Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  As Heinz had no money, and Rudolf was saving up for his piano,* they didn’t eat out but would buy supper to take back to Heinz’s small room off Unter den Linden. Even though the opportunity was there—“I remember we drank a great deal at this time”—Rudolf did not attempt any kind of pass: If he was attracted to Heinz, his desire was subliminal. “You feel if someone is homosexual, and I really believe that Rudolf wasn’t at this point; he didn’t walk like one or behave like one. We just had a very, very warm feeling toward each other.” They were both examples of what Heinz calls “Verwahrlost in the soul [lost souls]”—both strays from a poor, tough childhood with none of the privileges bestowed on their contemporaries. “We were street kids with ambition, two friends who found in each other something that went extremely deep.” Rudolf evidently felt this, too, as when the time came to leave, he kissed Heinz on the lips with such ardor that Heinz was amazed and yet at the same time understood. “We had become so close and really loved each other. It was a really beautiful kiss which to this day I don’t regret.”

  Wanting to keep in touch with Heinz on his return to Leningrad, Rudolf wrote him an affectionately nostalgic letter recalling their time together, and when he received a present of a nylon shirt—to him, a Western status symbol—he reciprocated by sending Heinz gifts of chocolates and green coffee beans, a Russian speciality. In January he found out that Heinz had married a girl two weeks after meeting her, but the news hardly registered, as his relationship with Teja was beginning to reach a new level of intensity.

  The turning point was the student’s eighteenth-birthday party, after which they began to meet frequently, mostly at the Rossi Street apartment. As one of Pushkin’s pupils, Teja naturally was invited there for meals and educated in the nuances of life outside school. From the beginning Xenia was instinctively drawn to this beautiful youth, while Alexander Ivanovich, whom Teja worshipped, soon became a father figure for him, too. With Teja by his side, Rudolf would listen to records and talk until late into the night. The Kremkes were a musical family (Teja’s sister, Ute, was a professional pianist, and he himself played the piano and the accordion), although it was only under Rudolf’s guidance that he developed a real feeling for music, especially Bach.

  It was rare that their conversations touched on subjects outside music and dance. Before his arrival Teja had spent a month in Moscow improving his schoolboy Russian and being indoctrinated in the ideology of the brotherland, but, like Rudolf, he had no interest in contemporary politics and hated the constraints of Communism. One evening they were talking in the Vaganova student kitchen while Ute Mitreuter was brewing coffee. “Teja was telling Rudolf that he should go to the West—‘There you’ll be the greatest dancer in the world,’ he said. ‘But if you stay here you’ll be known only to the Russians.’ ‘Yes of course I know that,’ answered Rudolf. ‘It’s how Nijinsky became a legend. And I’m going to be the next one.’ ”

  Yet for all their freedom of spirit, their characters were completely at odds, with Teja’s Teutonic pragmatism running counter to Rudolf’s extreme impetuosity. There were many clashes. Slava Santto, a young friend of the Pushkins, watched them play chess together one night: “Teja did everything very accurately, thinking slowly and carefully about his next position. But when Teja started to win the game, it was too much for Rudolf. All of a sudden he swept the chessboard and everything else onto the floor, then flew out of the room. Teja stayed exactly where he was: very calm, with no expression on his face.” Teja had more money than the other students, more money even than members of the staff, and set himself up as a kind of middleman, trading clothes, records, and medicines from the West. This mercenary quality irritated Rudolf—“That’s Teja,” he once scoffed to a friend. “Either buying or selling.” But he was quick to use it to his own advantage, persuading him to bring back from one trip something he had coveted desperately since he was a child.

  It was when Teja hadn’t appeared at the school one day that a concerned Ute Mitreuter went to his room and found him sitting on the floor setting up a network of rails to an electric train set. “He was waiting to surprise Rudolf. And I remember thinking, My God, he cares only about him—how could he not go to class? For us this was very serious. It seemed so strange, this concern for Rudolf. It was as if he really loved him.” Ute Kremke had also been taken aback by the intensity of Teja’s commitment to Rudolf. “Rudik is my blood brother,” he told her, admitting that they had cut themselves to mingle their blood. “But why? What do you mean?” she asked in amazement, not knowing about the American Indian ritual, and thinking, His feelings are too strong. Teja only smiled.

