At this stage Voitovich would have seen the ten-year-old Nureyev as gifted with not a great deal more than supple limbs, instinctive musicality, and a strikingly compelling presence. Classical technique never came easily to Rudolf; he did not have natural turnout, and his proportions were far from ideal. All his life he wished for longer legs. But what struck everyone at the time was his intense commitment to dance. “He took it so seriously, like a professional,” remarks one Pioneers classmate. “Next to him the rest of us were just children.” “He was so completely focused on what he was doing that he really impressed and inspired me,” admitted Natalia Akimova, who never forgot how he partnered her in a polonaise, standing in preparation beside her, his chin tilted imperiously. “Then suddenly he let out a huge sniff—he always had a cold—but carried on looking so superior.”
As a dancer Voitovich had had a strong technique with a powerful jump, and was able to demonstrate very precisely what she wanted. She was also likely to have passed on to Rudolf tips on elevation as well as the rudiments of the Vaganova method, which she had learned in St. Petersburg.* “Elena Konstantinovna taught him to be professional, to do things cleanly and well,” said Ufa’s veteran ballerina Zaituna Nazretdinova, who was regularly coached by her. When Voitovich choreographed The Fairy Doll, a special duet for Rudolf and pretty thirteen-year-old Sveta Baisheva, she explained the basic etiquette of partnering, showing them how to greet each other and how to move in unison. “And she told us that the stage was a very special place. ‘Stage is an X-ray,’ she said. ‘The audience can see who you really are.’ ”
In an interview he gave in the West in the 1960s, Rudolf claimed that his Ufa apprenticeship actually damaged him as a dancer. “I am the wrong shape, the wrong size. When I started to dance I lacked the proper training so that I deformed both my body and my muscles.” Pictures taken of him at the barre in an Ufa studio show muscle-bound legs more characteristic of an athlete than a dancer, but whether this was Rudolf’s natural physique or a result of early teaching is hard to assess. Voitovich was without question a responsible teacher who provided Rudolf with a sound classical base, but at the same time her exercises were designed more to develop than to elongate the leg muscles. “That comes from modern methods in ballet and was something Rudolf would have learned later. Elena Konstantinovna was preserving the old classical traditions of everything being very clear and pure, but she didn’t pay much attention to really lengthening the movements to their maximum.”
Yet Voitovich, as one of her pupils remarked, “wasn’t only giving us ballet classes, she was developing us spiritually.” A recently widowed St. Petersburg intellectual, she began inviting Rudolf to tea at her home nearby, where she lived with her aged mother, who had once been a lady-in-waiting at the czar’s court and was always beautifully dressed and coiffed. Although they had only one small room in a communal apartment, it was full of elegant furniture and had a special, sweetly scented atmosphere that her pupils still remember. “Elena Konstantinovna set a very high and special example. She believed in teaching boys to be gentlemen because she said that it showed when they danced.” While her mother served tea in traditional style, with little pots of jam, Voitovich held Rudolf fascinated by talking of her youth. She described how she and the other children at the Imperial Ballet School had been dressed in fur-lined capes and transported in carriages through the “white nights” to performances at the Maryinsky Theater. She illustrated her stories with photographs she kept in an old album. She, together with Udeltsova and another St. Petersburg exile, Irina Alexandrovna Voronina, a pianist at the Pioneer Palace and concertmaster for the Ufa Ballet, formed a triumvirate of female mentors, with Voronina soon to become Rudolf’s most dedicated champion of all.
A stout motherly figure with a kind, doughy face, Irina Alexandrovna was, an Ufa dancer commented, “a one-person orchestra” who could make a solo piano piece sound like a symphony. In winter it was so cold in the studio that she wore gloves and yet still played beautifully. During rehearsals, she would sit on the piano stool with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, unable to resist calling out corrections to the pupils. Rudolf’s musicality immediately caught her attention and, intent on developing it, she began teaching him simple tunes on the piano at her home. “She adored Rudolf and would have shared every last thing she owned with him.”
