Such outbursts only increased Sergiu’s awe of the young rebel: “I used to follow behind Rudik a little bit. I was his echo.” Described by one colleague as “more adventurously curious than the rest of us,” Sergiu eagerly colluded in the kind of partnership that Rudolf had had in Ufa with Albert Aslanov—twin apostles of culture and beauty. “For us, everything belonged to art, drama, music.… We had this hunger all the time.” They went to concerts at the Philharmonic Hall; saw Shakespeare performed at the Gorky Theater; and, to study different acting techniques, even sat though mediocre propagandist plays at the Pushkin Theater, staged by an artistic director who had “sold his soul to the devil.”
Every other night they went to the ballet. “You had to be on a list, but we’d find a way to get in; sometimes we’d use a false name.” Later the babushki who sat in the corridors of the Kirov Theater knitting or darning the ballerinas’ pointe shoes got to know them and would let them past. The following morning they would often discuss the performance with Marietta Frangopoulo, curator of the school museum. The door was always open, and Frangopoulo, a motherly woman of Greek descent who transformed her solid figure with chic European clothes and Art Deco jewelry, sat surrounded by her gallery of ballet photographs and cabinets of memorabilia. “She was our goddess. She was so erudite and had seen everybody dance.” It was Frangopoulo who instilled in Rudolf a lifelong veneration of Balanchine, whose classmate she had been. “Privately, never in front of the class,” she shared her memories of the teenage Georgi Balanchivadze’s first attempts at choreography, but having been incarcerated in a prison camp during the terrors, Frangopoulo was still wary of talking about an artist whose name until Stalin’s death a few years earlier could only be whispered.
By now Rudolf had discovered a little shop opposite the Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospekt that sold sheet music. There was a piano in the corner on which customers could try out a piece before buying it, or else the manager, an excellent pianist herself, would play it or put on a record. Rudolf took an instant liking to Elizaveta Pazhi, a small, plump, merry woman with tight curls of blondish gray hair. She was such good company—kind, cultured, full of humor—that he took to hanging around the shop until it closed and walking her to the tram stop carrying her bags. Enchanted by this eager young student with his radiant smile and worn Gogolian overcoat, Elizaveta Mikhailovna took pity on him and promised to find him a piano teacher willing to give him lessons free of charge. Her close friend Marina Savva, a concert pianist at the Maly Opera Theater, was another warm, intelligent, childless woman in her fifties. She and her husband, a violinist in the orchestra, welcomed Rudolf into their home, and within four weeks, thanks to Marina Petrovna’s gentle persistence, Rudolf had progressed from picking out tunes from Sleeping Beauty with one finger to playing an elegy by Rachmaninov.
He began to read scores for pleasure, and would play a game with his classmate Marina, hiding the name on the cover and making her guess the identity of the composer from the notes. He stored his growing collection of music under his mattress and guarded it fiercely. “Has anyone touched anything?” he grilled Sergiu when he returned to the dormitory. Shelkov had come down hard on Sergiu for his nocturnal truancy with the warning, “If you follow that Rudolf Nureyev, you’re not going to stay in this school,” and more often now, Rudolf went out alone. Considering it an important part of his education to attend as many performances as he could, he was determined to see a newly updated version of Taras Bulba, a three-act ballet based on a Gogol short story, but when he returned to school around midnight, he discovered that his mattress had been removed and his meal tickets confiscated. He spent the rest of the night on a window ledge, and the next morning went to Ogorodnikov Prospekt to have breakfast with Anna Udeltsova’s family, missing his first lesson. His absence and subsequent insolence to the teacher who had insisted on an explanation were reported, and he found himself summoned to Shelkov’s office and violently upbraided. Demanding the name of Rudolf’s friends, Shelkov had snatched his address book out of his hand, causing him to run back to the residence “like a wild man,” outraged by this invasion of privacy. “That bastard!” he cried to Sergiu. “He’s a fascist. Why can’t he be human?”
About a week later Rudolf went to the artistic director of the school, Nicolai Ivanovsky, and without complaining directly about Shelkov, told him, “You know, I am seventeen now. If I stay in Shelkov’s class for another three years, after I graduate they will take me straight into the army. Could I move up to Pushkin’s class?”* A delicate, Proustian character who wore elegant suits and patent-leather pumps, Ivanovsky was a lecturer in historical dance and one of the most cultivated and popular teachers in the school. “There had never been a request like it,” said a former student, Marina Vivien. “No one had asked to change his teacher before, but Ivanovsky was a generous, intelligent man. He must have seen Nureyev’s talent and did not allow Shelkov to do what he wanted, which was to expel the boy. He over-ruled Valentin Ivanovich, and Pushkin took the pupil of his pupil.”