  Their growing intimacy was a secret too risky to reveal to anyone—even to Ute Mitreuter, to whom Teja had always confided his sexual history in the past. “Teja talked to me about all the things he did with girls. There were many of them who were mad about him—I heard he was a very good lover—and that’s why I didn’t think there was anything more than a friendship between him and Rudolf. It was only later that I knew it was a love affair.”

  Teja had left a school sweetheart behind in Germany, a dancer with heavy-browed, lovely eyes like his, and although she had recently defected with her parents to West Germany, they wrote to each other regularly. “Mietze” (Anne Enders) always believed that Teja was faithful to her while he was in Leningrad, whereas in fact he had established a reputation as a school philanderer from his first day. Arriving at his new lodgings, he found the common room being painted by a young rabochaya, who, while not at all pretty, had something in her coarse manner and fleshy, gleaming body that stirred him. He began chatting in his charmingly insinuating way until he had talked her into letting him ravish her on the grand piano, making sure her head was thrown back over the side so he didn’t have to see her face. Even more sexually precocious than the young Sasha Blok, Teja was only twelve when he was seduced while on vacation with his family by a thirty-five-year-old woman—an encounter that left him with a far-from-conventional sexual outlook. (In the mid-sixties he would persuade his adoring Indonesian child-wife to live in a ménage à trois with a beautiful Aryan youth with whom he was having an affair.) “Teja was always open to new experience. There was a perverse strain in his character. Something other people didn’t find normal was very exciting to him.”

  When, soon after Rudolf’s defection, Teja was interrogated about their friendship by the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, he claimed that it was Rudolf who had tried to seduce him, but as Teja was the one with homosexual experience—at school in Berlin he had been caught in the shower with a boy—it is far more likely that the opposite was true. (Rudolf would one day tell a mutual friend that it was Teja who first taught him “the art of male love.”) When Konstantin Russu, another student from East Germany, went to the Vaganova shower room one day, he found that Rudolf and Teja had locked themselves in and were refusing to open the door. It only confirmed what he had suspected for some time: Often, when he came back in the evening to the room he shared with Teja, he had seen the Kirov star climbing out of the ground-floor window and running down Rossi Street. With only the two students sharing, it was easy for Rudolf and Teja to be alone when Konstantin was at class—“They could just close the door if they wanted to.”

  Yet more and more, Rudolf longed for a place of his own. “It became a fixation for him. Somewhere, anywhere, but it had to be private with enough space for the piano he badly coveted.” He decided that he would try to exchange the room in the Ordinarnaya Street apartment (which the Kirov had given him and Alla Sizova to share) for two smaller rooms—one for himself and one somewhere else for his sister Rosa, with whom he didn’t want to live. Having managed to obtain the special permit allowing her to remain in Leningrad, she was living in considerable style by Russian standards, leading what Sizova describes as “a very free life with a lot of people coming and going.” Rudolf knew that she would hate the idea of giving all this up, and as he couldn’t face breaking the news himself, he persuaded Tamara to d
o it for him.

  Rosa was lying on a couch when Tamara arrived to see her, but as soon as she realized the implications of what was being said, she suddenly jumped up and began shouting, “You want the room. You will get nothing! It’s mine. I live here.… And I’m pregnant!” She became so hysterical that Alla’s parents, who were in the room next door, came rushing in to investigate. Later, when Tamara told Rudolf what had happened, she saw his cheeks burn with shame as he forbade her ever to mention the subject again. The drama only heightened his growing sense of detachment from Rosa, his childhood ally, who no longer fitted into his world and was now alienating his Leningrad friends. They found her “strange, closed, introverted,” and so different from Rudolf that it was hard to believe they were siblings. As Leonid Romankov put it, “Rosa was of this world; Rudolf came from the stars.” Tamara had vowed that she would no longer speak to her, and Xenia had disapproved of her from the start. “Xenia Josifovna was from a good family, very intelligent, with wonderful manners; Rosa was the absolute opposite.”