With music becoming almost as much of a passion as dance, Rudolf went to his father one day and begged him to buy a piano. Hamet was sympathetic. He loved music, too, but a piano was out of the question. How could they possibly afford it? And even if they could, where was there space to put it? He offered to get his son an accordion, telling him that he could make himself popular at parties by entertaining his friends. “You can’t carry [a piano] on your shoulders.” Rudolf refused. “Even then I knew this is ugly music.” But although Rudolf never played the instrument, toward the end of his life in an extraordinary fantasy motivated partly by wishful thinking, partly by the wish to concoct a good story, he told an audience of fund-raisers in San Francisco that Hamet had indeed bought him an accordion, “so that I could go from bar to bar and get money.” He described how he had played it with expertise, and how after watching him waltz around the room with it as if it were a partner, his father had exclaimed, “You can dance, my boy! I’m going to take you to Leningrad so that you can study at the Kirov!” Everyone in the room believed the story.
As far as Rudolf was concerned, Hamet was his enemy, forcing him to become underhanded and deceitful, in his endless struggle to overcome the obstacles standing between him and his passion for dancing. He liked to think that his mother was on his side, but Farida was just as concerned that dance was a precarious career for a man. “Rosa, my only ally, had now gone to Leningrad. I became more and more distressed and secretive.” As an excuse to leave the house in order to go to class, he would volunteer to get bread or kerosene, often forgetting the errand itself and having to run back for the empty canister, which he had left in a corner of the studio. He claims that his father beat him every time he caught him, but Albert Aslanov, who had known Rudolf since their kindergarten days, takes a different view.
I never saw him beating Rudolf or swearing at him. He used to get Rudolf to roll the foil shots he needed for hunting and I would often help him till we were almost dead. Sometimes Rudolf didn’t finish the job and Hamet-abiy could get quite angry and give him a clip on the ass, but all the fathers did that. It wasn’t serious.
Albert’s own father was far more tolerant about his dancing, his attitude being that it was better than being on the street. The boys in their yard were frequently in trouble—two grew up to be pickpockets—and everyone was involved in stealing from the vegetable gardens. “Rudolf was our lookout,” says Federat Musin. “He’d watch by the hole we’d made in the fence. We weren’t often caught because we never went to the same place twice, but once we were shot at with salt pellets.” This gang of adolescents was “a little like a wolf pack”; membership was compulsory, although Rudolf avoided doing anything—ski-jumping off isba roofs, for example—that might endanger his dancing. “He wasn’t mad about doing things with us,” remembers Kostya. “It was always something a bit on the side for him. He preferred to be at the Pioneers.” Rudolf was never mocked for his interest in ballet—on the contrary, he was able to persuade a few of the boys from the yard to join his class—because the gang rule was never to pick on anybody: “We were all for one and one for all.” He also made sure that he was active enough not to be considered an outsider. On a summer evening if he saw a ball game taking place in the yard, he would put down the kerosene can he was carrying and join in. The boys played lapta, a Russian version of cricket, or football, using a homemade ball stuffed with hay.
When it got destroyed, it would be someone else’s turn to cover and sew it for the next day. Because there were no showers at home, after a match we’d go our usual shortcut—twelve or fifteen of us—to cool off in the river. Everyone’s underwear was full
of holes so we’d strip off and dive in. There were no girls around. We all knew how to swim and would stay in the water until our lips were blue.
Even in winter Rudolf loved the river, and often ran down the hill after school with the other boys to watch the icebreaker in action. Once it crashed into some shanty dwellings by the shore, and they saw whole houses floating downriver with their inhabitants clinging to the corrugated iron roofs. But his favorite activity were the trips to the Rodina cinema, a building with a classical facade, even grander than the opera house, where one could see American “trophy” movies that had been captured by the Soviets at the end of the war. It was in Ufa that Rudolf first saw Charlie Chaplin, a lifelong inspiration, influencing his own approach to physical comedy. To screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière he later described other Western films he saw in Ufa.