From the moment Rudolf entered the attic studio where sunlight from huge, rounded windows slanted across the floor, he regarded Pushkin’s classes as “two holy hours.” A serene, almost hieratic man, the maestro was soft-spoken and direct, not given to elaborate verbal instructions, although pupils learned to tell if anything displeased him by the blush that slowly crept up from his neck. “His color would change but never his voice.” With his suit jacket hung over the back of a chair, and wearing his customary white shirt and tie, the balding forty-eight-year-old Pushkin would demonstrate elementary but wonderfully danceable combinations in which each movement seemed to flow organically into the next. No matter that he was half marking or that his back was slumped, he could convey exactly the rubato phrasing and harmonious coordination of the whole body that he had learned from his own teachers Vladimir Ponomarev and Agrippina Vaganova. “He was working in a great tradition; hand to hand from one master to another,” said Mikhail Baryshnikov, who has always claimed that he owes his career to Pushkin.
Many pupils new to his class found nothing special about Pushkin’s method, not realizing that simplicity was his secret—the key to grasping the inner logic and natural transitions of steps. For Rudolf, having gone through the motions of Shelkov’s cold configurations, every Pushkin class felt as intoxicating as a performance: “kind of irresistible. Very tasty, very delicious.” Believing in giving a newcomer a chance to settle down and understand the rudiments of what he was doing, Pushkin hardly looked in Rudolf’s direction for the first few weeks, but even ignored as he was, he knew from the first lesson that he had made the right decision. Years later he told a friend that if he hadn’t moved to Pushkin’s class, he would have given up dancing “because Shelkov repressed everything in me.”
Outside school, Rudolf had grown very close to Elizaveta Pazhi, who regularly brought him home for meals after she had closed her shop. Her husband, Veniamin Mikhailovich, was an engineer, a quiet, bearded man with a private passion for the verse of the Silver Age, which he would read to Rudolf when dinner was over. There was something enticingly taboo about discovering these nineteenth-century Russian symbolists who were not standard authors at school but derided as émigrés and considered decorative and superficial. Rudolf’s favorites were the tuneful, accessible Konstantin Balmont and Valery Bryusov, whose style is more erudite and ornate. Cosmopolitanism is what they all have in common, and this, along with their technical virtuosity, musicality, and attitude to art as a form of divine revelation, were qualities with which the young dancer passionately identified.
Rudolf made sure that he never missed these evenings, and both Pazhis grew to dote on him, but he began noticing how much Elizaveta Mikhailovna depended on his visits to the shop, how upset she would become if he failed to arrive. He saw “even something Dostoevskian” in the intensity of her feelings, which were beginning to be stifling. “Maybe Lilen’ka fell a little bit in love with Rudik. She was so charmed by him.” He
found himself missing the company of friends of his own age, and wrote a postcard to his Ufa soul mate Albert. “In honor of our friendship. It’s been twelve years since we’ve known each other,” as well as several “tender” letters to Pamira (destroyed by her family when she married). In them Rudolf described performances he had seen, his walks in Leningrad, and the museums he had visited. She remembers one long letter just about the Hermitage. “In another he told me of his passion for the music of Prokofiev. I could tell that he was quite lonely.”
During a short break that fall, Rudolf decided to spend a few days in Ufa. At home on Zentsova Street he found conditions as cramped as ever, although the family’s quality of life had improved. Hamet had been promoted to chief of security at his factory, and Rosa was now independent, working as a kindergarten teacher in a small Bashkirian town. Lilia’s new husband had joined the family, but they were both bringing in a salary. Lilia had a job as a seamstress and Fanel, who was also deaf, was a porter and odd-job man. Only Razida was still studying. She had wanted to major in geology but, this time, it was Farida who talked her out of an unsuitable career (“climbing over hills” was not something that would provide enough of a wage, she insisted). Razida’s decision to enroll instead at Ufa’s technical institute had her father’s full support: “He said that it must be my calling. He knew how from an early age I’d been a tomboy and always liked mechanical toys.”
