Except for a postcard he received from the front—“My dear son Rudik! I’m saying hello to everybody, Rosa, Razida, Lilia, and Mama. I’m alive and healthy, Your father, Nureyev”—Rudolf had had no contact with Hamet, and held no childhood memories of him. His first impression was of “a severe, very powerful man with a strong chin and a heavy jaw-line—an unknown force that rarely smiled, rarely spoke and who scared me.” Surrounded from birth by females, Rudolf had had no man in his life until then: Both his grandfathers were dead, his uncle was at war, and so were most of the men in the neighborhood. Suddenly he found himself supplanted in the household as the only male, and subjected to a whole new set of curfews and rules.
It was hard for Rudolf to obey and respect a man who had allowed his family to go hungry, and there was something comical as well as intimidating about his father’s punctilious military manner. Every evening when he came back from his job as a security guard in a factory, Hamet took off his cap with his left hand and raked his hair with his right, staring straight ahead and never smiling. The ritual was always the same. On the other hand, Rudolf, like his sisters, felt awkwardly in awe of Hamet and wasn’t able to look him directly in the eye. When the children addressed him they would use the formal vy rather than ty (the equivalents of the French vous and tu), which clearly hurt him. “I told him it was because we hadn’t seen him for eight years,” said Razida.
With his immense pride in having a son, Hamet came back from the war “wanting to find a pal.” On their first outing together he took Rudolf shooting, hoping to impress him with the Belgian gun that had been given to him as a present by his Red Army superiors. “He was so proud of it and would lend it to nobody,” remarked a fellow hunter. When Rudolf started lagging behind, Hamet decided to go on ahead and told his son to wait for him with the gear. Never having been alone in the forest, Rudolf was terrified. “Suddenly I saw a woodpecker who scared me and ducks flying in and out.… I started to say, ‘Papa, Papa, Mama, Mama.’ ” Hamet laughed when he came back and heard all the wailing—the eight-year-old clearly needed toughening up—but Farida was furious when she learned about the incident. She could never forget her experience with the wolves.
Hamet’s idea of male bonding was the traditional Bashkirian one of hunting and sitting around a campfire telling stories, all of which Rudolf found “very uncomfortable.” Razida was more interested than her brother in hearing about Hamet’s experiences in the war. He was not a man of many words—an army officer in Russia’s political climate at the time was obliged to be taciturn—but occasionally a tale would emerge about how he had carried a hand grenade across the river Oder or how a German tank had targeted him, circling round and round. Given his gift for communicating with his comrades, it was distressing for Hamet to discover that he was not able to relate to his son. He began taking his nephew Rais hunting instead. What he could not know was that dance, already a fixation for Rudolf, would cause a far greater rift between them.
At kindergarten Rudolf, like most children, had learned folk dancing, immediately showing the kind of energy and spirit demanded by Bashkirian dance, and shining enough to be chosen as one of the soloists in school performances. “From early years I knew how to be onstage and how to command it,” he said. Some concerts took place in Ufa’s hospitals, where Rudolf and his little troupe were sent to entertain the wounded soldiers—an experience vividly rendered in Colum McCann’s Nureyev novel, Dancer:
In the spaces between the beds the children performed.… they sank to their knees and then they rose and shouted and clapped their hands.… Just when we thought they were finished, a small blond boy stepped out of the line. He was about five or six years old. He extended his leg, placed his hands firmly on his hips and hitched his thumbs at his back … the soldiers in their beds propped themselves up. Those by the windows shaded their eyes to watch. The boy went to the floor for a squatting dance.… When he finished the ward was full of applause. Someone offered the boy a cube of sugar. He blushed and slipped it into the top of his sock.… By the time he finishes so many cubes of sugar are stuffed lumpily inside his socks that the patients laugh about his legs being diseased. He is given vegetable scraps and bread that the soldiers have set aside, and he crams them into a small paper bag to bring home.
