While on this tour, Albert and Rudolf also took the bus to Moscow, arriving in the middle of August when all the theaters and concert halls were closed. They decided to explore the city on foot, crisscrossing Red Square from GUM, the vast, glass-covered state department store, to the Kremlin, discovering behind its high walls the golden-domed cathedrals filled with treasures, marveling at Saint Basil’s, dominating the south end, and spending an entire afternoon at the Tretyakov Gallery. On their last evening they took the metro—just for the experience of the ride—and somehow got separated, meeting only the next morning at a prearranged rendezvous by the Gorky monument at Belorussia Station. Albert had checked into a cheap hotel, but Rudolf had walked all night, unable to stop feasting on the sights and cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city. “Never had I encountered so many races on the streets, so many different types of human beings.” Ufa was a world away.
By the fall of 1953 Rudolf had started dancing with the corps de ballet and was taking class with the company’s ballet master as well as with Voitovich. While colleagues remember him being well prepared—“No one looked down on him for not having been professionally schooled”—he himself felt that by comparison he had had “absolutely no classical training.” At the same time he found that he could quite easily reproduce qualities he observed in the other dancers. His main model was Halyaf Safiulin, an ex-Pushkin pupil and the husband and partner of Zaituna Nazretdinova—the costars of the company. Although past his prime and beginning to develop a paunch, Safiulin was still an impressive virtuoso, capable of executing triple cabrioles, multiple pirouettes, and huge jumps with cat-soft landings. But it was his charisma as a performer that most impressed Rudolf, who would try to emulate the challenging tilt of Safiulin’s head and the way he compensated for his short stature by making every movement seem longer and higher than usual. A colleague at the time noted, “Later when I saw videos of Rudolf in the West I noticed some of Safiulin’s spirit and plastique.”
The lofty manner that had made Rudolf unpopular with some of the students in his Pioneers class became even more pronounced now that he was dancing with the company; already he was showing signs of the temperament for which he became infamous. “If he didn’t like the look of his costume he would fling it back at someone in anger. ‘What are you worried about?’ they’d laugh. ‘You’re in the back row; nobody’s going to see you.’ ” One day he was summoned into the office of the director, who told him that he had received eleven marks for bad behavior; but instead of dismissing him he invited Rudolf to become a full member of the company. “At my age, given the high standard of the classes and of the company in general I should have been thrilled.… And in fact I was. But all I could think of was Leningrad. So I refused.”
The pianist Irina Voronina, well connected in the musical establishment, had been campaigning on Rudolf’s behalf, persuading local luminaries to send letters to the Bashkirian Ministry of Culture recommending him for a scholarship to the Vaganova Academy. When a visiting minister sought Zaituna Nazretdinova’s opinion, she insisted that Rudolf should be allowed to go, even though privately she considered him not much more than a capable beginner. “He wasn’t outstanding. The main thing was his desire to dance.” It was around this time, in the early spring of 1955, that Rudolf discovered that the republic was choosing dancers to take part in a major event—a celebration of a decade of Bashkirian Literature and Art, to be held in Moscow in the late spring of 1955. He was not asked to audition, but during a rehearsal of Song of the Cranes, one of the pieces chosen for the festival, the director asked if there was anybody who could take the place of a performer who had failed to show up. Rudolf immediately stepped forward: Not only did he have a photographic memory for steps, but he had already danced the whole ballet in his head. The role of the herald, a Bashkirian Cossack, who performed a solo while waving a beribboned pole, would have provided Rudolf with a brief moment in which to shine, but once in Moscow, during the first day’s rehearsal, he injured his foot too badly to go on.
Determined to make the most of his time, he threw himself into rediscovering the city, delighted this time to be able to attend performances—sometimes as many as three a day—since the students had been given free passes to all the theaters. Noticing that his friend Pamira felt intimidated by the bustle and unfamiliarity of the metropolis, Rudolf took her in hand, glad of a chance to show off his knowledge. All the same it was frustrating not to be dancing: The Dekada was to have been his first chance to show what he could do. Moscow that week was packed with teachers, dancers, and directors from all over the Soviet Union, there for the purpose of recruiting new talent. “Finally something came and clicked in my mind that nobody’s going to come and take me by hand and show me anything. I had to do it all myself.”