  Rudolf resigned himself to remaining with the Pushkins. However stifling Xenia could be, no one looked after him better, while the solicitous devotion of Alexander Ivanovitch was boundless. Slava Santto arrived at the apartment one evening to find Pushkin confined to the tiny kitchen. “Ssssh! Please don’t go in,” he whispered. “Rudik is there. He’s listening to music.” Sure enough, Rudolf was lying on the floor listening to a recording of Bach. Another advantage of staying in Rossi Street was the fact that Teja was always welcome there, Xenia having adopted him as a new protégé, shaping his thoughts and tastes. By now a deep bond had developed among them all: “It was a liaison à quatre. They were kind of bound together.”

  It was nearly always Xenia who took charge of a situation, lighting it up with her vivacity, but Pushkin would often join in their more frivolous moments, playing up to Teja’s camera during country weekends and allowing himself to be photographed side by side with Xenia in their large mahogany bed. Teja’s daughter, Jurico, remembers seeing a photograph of her father with Rudolf and Pushkin in the bed, which may have led to the innuendos she heard from her mother about “sex games” at the Pushkins’ apartment (the kind of speculation Rudolf himself perpetuated when he shocked a friend by saying that he had slept with Pushkin as well as Xenia: “Both of them enjoyed it!”). But if Pushkin was indeed drawn to his own sex—and several people believe that “Alexander Ivanovich was the other way”—it was not a compulsion he was known to act on. In an album put together after their death by friends of the Pushkins, there is a photograph of Pushkin sitting on a beach beside a tanned, smiling Sergeyev. Like everyone else sunbathing around them, they are both naked. Yet whereas Sergeyev, standing with Pushkin in another picture taken at the water’s edge, projects an unmistakable homoerotic charge, his magnificent physique on full display except for a slip of a towel around his loins, Alexander Ivanovich, with his shapeless trunks, skullcap, and thin limbs, seems strangely out of place: In contrast to his earthy wife, there was something spiritual, almost ascetic about him.

  Whether or not the Pushkins were aware of Rudolf’s physical liaison with Teja can never be known (it was certainly not discussed with other members of their circle), but the importance Teja was assuming in Rudolf’s life was something Xenia would soon start to resent. Far more unsettling, had they been aware of it, was Teja’s constant goading of Rudolf to leave Russia. “He’d say, ‘Go! Get out! At the first opportunity you have. Don’t stay here or no one will hear of you!’ ” A decade later, afraid that Teja would have the same malign influence on Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had taken Rudolf’s place in Pushkin’s affections, the teacher, making some excuse, would usher his young charge into another room if Teja happened to drop in, keeping him hidden there until Teja had left. “Alexander Ivanovich was a very, very Soviet man,” remarks Slava Santto. “I know what it was like at that time: What was possible for Rudolf to speak about with comrades of his own age, and what was impossible for the Pushkins to understand.”

  Little did the Pushkins know when they posed for Teja’s movie camera during a weekend on the Finnish Gulf that they were, in fact, colluding in an extraordinary prophetic enactment of Rudolf’s defection. This fleeting narrative begins with Rudolf walking up the steps of the Neva embankment and stopping to look back, as if taking leave of the city and his friends. There are smiling close-ups of Xenia, Teja, and Alexander Ivanovich before we see Rudolf standing alone on a snow-covered platform as a train pulls in. While sunlight glints on rails and rotating wheels, a wintry Russian landscape rushes by, mixed with images of Teja and Xenia. Sitting pensively by the window is Rudolf, whose thoughts are visualized as the film flashes back to moments from his performances on the Kirov stage—the third-act pas de deux from Swan Lake, a triumphant curtain call—before focusing on Xenia dancing toward the camera with Slava Santto, and lingering on Teja, who provocatively holds the gaze of the lens.

  Then, in a potent image of solitary flight, the footage ends with a long shot of Rudolf silhouetted with a sledge in a snowy landscape, finally skating off into the sunset. “Teja predicted Rudolf’s future,” says his friend Vladimir Fedianin. “I think he had a gift of foresight. He knew that Rudolf would stay in the West or he’d turn into nothing but dust.”