It was when Rudolf moved to School Number Two, about a year before his father’s return, that his real potential was spotted. A soloist from the theater who came to give a course in dancing saw Rudolf and arranged a sailor’s hornpipe especially for him, saying that he should go to the House of Teachers, a social club outside Ufa, where one of the classes was taught by a woman said to have been “from the circle around Diaghilev,” and who was, as Rudolf later remarked, “almost a real ballet teacher.”
Anna Ivanovna Udeltsova’s studio on the outskirts of Ufa was a large hall with no mirrors, a barre made from a row of cinema chairs, and a stage at one end. It was there that Rudolf auditioned for her, performing a Ukranian gopek with emphatic arm movements, side kicks, and big jumps, followed by a lezghinka, a Caucasian showstopper in which men, wearing supple boots, traditionally dance on pointe, with turned-in legs and fisted hands. Building up to a climax of turns and multiple falls onto the knee, the eight-year-old Rudolf stunned Udeltsova, who told him in her strange falsetto voice that he had a duty to himself to learn classical ballet, and must work toward joining the students of the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.
She began giving him ballet lessons twice a week, which immediately became the center of his existence. “Class was extraordinary ritual. All unpleasant things vanished.” Taking Rudolf under her wing, Udeltsova tidied him up, getting him to wash his hands and damp down his tousled hair before starting at the barre, and was soon casting him as the lead in her concerts. Even at this stage there was a feminine softness to his movements, leading a few parents to comment that it was only his costume that distinguished him as a boy. Nevertheless he was warmly praised for his talent, and sometimes given chocolates by a doting babushka. Often Udeltsova paired him with a ten-year-old girl called Valya, although neither felt comfortable about their dancing together.
At school boys and girls studied separately so we were ashamed to be seen mixing with each other but, Rudolf so loved dancing that he was happy to do anything Anna Ivanovna wanted. We stayed behind sometimes to work on our duet but never spoke to each other and would leave the House of Teachers in silence, going our separate ways.
All the same, they were often teased about being “a couple” by the other girls, who resented their special treatment. They would lie in wait for Rudolf before class, hiding behind snowdrifts until they saw him coming, then pelt him with snowballs and roll him in the snow while shrieking with laughter. “Anna Ivanovna knew what was going on and scolded the girls, but it happened again and again.” Converting her students’ behavior into dance, Udeltsova invented a duet in which Rudolf and Valya exchanged a ball and a skipping rope, which diverted them from their gaucheness, and in another piece re-created the scene in the yard by encircling Rudolf with mischievous girls from whom he had to escape. For this piece, “Dance of the Clogs,” Udeltsova had somehow found authentic wooden clogs for the whole group. “She was so inspired with ideas for ballets and so much in love with Rudolf that she made all his costumes herself.” For an arcadian shepherd’s dance, Udeltsova kitted Rudolf out in breeches, a fitted jacket, and an eighteenth-century-style wig, and in the romantic “Winter Fairy Tale,” her homage to The Nutcracker, he played a prince who chose Valya, the prettiest snowflake, as a partner. In the end he was left alone onstage, opening his eyes and realizing it had all been a beautiful vision—the feeling Rudolf himself experienced each time he returned to his everyday Ufa life.
At first Rudolf had loved “real school,” and because of his unusually retentive memory, was one of its top pupils. “I don’t remember him being a brat like the other boys. He was outstanding for his obedience. If he had to go somewhere, participate in something, he would always ask permiss
ion in advance.” Geography, literature, and physics were his favorite subjects, and he enjoyed the English lessons given by a woman who had studied at Cambridge, but once Rudolf had fallen under the spell of dancing, his school grades began to deteriorate and he became pensive and withdrawn.
There were days when he would sit … looking attentively at the teacher but he was in his inside world, dreaming about something. It seemed peculiar to the others and while he was sitting like that one boy would punch him from the side and when Rudolf would answer him he would receive a punch from the other side. While he would answer the second, a third would push his shoulder.