When Rudolf suddenly appeared at the apartment, he was welcomed with delight by Farida, who had not expected to see him home so soon, although Hamet appeared as impassive as ever. “Father didn’t like to show his emotions. He kept good and bad inside of him. His attitude to Rudolf getting to Leningrad was, ‘So he went there. It’s good. We’ll see what will come from it.’ ” In fact Hamet had mellowed considerably since Rudolf last saw him, and was far more at ease with himself. He knew that he was well respected at work, and although his position at the factory was a mindless occupation, he had recently developed a passion for horticulture. He read voraciously on the subject and, drawing on his agricultural studies, had created a small garden outside old Ufa, where he grew vegetables and fruit, including more than twenty different varieties of apples.
Everyone was expected to help with the vegetable plot on Sundays, but Rudolf managed to escape, instead visiting Alik Bikchurin, the Dekada go-between, who had returned home after completing his Leningrad training: “The whole family was digging potatoes, but Rudolf wanted to talk about dance.” He spent as much time as he could with Albert, who had recently become a member of the Ufa ballet company, and together they went to call on their pianist friend Irina Voronina, whom Rudolf greatly missed. “He played one piece that was a surprise for all of us,” Albert says, “ ‘You play better than the ones who have studied for a year,’ Irina Alexandrovna told him.”
Back in Leningrad, Rudolf continued to be regarded by colleagues as an alien being, living a different existence and interested only in museums, theaters, the Philharmonic Hall, art books, and musical scores. “He seemed like some kind of fanatic to everyone,” said Alexander “Sasha” Minz. “No one knew what to make of him. And so they stayed away from him.” Already he was infamous. A young researcher at the theater museum across the courtyard heard from his supervisor, the critic Vera Krasovskaya, that “in Pushkin’s class there had appeared a pupil—a Tatar who only eats horsemeat [a Bashkirian specialty]—with fantastic abilities, but who would have a hard fate because of his bad character.” Fellow pupils could not believe how, even in Pushkin’s class, Rudolf frequently ignored the master and went his own way. As Sergiu recalled:
Pushkin would set an adagio at the barre, but Rudik would often not follow it and do only want he wanted. The others would finish and he would hold his leg for thirty-two counts at the front, thirty-two counts at the side. “Why don’t you do what Alexander Ivanovich set?” I’d ask him. “Don’t be stupid,” he’d say. “I’m not strong like the other boys. I need to build up muscles.”
Pushkin never reprimanded Rudolf; it was his policy to teach dancers to recognize their gifts and limitations—to give them what Baryshnikov calls “the idea of self-education”:
In his class you could see boys, even in their teens, moving individually in the way that patterns of speech separate one person from another. With dance it’s the same thing: you have to find that individuality, that internal understanding of phrasing. Pushkin was teaching boys to make their own decisions: creating thinking dancers.
Time after time Rudolf would return to an empty studio and practice the step with which he had been struggling until he could do it perfectly. Frustration was the most frequent cause of his outbursts, and only Pushkin was able to calm him. Other teachers would appeal to him in despair, saying, “ ‘Sasha, please do something!’ And Alexander Ivanovich would go and tell him, ‘Rudik, one can’t behave like this. Try some pirouettes … that will calm you down.’ Then Rudik would grow quiet and continue the rehearsal.” He was often at his worst in pas de deux classes—“a real torture for him” as he did not yet have the strength and coordination required for partnering, and few of the girls wanted to dance with him as he was thin, not particularly attractive at that time, and had such a high opinion of himself. One of the lightest, Marina Vasilieva, often found herself coupled with him. On one occasion, after struggling unsuccessfully to carry out a shoulder lift, Rudolf thrust her to the floor, picked up his towel, and stormed off. “Kostrovitskaya was furious and told him to stay away. He often swore a lot during lessons, and we tried not to react. Later he struggled to contain himself, especially when girls were around. He was wilder at the beginning. Little by little he improved.”
Technically Rudolf was improving so rapidly that colleagues could see his progress from one day to the next. Nevertheless, Pushkin decided not to include him in the students’ concert, considering that he was still not ready. Desperately disappointed, Rudolf begged his teacher to let him perform for him the dynamic male solo from the Diana and Acteon duet, on which he had been working alone, hoping it would help to change his mind. This is a variation in heroic Soviet style, which the Kirov star Vakhtang Chaboukiani had rechoreographed in the 1930s to display his virtuosity and dynamism. And in the studio that evening, as Pushkin watched Rudolf attack the final climactic diagonal of spinning leaps, fast chaînés, and dramatic lunges, his body arched and head flung back, it was impossible not to think of him as a reincarnation of the young Chaboukiani himself. The matter was settled: Pushkin agreed to let Rudolf perform, and throughout 1956 Rudolf continued dancing the lead in various solos and pas de deux for student concerts.
