Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  To his roommates Rudolf was a figure of such authority that he seemed to be much older. “When he said it was time to sleep, everyone slept,” says Leo, who once wrote a letter to his idol, reminding him of their dormitory days:

  Your mind was already at least ten years more developed than the rest of us.… Each one of us had stupid, childish opinions about everything. But when you finally voiced your opinion, we all accepted it and the case was closed.… I had come from the “West,” and saw things differently from others. I always thought it was such a shame that so many people thought you were a “problem” at the school.… When you were resting your legs in bed (next to mine), your arms were working, searching for that ultimate port de bras.

  “We thought him incredible,” agrees Grigore, recalling how he once woke Rudolf up in the middle of the night to ask his help with a tricky sequence of steps: “There we were in our pajamas, with no music, rehearsing in the corridor.” Even lying in bed, Rudolf would be practicing the castanets for a role. “We didn’t mind: We respected him for doing it. He didn’t want to fake it.” And although regional Russian dancing was not taught at school, Rudolf made a point of keeping up his own traditions. Humming folk tunes he remembered from home, he used to persuade one of his classmates to improvise on the piano during breaks while he “danced like crazy.” By drawing on Bashkirian dance’s unique combination of fire and Oriental plastique, he knew that he could make the famous classical roles his own.

  When Rudolf’s behavior was at its coarsest, he still managed to retain their esteem. There was a night when Rudolf came back to the room in a bad temper made worse by seeing Egon sitting on the bed next to his own eating a plate of fried potatoes he had just cooked. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “Can’t you see? I’m eating.” “What are you eating?” insisted Rudolf, who suddenly leaned across and spat on Egon’s plate. “Are you crazy?” cried Grigore, leaping to Egon’s defense, only to watch Rudolf, his fury rising, take off his shoe and fling it at the ceiling, breaking the lamp and extinguishing the light. In seconds the three were rolling on the floor, fighting in the dark, but then they all saw the ludicrousness of the situation and collapsed in laughter.

  In the right mood Rudolf could be delightful company. Leo Ahonen’s hobby was photography, and one night they all mugged for his camera, taking turns holding a blanket against the wall as a backdrop. Rudolf, who always loved being photographed, mimicked Chaboukiani in his bare-chested Corsaire pose, flexed his biceps, Mr. Universe–style, and, with a pair of boys hiding behind him, formed a six-armed mythical creature. In another sequence Egon, looking like Noël Coward with his striped dressing gown and fake cigarette, lay on the bed draped across Rudolf’s knees. As Egon flashed his long bare legs for one shot, Rudolf gazed into his eyes and cupped his cheeks in a mock movie clinch that looks more suggestive than it actually was. “The pictures are only acting camp. They were really very innocent.” Three decades later, to a friend’s inquiry about one of the photographs, which he still kept in his wallet, Rudolf said, “This was our view of the West.” (It may well have been a view inspired by a sapphic German film he had seen in Russia called Peter. “To us it was a great sensation, because you saw women smoking and looking tenderly at each other.”)

  All four insist that there was none of the usual adolescent sex talk in their dormitory. “Maybe they put something in the water, like in the army. Ninety percent of our thoughts were about ballet.” Most of the students knew that Ekaterina Square in front of the Pushkin Theater was a nocturnal cruising ground for gomiki, but this was a subject that Rudolf had no interest in discussing. One evening, as Sergiu cut across the garden on his way back to school, he saw a man lecherously open his coat and expose himself. “And this was at a period when they would put you in prison for something like that.” In the ballet world, where it was well known that Chaboukiani, among others, was a practicing homosexual, a certain license existed. In 1957, when the dancer returned to the Kirov to appear in Othello, he cast his lover as Iago, and few in the audience failed to notice the homoerotic charge onstage as the Moor crawled like a snake toward an Iago who held him captive with one foot pressing on his rib cage. “I felt a man behind leaning over me,” recalled Sergiu. “He was very very attractive and very excited. At the intermission he invited me for a drink.”

  Sergiu was one of several students who experimented with same-gender sex at school, allowing himself to be seduced in an empty dressing room by Alexander Minz, then in the process of discovering his own predilections. Rudolf’s colleagues are convinced that if he felt an attraction toward any of the boys, he did nothing about it: “He was too busy sponging up information.” Even Grigore Vintila, with his matinee-idol looks, sensed no special attention from Rudolf, who, if anything, appeared to take a greater interest in girls than the others did. Leo remembers his liking for a soloist in the Finnish National Ballet, when it toured Leningrad. “She wasn’t special as dancer, so he obviously noticed a pretty face.” And like almost everyone at school, he was mesmerized by a Cuban girl, as alluring as a young Gina Lollobrigida, who was to become his first and only teenage sweetheart.