To the pupils Rudolf was “somehow different … like a white crow,” according to a classmate, and yet, however much they teased him for his eccentricity, he never conformed. During gym, when the members of the class were told to hold out their arms to the side, he curved his into a classical second port de bras. Much of his free time was spent listening to the family’s “terrible little radio,” which was always turned on. He used to long for someone important to die because then nothing but the great nineteenth-century composers—Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Schumann—were played as a tribute around the clock. Almost every day he climbed the hill above the city and sat alone for hours watching the trains come and go. The sound of their wheels—the first lessons in rhythm, instilled in him from birth—gave him a subliminal thrill he later learned to exploit.*
He did not mix easily with children of his age, although he liked a boy in the yard called Konstantin “Kostya” Slovohotov who always defended him. It was Kostya who put a stop to the girls ambushing him with snowballs at the House of Teachers. “He was a big authority for us and the girls didn’t dare try anything when he was with Rudolf,” Valya remembers. “Many times Kostya came like a bodyguard to watch Rudolf dance. He would sit and watch the lesson and then the two would leave together.”
Kostya himself well remembers how unadventurous Rudolf was compared to the rest of the gang from the yard. Once they persuaded him to come on a fishing trip, which involved going part of the way by jumping onto a moving train. It wasn’t hard, as trains always slowed down at a certain point on the track, but all of a sudden Rudolf turned on his heels and ran home. On another occasion a few of the boys decided to swim across the wide Belaya River, but Rudolf remained on the bank. Two girls dived in and tried to follow them but then got into difficulties in the fast current. Rudolf cried out to the boys to help, but he made no attempt to rescue them himself: “He was jumping like a monkey and screaming on the side.” Rudolf already knew his destiny: He was not taking any risks.
He began seeking out the company of girls “because he didn’t like to fight,” said Azalia Cuchimova, whom Rudolf often visited, lured mainly by the music they would listen to on the family’s record player (her mother was a member of the opera chorus). He was also tender toward Clara Bikchova, who lived across the yard, and when he appeared her sisters would call, “Clara, Clara, your fiancé’s here.” But he grew closest of all to his eldest sister, Rosa, then studying to be a kindergarten teacher at Ufa’s training college. A pretty girl with short curly hair, her father’s black brows, and mother’s large shining eyes, Rosa was more intelligent than many of her contemporaries, and was considered the family intellectual. She called Rudolf chertenok (little son of the devil), but at home she was the only one who encouraged his passion. She herself was studying dance and piano as part of her course, and talked to Rudolf about ballet history, took him to lectures, and sometimes brought back costumes to please him: “That to me was heaven. I would spread them out on the bed and gaze at them—gaze at them so intensely that I could feel myself actually inside them. I would fondle them for hours, smooth them and smell them. There is no other word to describe it—I was like a dope addict.”
Determined to make a man of his son, Hamet gave Rudolf a special position in the family. “He did everything that my father thought a boy should do,” says Razida. “Bring water, cut wood, bring firewood, dig for potatoes, fetch the bread.” This gave him a sense of superiority that never left him. Later, at the Kirov, he was the only dancer who refused to take his turn watering the studio floor (a daily drill carried out as a precaution against slipping), which he considered beneath him. His lifelong willingness to let women martyr themselves for him was also something passed on by his father, who shared the traditional Tatar view that a woman’s duty is to serve a man. “At home she must work harder than her husband and when he is relaxing she must still carry on.” When Farida was preparing a meal one day, she asked Rudolf to go out and buy something she needed, but at that moment Hamet came in and exploded: “What’s the matter with you? There are three women in the house and you’re sending our son on these errands!”