In January of that year Hamet sent a note to the school asking permission for Rudolf to spend a vacation in Ufa: “If it’s possible, please make the holiday time longer.” Since Rudolf’s last trip home, relations with his father had improved substantially. A few weeks later Rudolf took the trouble to find a birthday card with a picture of a dog much like Hamet’s Palma, in which his inscription shows a new eagerness to please: “I hope you grow the garden you want to grow and have a very good rest and go hunting this summer.” Hamet had deliberately addressed the request to Rudolf’s tutor, Yevgenia Leontieva, a calm, sweet-natured woman, who would probably have agreed to it had she not been obliged to seek the authority of Shelkov, who scrawled “To be refused” across the note. “Director never forgave me,” said Rudolf. “At any given moment, he needled me.”
“Every day there was news of another ‘outrage’ Rudolf had committed. Some way he had dressed, something he had said, something he liked.” And nothing Shelkov did could make Rudolf conform. He refused to become a member of Komsomol, the junior organization of the Communist Party, to which most of his colleagues belonged, and he disregarded countless school rules. Pupils were supposed to have a special case in which to carry their dance togs; Rudolf always piled his in his arms and threw them on his bed at the end of the day. Shelkov was fanatical about observing old Imperial School traditions: Collars must be white and bu
ttoned to the neck, pupils must stop and bow when passing a member of the staff in the corridor. Once, when Rudolf walked past him without making the traditional obeisance, the director called him back and, taking hold of the dancer’s hair, forced his head down over and again, shouting, “Bow! Bow! Bow!” “Shelkov was very sadistic. We all used to think that he was gay,” said Egon Bischoff, Rudolf’s contemporary, who believes that suppressed guilt about a physical attraction toward the young Tatar may explain the pathological severity of Shelkov’s behavior—a possibility that other students have confirmed. “Shelkov used to love to call him into his office for long talks about sex,” said Alexander Minz. “He took a kind of sadistic pleasure in doing that.”
By the spring of 1957 Rudolf had moved out of the dormitory and into a small, high-ceilinged room he shared with Sergiu Stefanschi and three other boys: Egon Bischoff from East Germany, Leo Ahonen from Finland, and Grigore Vintila from Romania. As a student from Bashkiria, Rudolf was considered as foreign as the Eastern Europeans—“I was intruder. Outsider from province.” Their new room was on the ground floor, and during the white nights of early summer when the main doors had been locked “with big jail keys,” they would often climb out of the window and into Rossi Street. “We loved to dance outdoors,” says Sergiu, describing a euphoric manège of grands jetés en tournant that Rudolf performed round the Alexander Column in the vast, empty expanse of Palace Square.
Across the corridor was a little communal kitchen they shared with the girl students, but Rudolf never bought food or cooked for himself as the others did: He ate his meals in the canteen because they were free. Nor did he gather around the girls’ gramophone and listen to the Bill Haley records that Leo had brought to Leningrad—“Rudolf wasn’t interested, he preferred the Philharmonic Hall.” Often, instead of going to a single performance at the Kirov like the others, Rudolf would be more selective, perhaps seeing just one act, and then leaving to catch the second half of a concert. Already at school he was the hyperactive “wind machine” he remained throughout his life. “When we played, he worked. The only important thing to him was to study classical ballet. He knew how little time he had to get to where he should be and burned candles at both ends. Whatever he’d learned that day he liked to chew over later that night. He was always practicing in the room. It was his homework.” Out late at performances virtually every night, Rudolf was in a different time zone from the the others. As on his first morning, he would stay buried under his heavy blanket, refusing to get up for breakfast, and before leaving for class paused only to drink tea straight from the nozzle of a battered kettle in the kitchen. “Sleep was more important to him than food.” The five never talked to each other about the lives they had left behind. Grigore Vintila had been brought up in a Romanian orphanage and “felt so alone, like Rudolf did,” yet neither knew about the other’s background. The only time anyone was aware that Rudolf had a family was when his sister Rosa turned up at the school one day and asked if Rudik was around. When he came back to the room later and found his sister sitting on his bed, he made his irritation quite clear. “He didn’t like that kind of surprise.”
Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342) Page 6