I remember those of Deanna Durbin, especially the one in which she appeared to wear more than a thousand skirts. She was very famous in Russia. Among the first films I saw was Lady Hamilton [That Hamilton Woman], with Vivien Leigh, Waterloo Bridge of Mervyn Le Roy and a film which I think was called Ballerina. A lot of them were in their original version with subtitles. For us, as for all the kids in the world at the end of the Forties, the cinema was a real passion.
The real catalyst was Tarzan, the Ape Man, a film Joseph Brodsky once said was more important to freethinking in Russia than A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. “This was the first movie in which we saw natural life. And long hair. And that marvelous cry of Tarzan which … hung over every Russian city. We were so eager to imitate Tarzan. That’s what started it all.” In Ufa it was almost impossible to get tickets, and the gang half carried Kostya, “stepping on people’s heads” to get to the front of the crowd. Tarzan was the event of the year for them all, although Albert Aslanov refutes any deeper significance. “It was about such great adventures, and we were boys. We had no feeling that we weren’t free at that point: We had all the freedom we needed.” Except for Rudolf.
At home he felt like a prisoner. Hamet often fell asleep after supper, and Rudolf seized the chance to run out to folk-dancing classes that were held for workers two evenings a week. By now, though, Hamet was surely turning a blind eye, as Rudolf managed to stay out long enough to join the amateur troupe’s night tours of neighboring villages. Their performances—“as wildly improvised and as primitive as when the theater first began in Russia”—played to an audience sitting on rough benches surrounded by hanging kerosene lamps. The stage was a wooden platform balanced between two parked trucks, and a backdrop was made out of red-and-blue floral cotton—“the kind you find in every Tatar isba on cushions, beds, and in the alcoves, a fabric that makes you warm just to think about it.” The experience remained so indelible that Rudolf re-created it in 1966 as a scene in the second act of his own production of Don Quixote. The village attitudes and traditions of Russian folk dance from the Ukraine, Moldavia, and the Cossack steppes were a crucial influence on Rudolf, their power to ignite an audience clearly the force behind his own dynamism onstage. Full of aggression, Bashkirian dance envisages the male as hunter, with motifs like stalking with a bow and galloping hooves symbolized by movement. People still remember the command Rudolf showed during the hunting scene of the Kirov’s Sleeping Beauty: He would find his own way of excelling at his father’s favorite pastime.
There were times when Hamet was almost resigned to the idea of his son making a career of dance. When Rudolf discovered that a group of local children were to be sent to Leningrad to audition for the Kirov school, Hamet went with him to the theater to find out more. “He had all the goodwill,” Rudolf admitted later. They asked a cashier about the registration procedure, only to discover that the party had already left. “It took me days to climb out of a state of black despair. For a long time after this incident my father seemed embarrassed whenever he laid eyes on me.” The reason became clear to Rudolf years later: Hamet simply didn’t have the necessary two hundred rubles to buy a train ticket from Ufa to Leningrad.
As he progressed through his teens, Rudolf hardly involved himself in the usual adolescent pursuits—“He could think of nothing else besides dancing”—although he once went with Kostya to a dance hall. “Just to watch.” He gave no inkling of nascent homosexual tendencies, and his friends don’t remember him paying much attention to girls except perhaps to Sveta, his shapely Pioneer partner, whom he made a point of sitting next to during breaks, even though he knew she was not interested in him. According to Sveta, “He always dressed very poorly with holes in his socks, and a black velvet jacket which looked terribly old the first time I saw it, and he wore it for years after that.”
By now he was growing away from Kostya and the yard gang, spending almost all his time in the company of Albert, also a dedicated pupil of Voitovich. The pair were both so smitten with dance that during lessons they drew doodles of ballerinas’ legs on their exercise books. Albert was the editor of the Stengazeta, the school’s newspaper, to which Rudolf contributed, staying up one night to draw a picture of the scientist and poet Mikhail Lomonosov. They went often to Ufa’s elegant art gallery, the Nesterov, named for the nineteenth-century artist who had spent his early life in the city. The two boys collected postcards of paintings by favorite artists—Ilya Repin and Valentin Serov among them—and talked of the day they would go to Moscow to see even finer examples of their work.