On a warm May evening, Alik Bikchurin, an Ufa-born student then studying at the Vaganova Academy, was alone in front of Moscow’s Hotel Evropeiskaya, idly kicking a tin can lid along the street, when a slim young man caught it with his foot and said with a wry smile, “Provincial depression?” Alik took no notice, but the young man went on, “Hello! I’m Rudik Nureyev from our Opera Theater. I saw your Giselle pas de deux in the Tchaikovsky Hall. You were good. Listen, I hear that Balticheva and Kumisnikov are here with you. Can you introduce me to them?” Taking no chance of a refusal, Rudolf made a similar approach to another Vaganova student from Ufa, Eldus Habirov, who, like Alik, did indeed speak to the two teachers on his behalf. Abdurahman Kumisnikov and his wife, Naima Balticheva, had just left Ufa to teach in Leningrad when Rudolf started classes, and were now among the city’s most prominent dance personalities. The following day, in their hotel room, where Rudolf used the iron bedstead as a barre, the dancer auditioned for them. Impressed more by his “craziness for ballet” than his natural abilities, they accepted him, telling him to come to the Vaganova school that September.
Meanwhile Irina Voronina, in Moscow as the Ufa Ballet’s accompanist, had through contacts of her own arranged for Rudolf to audition for the Bolshoi’s dance academy. Once again, he was offered a place for the following term, but as the Moscow school had neither a residential college nor a scholarship system for students from other states, Rudolf turned it down. Back in Ufa, he came up to Pamira and a group of students sitting on a sofa after class one day and said, “That’s it. I’m going to study in Leningrad!” Pamira immediately burst into tears. “I was so surprised and I don’t know why, but I became sad. I still can’t understand why I cried so much. Maybe because I also wanted to study, maybe it was because it was a pity that he was leaving.”
On the day his son left for Leningrad, Hamet also broke down. “It was terrible.… I’d never seen him cry before.” But nobody could have held Rudolf back now. On a day in mid-August he found himself taking the route he had followed so often in his mind while sitting on the hill of Salavat listening to the sound of trains, “Calling you, beckoning you to go somewhere.” Crossing over the Belaya River past the chicken-shack houses that shook with the vibration of each locomotive, Rudolf left Ufa behind him at last.
*At the Kirov before creating a new role, he would often go and sit at Leningrad station “until I could feel the movement become part of me and I part of the train.”
*Named after the famous pedagogue whose system defines twentieth-century Russian ballet, Vaganova teaching works the whole body in harmony, emphasizing the expressive use of the eyes, head, arms, and shoulders while strengthening the legs and feet.
2 HOLLYWOOD STORY
Before he knew where he was going to spend his first night in Leningrad, Rudolf went immediately to The Vaganova Academy, on Ulitsa Rossi, one of the most elegant streets in the city. Tall, neoclassical buildings, painted buttery yellow and white, form a perspective of calculated symmetry from Lomonsov Square to the Pushkin Theater, which corresponds to its contours and colors like a reflection. “Do you know,” the choreographer Fyodor Lopokhov once pointed out, “when you walk down this street to the theatre, the columns of the b
uildings literally start to dance?” Carlo Rossi, the designer of “Theater Street,” was the son of an Italian ballerina, and his strict linearity is reflected in the Kirov school’s own aesthetic of sublime classical precision. “The architecture in Moscow has no order, it has no style,” Rudolf once said. “In Leningrad you see beauty all the time. Like in Italy. Even if a man is sweeping the streets he sees beauty all around him.”
As he entered through the double wooden doors past framed sepia photographs of great Soviet dance teachers, Rudolf half expected to see the wraiths of Pavlova, Karsavina, and Nijinsky, who had all begun their careers there. Instead he encountered cleaners and painters: The school was being renovated in preparation for the new term. Having sought out the director, he grandiloquently announced himself: “I am Rudolf Nureyev, artist from the Ufa Opera. I would like to study here.” He was too early, Comrade Shelkov told him; he must come back a week later and be assessed.