  Earlier in the winter of 1960 Janine Ringuet, a twenty-year-old assistant impresario who worked for a Parisian organization specializing in artistic exchanges between France and the Soviet Union, came to Leningrad for several weeks to observe the Kirov Ballet. It was four years after the death of Stalin, and relations between the two countries were just beginning to open up. The Bolshoi had been to Paris with great success in 1958, but at that time almost nothing was known about the Kirov. Janine, who spoke fluent Russian and had been to almost every performance, was standing in the company office a few days before returning home, when she noticed a program announcing a performance of Don Quixote, a ballet she hadn’t seen. “Oh no—that’s of no interest to you,” she was told. “It’s old and we haven’t worked on it recently.” But preferring to go to the ballet than stay in her hotel room, she insisted on going.

  It’s true that the ballet was dated, but I saw a young dancer who was absolutely wonderful and I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t shown him to me before. I was very impulsive and the next morning sent a telegram to my director saying, “Last night I had the opportunity to see the best male dancer in the world. His name is Rudolf Nureyev.” A few hours later I received a cable back, basically telling me that I was too young and inexperienced to understand such things. However, when I returned to Paris and they saw how serious I was, they realized that it would be a great mistake not to engage this dancer for the Paris tour.

  After consulting Ekaterina Furtseva, the minister of culture, who confirmed, “Yes, he’s amazing, but there have been some problems,” the French impresario George Sorio insisted not only that Rudolf must join the tour, but also that Sergeyev and Dudinskaya must relinquish their roles to younger members of the company and travel only as “artistic advisers.” “We tried to indicate that they were glories of the past who should remain that way. Understandably they were very angry—this was a big blow to them—but they had no choice.” It was a decision with which Rudolf wholeheartedly concurred—at least as far as Sergeyev was concerned. He himself had said as much when he came up to Sergeyev and Dudinskaya after a performance and remarked, “Natalaya Mihailovna, you were wonderful and must dance for many more years, but for Konstantin Mikhailovich it is time to go.”

  Rudolf left no one in any doubt about his contempt for Sergeyev’s dancing. His own Giselle, as one critic put it, “doesn’t so much depart from Sergeyev’s traditions as openly challenges them.” “He didn’t like his style,” confirms Irina Kolpakova; “I always went to see performances of Giselle when Dudinskaya and Sergeyev appeared, but Rudik never did. He wasn’t interested.” When, at the start of 1961, the Kirov star was reappointed director following Boris Fenster’s sudden death,
Rudolf greeted the news with dismay. Sergeyev’s policy as a leader was as conservative as his approach to the repertory—the reason the choreographer Leonid Yakobson had successfully campaigned to have him removed from the job in the mid-fifties. Whereas the forward-looking Fenster had always supported Nureyev, Sergeyev posed a genuine obstacle to any kind of change. Consequently, when Rudolf learned that his name had been added to the list of dancers bound for Paris, he was amazed: “Strangely enough I owe [this chance] entirely to someone who had always seemed most strongly opposed to me.” Only much later did he find out his champion was not Sergeyev but Janine Ringuet, who was completely unknown to him. Nor could he have foreseen that the director would unexpectedly become an ally when an opportunity presented itself for political maneuvering.

  Yuri Grigorovich, a thirty-four-year-old choreographer whose first work, The Stone Flower, had been greeted as a revolutionary departure from the formulaic dramatic ballets that prevailed, was planning his next full-length piece, and saw in Rudolf’s Eastern plastique and romantic presence exactly the qualities he wanted for his hero. Grigorovich had rehearsed Rudolf in Giselle, and since then had become an admirer and champion of his, finding his innovative dancing close in spirit to what he was attempting with choreography. In The Legend of Love, based on a Turkish play about a stonecutter loved by two sisters, he planned to eliminate dated mime sequences and tell his story through classical dance tinged with national color. Unusually for its time, the ballet was conceived as a collaboration in the Ballets Russes tradition with music specially written (by Arif Melikov, an Azerbaijani composer), and decor by Simon Virsaladze, the designer who had already done so much to stimulate Rudolf’s interest in changing his appearance onstage.