On March 5, 1953, Stalin died. His statue, eight meters high, was next to the opera house, and all around the block the grieving people of Ufa stood in line to place flowers at his feet. In Moscow, where Sergey Prokofiev died on the same day, the streets were blocked off, traffic was at a standstill, and all the florists’ shops had been emptied. “Nowhere could one buy even a few flowers to place on the coffin of the great Russian composer,” writes the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. “In newspapers, there was no room for an obituary. Everything was Stalin’s—even the ashes of Prokofiev, whom he had persecuted.”
For Rudolf, who turned fifteen two weeks later, the only major event that year was the opening of a ballet studio attached to the local theater. Now at last he had the chance to train as a professional. “Before, we had just Voitovich and not a proper school.” Ufa was proud of its opera house, the center of cultural life and always packed with people. The great basso Feodor Chaliapin had made his debut there, and since 1941, when a group of Ufa students graduated from the Kirov’s ballet school, The Vaganova Academy, and formed the nucleus of a company, the ballet had maintained a direct link with Leningrad. Among the male soloists, several had been taught by Alexander Pushkin, who was to be the most important influence on the early careers of both Rudolf and Mikhail Baryshnikov a decade later. But whereas Baryshnikov had had the consistency of training in Latvia from the age of twelve at a Vaganova-style vocational school (where the academic program was affiliated), Rudolf had been forced to snatch classes at a social club whenever he could. Even after his academic studies entered a more flexible phase at the School of Working Youth, he was still having to adopt his old ruse of running errands in order to escape to the studio. “He would come with a big shopping bag as if he was going to buy bread.” And because he couldn’t leave the house before Hamet had set off for work, he frequently arrived late, infuriating his new teacher.
As Voitovich taught only company members, Rudolf’s first classes were taught by Zaituna Bakhtiyarova, a petite, impeccably chic woman who immediately took exception to his disheveled appearance. “He would arrive looking tousled and wearing a T-shirt that wasn’t very clean. He had nothing bright or white.” If Rudolf answered her back when she upbraided him for being late, Bakhtiyarova would call him a hooligan and threaten to send him to the Matrosov, a colony for delinquents. But as she told one pupil, “I criticize only those I think have a future.” And yet however offensive he found her remarks, nothing could have deterred Rudolf: He was obsessed. While other students took one class a day, he took three, and in between worked on steps with Albert and Pamira Sulamenov
a, another ex-Pioneer colleague whom he liked very much. “He was more interested in what he couldn’t do well than in what came easily to him.” They would work on difficult lifts together, and although Rudolf often grumbled to Pamira that she was too heavy, she felt completely safe in his hands and loved watching him work. “He stood out because he had some kind of flame. He lived in his dancing. Whatever he did he did with joy.”
Rudolf was soon cast in walk-on roles for ten rubles a performance, and by introducing himself as “an artist from the Ufa Opera” to workers’ collectives, he was able to supplement his income by giving dance lessons for two hundred rubles a month. He was now earning as much as Hamet, who was forced to concede that his son’s career could at least provide him with a respectable wage. And his sister Rosa, on her return to Ufa, had “succeeded in persuading our parents to allow Rudolf to continue his beloved profession.” His life now revolved around the theater; when he was not involved in classes, rehearsals, and performances, he was going to see every ballet and opera in the repertory.
That summer he went with the Ufa Ballet on a monthlong trip to Ryazan, in the extreme west of Russia, and roomed with Albert, who was also employed as an extra. Although they earned very little, surviving on suppers of tea and fish-paste sandwiches, they managed to save enough of their salary to buy presents for their families. “Rudik sent his mother money to buy shoes for his sisters. He was so kind.” As their days were free, they took the trolleybus after breakfast to a river to sunbathe and swim, a period during which he and Albert grew very close: “Our dreams were the same.” If Rudolf’s teenage fantasies contained caches of erotic excitement or shame, he kept them secret; Albert’s discovery of his friend’s homosexuality years later took him completely by surprise. “He never acted at all strangely. I knew that some people from the theater were gay and I kept away from them. Rudolf did the same.”
Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342) Page 4