With the prospect of an unexpected vacation ahead of him, Rudolf went to call on Anna Udeltsova, his Ufa ballet teacher, who was in Leningrad for the summer. Her psychiatrist daughter owned a large apartment on Ogorodnikov Prospekt, and although there appeared to be more relatives than rooms, the family gave Rudolf a space to himself—a child’s bed with a chair at one end to support his feet. He enjoyed being spoiled and well fed, and he appreciated the somber grandeur of his surroundings; Udeltsova’s sister had been married to a prosperous Moscow merchant, and there were still signs of past wealth in the czarist furniture and European paintings they had managed to save. Rudolf learned how, during the revolution, Elena Ivanovna had concealed her jewelry under her dress: “Wherever she went her husband would follow her with a pistol and never let her out of his sight.” The family had remained devoutly religious, and in almost every corner was an ancient icon. “Rudolf loved the atmosphere, although he never went to church with us, and was far from being a believer himself.” What delighted him most was the fact that there was a piano in the apartment; Udeltsova’s daughter began giving him rudimentary lessons, and he kept himself physically in shape by practicing ballet steps in the big kitchen under Anna Ivanovna’s watchful eye.
After dinner she took him for walks along the Griboyedov Canal and Fontanka River, reminiscing about dancers she had seen and life before the revolution. Most of that week, however, Rudolf spent alone, sightseeing from morning until nightfall. Nothing, not even the majesty of Moscow’s Red Square and the hidden enchantments of the Kremlin, had prepared him for the beauty of Leningrad, a vision made real by Peter the Great, who ordered a metropolis to rise where nothing existed before but marshland and the sound of seabirds. Its magical appearance, like a sudden set change, is perpetuated by the theatricality of the city itself—the stucco facades washed with confectionary colors of pale blue, pink, and yellow; the glinting of gold on spires, domes, and eagles; the bridges with their Art Nouveau intricacies of wrought iron; the exquisite Italianate moldings and cherubim that even the most dilapidated buildings display on crumbling walls. At the Hermitage Museum, housed in Rastrelli’s Winter Palace, a work of art in itself, Rudolf made his first discovery of the French impressionists and Italian Renaissance painting—“a revelation to me.” Avid for more, he took a train to the outskirts of Leningrad to visit Peterhof, Russia’s Versailles, set in the most ravishing park he had ever seen; and he fell in love with the English landscape gardens of Pavlovsk, the palace south of the city that Catherine the Great had built for her son.
On August 25 Rudolf returned to the ballet school, where he joined an assessment class given by Vera Kostrovitskaya, in his view the best woman teacher in Russia, who had further developed and edited the Vaganova system of dance. With her large eyes and beaky nose she looked just like Pavlova, and Rudolf could feel her watching him intently as he danced. When he finished the final enchaînement, she walked up to him and announced in full hearing: “Well, boy, you will either become something very unusual or you will be a great failure!,” later repeating her prediction to a group of students. “He is a very talented boy. He will either be a great dancer or go back to Siberia.” He was accepted, but Rudolf knew exactly what she meant: His spontaneous, individual style came straight from the heart but lacked clarity and inner control. “I would have to work and work and work—more than anyone else in the school.”
On his first day, September 7, 1955, the pale seventeen-year-old, wearing a thin sweater tightly cinched with a large belt to emphasize his slim waist, and carrying his belongings in a bag no bigger than a briefcase, was shown his living quarters—a large, light dormitory shared with nineteen other students whom Rudolf decided to ignore. “He didn’t say hello, or how are you. He didn’t look at us at all, he went straight to bed.” In the morning, hating the idea of eating a communal breakfast with the malchiki, Rudolf kept his head hidden under the covers half an hour after everyone else had gotten up. These were long days, ending sometimes as late as seven o’clock, with academic lessons worked into the timetable around classical and character dancing. His first ballet classes came as a dismaying anticlimax. He had heard so much in Ufa about the genius of Alexander Pushkin, who had taught Halyaf Safiulin and the first wave of male Bashkirian soloists in Leningrad, and who was now in charge of the eighth grade. “They said, ‘Pushkin is there and he is the only one to take classes from.’ ” To his distress, however, Rudolf learned that he had been assigned to the sixth-grade class of Valentin Ivanovich Shelkov, a squat Soviet bureaucrat, whom he had met on his first day in Leningrad. Although a Pushkin pupil himself, Shelkov had absorbed nothing of the maestro’s skill at tactfully guiding rather than driving the students, and his officious manner turned even the most lyrical exercises into military drill.