Years later Rudolf would claim that his father had been physically violent toward his mother, but other family members find this hard to believe. Dressed in his Red Army uniform, which he continued to wear long after the war was over, Hamet might have looked threatening, scaring the children in the yard—“He would come out glaring and we’d stop still like rabbits”—but Razida swears that he was never cruel. “He was hot-tempered, but not for long, and I never saw him being aggressive to my mother.” “Hamet was an army man with an army character but he could be soft and kind,” says Rudolf’s cousin Amina, who came to live with the family when her mother, Hamet’s sister Jamila, died. There were already six members of the Nureyev family living in a room sixteen meters square, the children sardined on one mattress on the floor, their parents separated by only a curtain. Amina insists that Hamet and Farida’s marriage was a happy one, describing how in the evenings they would often sing duets together or go for walks with Palma, Hamet’s chocolate brown hunting dog. “The atmosphere was so calm, so peaceful. In the morning before he left for work Hamet would kneel down by us sleeping children and touch each of us in turn to say ‘good-bye.’ ”
And yet, throughout his life Rudolf was adament that he hated his father—“a Stalinist,” he called him, which he was, but so was his mother and almost every Russian at that time. There was only one real reason for his contempt: Hamet refused to tolerate his dancing. The extent to which ballet was interfering with his schooling was already clear from Rudolf’s increasingly poor grades. Wanting him to train as an engineer or a doctor, Hamet saw his hopes for his son, and everything for which he and Farida had worked, being dashed. As Rudolf would not listen to reason, Hamet decided to seek the help of his son’s class tutor, Taisiam Ilchinova.
His father twice visited me at school. He asked me to use all the influence I had with Rudik. “The boy is a future head of the family. Dancing cannot feed properly.” That was what made him upset.… I knew Hamet-agai and he is not such an angry or blind person … [but] I am guilty because I did not talk to Rudik about that. I realised the uselessness of such attempts.
Rudolf, as Ilchinova realized, was “very stubborn.” The only influence he cared about then was that of Udeltsova, his ballet teacher, a highly cultivated woman who every summer would stay with relatives in Leningrad in order to catch up with what was new in the arts. She had begun introducing Rudolf to literature and music as well as talking to him about dancers she had seen from as far afield as Japan and India. “She told me about Diaghilev, Massine, and The Legend of Joseph; and how they all hated to dance barefoot … and how she worked with the young Balanchivadze [George Balanchine] who has always preferred girls with long legs.” And having watched the great Anna Pavlova perform, Udeltsova was able to convey how the ballerina had used her own electrifying personality to blind an audience to technical flaws—exactly what Rudolf himself went on to do. “This conception thrilled me. The art of hiding art: surely this was the key to greatness in an artist.”
Like many Russians, Udeltsova was instinctively prejudiced against Tatars, a word synonymous in her mind not with Byronic hot-bloodedness but with dirt and savagery. She regarded Rudolf as a “little Tatar boy, an urchin, untamed,” and took it upon herse
lf to educate him in St. Petersburg etiquette and culture. After the revolution her husband, an officer of the czar’s army, had been banished to a Siberian labor camp and exiled to Ufa on his release. There remained a shadow of scandal about the couple, probably the reason why Udeltsova was never employed by the theater. When she was reprimanded by the administration of the House of Teachers for making an exception of Rudolf by giving him free lessons, she was indignant enough to decide to close her studio altogether. She reassured her “dear boy” that she was not abandoning him but would be sending him to a friend, also from St. Petersburg, who had studied at the Imperial Ballet School and danced at the Maryinsky.
Tall and bohemian with dark skin, a gypsy scarf worn low over her forehead, and a voice made deep and gravelly by the cheap papirosy she chain-smoked, Elena Konstantinovna Voitovich now worked as ballet mistress at the Ufa theater and gave classes in her spare time at the Pioneers Palace, the state social club for children. Intent on creating a serious approach in her young pupils, she could be extremely severe (even if they saw her in the street they would be expected to drop into a deep “reverence”), but she had her favorites, and Rudolf was one.
She forgave him anything. He was a touchy boy and sometimes if she spoke harshly to him he’d walk away from the barre and go up to the window and just stand there in silence. Elena Konstantinovna would call him back, but he’d ignore her. So she would go up and tenderly say, “Hey, Rudolf, It’s O.K. Come on.… Why don’t you come back?” And only then would he join us again. It was curious for us to see that Elena Konstantinovna, who was so strict with all of us, would allow him to get away with such behavior. When we were given presents after our Elka [New Year] performances we noticed that she would arrange for Rudolf to be given the best one. We weren’t offended as we knew he was poor and that she was trying to help him.
Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342) Page 3