for him. And I thought, What do I say to Maria Tallchief? I have nothing to say to her but everything for him. When I start to move toward them, fans, they just took me. They said, “Don’t you dare, because they will never let you out of Russia. Your career will be finished if you speak to them.”

  It was Bruhn’s schooling that Rudolf was “desperate” to deconstruct and absorb; in addition was the fact the ABT repertory included Theme and Variations by Balanchine, the choreographer whose work he longed to dance more than any other in the world. “I made that so clear that the authorities sent me to Germany to dance. They didn’t want me to be influenced by Western styles.”

  Not only was Rudolf convinced that his absence from Leningrad was deliberately timed, but when the tour began, he discovered that he and Ninel Kurgapkina had been “cheated” by the Kirov management, which had presented the tour as a special privilege (claiming they were to replace an indisposed Ulanova), whereas in fact they had been booked as just another turn on a variety-show bill. “There were clowns, jugglers … and us.” Feeling cold and cramped on a bus traveling thousands of kilometers across East Germany and dancing in seedy theaters and army camps for unenthusiasic audiences left Rudolf grimly determined to vent his fury on the authorities as soon as he returned. It was the influential Konstantin Sergeyev whom both dancers blamed for their “punishment.” Only recently, Rudolf had publicly humiliated Sergeyev for correcting a pupil while Pushkin was teaching class. “There is a teacher here,” Rudolf exploded. “You can leave right away and shut the door behind you!”

  Another motive, Ninel believes, was jealousy:

  Konstantin Mikhailovich would help people to rise up, but as soon as they became outstanding and threatened his and Dudinskaya’s position, he would try to push them back down again. In our case this was impossible. I had a strong character and was very independent, and Rudolf was the same. That was something that made us close. We were very good at being alone against the world.

  Determined to make the most of their travels, she and Rudolf went to the National Gallery in Dresden, where he bought a book on the collection and one on Rembrandt, which he planned to get Teja to translate for him on his return. In East Berlin, the last stop on the tour, Rudolf made contact with his ex-roommate Egon Bischoff, now a soloist and ballet master at the State Theater. One night they went out with Egon’s jolly wife, Gisela, to Die Möwe, a popular artists’ haunt, where they drank a lot, reminisced, and danced so wildly that the pearls on Gisela’s necklace flew off and bounced around like hail-stones. Earlier in the day they had driven around the city, and Rudolf, “in a lustig [happy] mood,” had insisted on being taken to see the frontier. “It was still open. If he’d wanted to go at this time he could have.” Which Rudolf knew. “I could go to West Germany very easily and just go to embassy and ask, Please, I would like to stay in your country.” At the beginning of the tour he had stuffed his suitcases with cookies, sugar, sausages, and tea, so that he didn’t have to spend a single kopek of his meager salary on food. “This money was meant for two things: defection to the West. Or if it doesn’t work, to buy piano. Because you couldn’t buy a piano in Russia.” He had complained a lot to Egon about his exile—“They have insulted me,” he said—and he even admitted that he was thinking of defecting. “My friend said, ‘Don’t be a fool.’ They’ll make publicity about you staying in the West and they will send you back to Russia. They’ve done that to everybody.’ So I bought a piano.”

  For Rudolf a decade later (as it had for Christopher Isherwood and his expatriate friends in the 1920s), Berlin meant boys, and Egon would be hard pressed to persuade him to forgo the clubs for a kitchen supper cooked by Gisela. But in the autumn of 1960 the city still had a certain prelapsarian charm—mostly the result of a single interlude that stayed in his memory for a long time. It was after taking class at the Staatsoper one day that he lingered to talk to a good-looking dancer who had caught his eye. Heinz Mannigel was two years older than Rudolf, with similarly sensuous features and a way of setting the simplest movements on fire. Spanish dancing was his speciality and, once again, Rudolf was determined to extract as much knowledge from another dancer as he could. They made a deal: Heinz would teach him authentic flamenco and the basics of German expressionism, while in return Rudolf would give him classes in the Pushkin method. “Rudolf gave me the logic of classical ballet, and I showed him how to get crazy things out of yourself that
you can’t speak. I was a young wild boy and tried to get him to be like an animal—which was how I understood dance to be.” It was the dynamics of German interpretive dance that especially interested Rudolf, the principle of tension, and the primitive, powerfully rhythmic way with which pioneers like Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca had expressed themselves. “He was curious about everything, and I never heard him be at all negative about the situation he was in; he just loved to dance.”

  Wanting Heinz to see how electrifying he himself could be onstage even in a pastiche Spanish role, Rudolf invited him to watch a performance of Don Quixote. They drove to a Russian army camp on the outskirts of the city, and when Heinz was forbidden entry, Rudolf in retaliation refused to dance until his friend was admitted. Then, inspired by his new command of flamenco, he danced the whole variation three times before the curtain went up. Despite his rapport with Ninel, which had been deepened by the hardships of the tour, Rudolf didn’t introduce the young German to her or even mention him, although he had invited Heinz to several other shows that week.

  The two Kirov dancers were supposed to report their whereabouts each day to a Komsomol representative, a rule Rudolf completely ignored. He and Heinz went together to the Komische Oper to see Walter Felsenstein’s spoof of Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, and walked for hours around the city visiting churches and museums. In the Pergamon Museum, Rudolf’s knowledge of Greek antiquities surprised Heinz. “It was he who explained things to me.” Eager to impress Rudolf, Heinz decided to take him on a trip to the West. “We got onto a subway train and I told Rudolf where we were going. ‘No, please, Heinz,’ he said, looking really frightened. ‘I can’t. I’ll get into big trouble.’ I didn’t understand, but I accepted it. We got off at the next station and went back.”