Compensating for his shortcomings as a teacher, Shelkov deliberately allocated the most gifted pupils to his own class—the reason for Rudolf’s presence—but nothing this unusual boy did could please him. “Shelkov was slighting me a lot. He would say to [Nikita] Dolgushin, Sasha Minz and others: ‘You are a good boy!’ and to me he would say, ‘You are a provincial fool!’ It was very offensive.” It was also hypocritical. Shelkov himself came from a town far beyond the Ural Mountains, and although it was he who had been responsible for obtaining a full grant for Rudolf’s tuition from the Bashkirian Ministry of Culture, he was motivated by self-interest rather than altruism: He enjoyed nothing more than collecting honorary titles from different regions. Sly and as slippery as his name suggests—shelk is the Russian word for “silk”—the teacher was “an absolute Soviet product.” Rudolf referred to him as “Arakcheyev” (a ruthless and ingratiating politician during the reign of Catherine the Great). When he wasn’t taunting Rudolf about his lowly roots, he was reminding him that he was only there on his and the state’s charity.
Academic subjects were just as demoralizing. During his last years in Ufa his schooling had dwindled to workers’ evening classes, where he received nothing like the education his Leningrad colleagues had had. He was completely lost during lectures in math and science, and had a poor grasp of the grammar and spelling of the Russian language, which had never been spoken well at home. One of the pupils, a petite blond named Marina Vasilieva, used to help him with punctuation during dictation lessons, tapping her shoulder once to indicate a comma, twice for a semicolon, and so on. When the girl sitting between them blocked his view, Rudolf would hiss at her, “Inna Skidelskaya, move to the side, scom!” Gradually, with subjects that interested him, he found himself able to appreciate the exceptionally high academic standards at the school. One of the music teachers was Shostakovich’s sister, the art teacher was a curator at the Hermitage, and literature was taught at the university level by a large Leningrad balletomane who always wore floor-length skirts. “She read in English perfectly and talked to us of Dumas and Goethe. It came pouring from her.”
But only the solitary heroes and extreme emotions of Dostoyevsky interested Rudolf at that time. As he later admitted, “I’ve always tended to reject everything in life
which doesn’t enrich or directly concern my single dominating passion.” His immediate priority was to absorb all he could from arts that would nourish his dancing, and the results in his first-year report card reflect this. He scored two 5s, the highest mark, for history of music and history of ballet; acting skills, classical and character dance each scored 4, as did geometry, French, chemistry, and physics; but he got 3s, the lowest grade, for literature, history, and geography.
“When Rudolf arrived in Leningrad, there was only one thing on his mind: to improve his dancing,” said Sergiu Stefanschi, a lively, round-faced Romanian, whose bed was next to Rudolf’s:
We started talking and found that we understood each other, as we were both beginners and the other pupils were so much more advanced. He knew I was having extra coaching classes and he would come back to the residence and say, “Well, what did you do? Tell me.” And I would. It was like a business talk. After 11:30 when we were supposed to be in bed, he’d say, “Let’s practice pirouettes.” We’d wait until the babushka had done her rounds—we hated her, she was an aparatchik like Shelkov—and then we’d start partnering each other and dancing. I was crazy about dance and he was crazy about dance. We didn’t talk about other things.
Sergiu could see from Rudolf’s clothes—his trousers were inches above his ankles—that he came from an underprivileged background. When teased, Rudolf, easily provoked, would retaliate in fury, calling Sergiu “a rich bourgeois.” “To make him mad when he wanted to dance, I’d pull the blanket over my head and say, ‘Leave me alone, Bashkirian pig.’ The next thing, Rudik would become like a crazed animal, biting and wrestling me to the ground.”
Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342) Page 5