  Trained in Havana by Fernando Alonso, husband of the famous ballerina Alicia Alonso, Menia Martinez suddenly appeared at the school one day like a rainbow in a leaden Leningrad sky. It was the middle of winter, yet she wore the thinnest of summer clothes—wild fifties outfits such as zebra-patterned stovepipes, boatnecked tops, open-toed stilettos, and huge hoop earrings. She was as glamorous as a pop star to the girls in her dormitory, who begged her to do their makeup, tell them stories about life in Cuba, and sing Latin American songs in her husky voice. “She used to sit on a bench in our kitchen with an upended washbowl between her legs and beat it like a tom-tom drum.”

  Although the pupils were thrilled by this “exotic bird,” several of the teachers were shocked: “Such a thing was not supposed to enter this traditional institution,” said Ursula Collein, an East German student who became her friend.

  I hope Menia never knew this, but we heard her being compared to a prostitute. We all liked her enormously, even though she didn’t share our hardworking Prussian ways—if she didn’t feel like it some days, she just wouldn’t get up—but she was such a winning personality that no one could be critical of her for long.

  No one except Shelkov. One day he summoned Menia into his office and lectured her about the school’s regime on dress and makeup. Glaring at her long, heavily mascaraed eyelashes, he asked sarcastically if they were her own. Menia, who knew only a few words of Russian and was completely unfazed by the director, laughed coquettishly. “Nyet. Magazin [a shop].”

  For all Menia’s frivolity, her thoughts were largely grounded in politics. “She was a serious Communist and very marked by her family and upbringing.” Her father had worked in the diplomatic service and was now a teacher renowned for his progressive ideas. Her older sister was married to a leading communist newspaper editor who, like many other middle-class intellectuals in Cuba, was soon to be among the most influential leaders of the revolution. Menia herself became an almost emblematic figure in Leningrad, a beautiful embodiment of the world outside—“such an extraordinary event in our gray lives”—and Spanish people who had emigrated to Russia with their families during the civil war often came to the school to talk to her.

  Soon after her arrival at the end of 1955, Menia’s teacher Naima Balticheva (who had auditioned Rudolf in Moscow during the Dekada) told her about “a fantastic dancer who’s a little crazy and sloppy, and needs to get into shape.” At the time Menia was considering the idea of training as a teacher herself, and asked Pushkin if he would give her permission to watch his classes. “Then slowly I started coming because of Rudolf—already people thought I was his girlfriend.” Menia loved the wild spirit of Rudolf’s dancing while he in turn loved the moody recitals of Afro-Cuban song and dance that she gave at school concerts in the House of Culture. How luscious she looked with her bare feet, flounced skirt, and whi
te bra showing through a tight, transparent black top; her eyes half closed and shapely hips swaying to the rhythm; and how well she could hold the stage alone. “He once said to me afterward, ‘I want to have the same emotion when I dance as you have when you sing.’ ”

  But, dismissing Rudolf as “just another stupid boy,” Menia was not romantically drawn to him at that time. She had been involved with a married man before she left Cuba, a leading cultural figure, and she preferred older men. “It all started with her father, a lot of interesting friends of his would come to the house,” says Bella Kurgina, her closest friend in Leningrad, who used to share the “thousands of chocolates” that Menia received from her admirers. “You just had to look in those huge eyes to fall in love.” It was around the beginning of 1957 that she and Rudolf began to grow attached. They found that they were soul mates. The same things made them laugh—Rudolf often made fun of Shelkov, standing stiffly in a Stalin-like pose and pointing to an offensive scrap of litter in the corridor—and they loved listening to music and talking about books they had read. “I was astonished. Where did he get that culture, that sensibility? How was it possible, this country boy with peasant parents?”

  Menia never discussed politics with Rudolf—he was simply not interested—even though this period, the lead-up to Castro’s overthrow of Fulgencio Batista, was the most turbulent in Cuban history. But she spoke about her family and encouraged him to do the same. It was the first time Rudolf had opened up about his life to anyone at school. He described the remarkable stoicism of his mother, and told Menia how his father had tried to talk him into playing the accordion instead of the piano. She spoke at length about her “Leningrad parents,” the couple who had practically adopted her. Estelle Volkenstein taught Spanish at Leningrad University and had participated in the civil war. When she heard of the arrival of a Cuban girl, she immediately contacted Menia, offering to act as her interpreter and to teach her Russian. Her husband, Mikhail Mikhailovich, a theoretician, was one of the brightest figures in Leningrad, an exceptionally cultivated, broad-minded man. “Conversation with the Volkensteins was at its most elevated—about art, about books, about philosophy—and one of the things that most impressed Rudolf about Menia was that she could be a friend of this very brilliant pair.”

  He was soon taken up by them, too; invited to concerts and to dinners at their house (a photograph from that period shows him sitting gazing up at Mikhail Mikhailovich, hanging on his words). It was through the Volkensteins that he and Menia were able to get tickets to see Glenn Gould during his 1957 Soviet tour. Recognizing a fellow maverick who breathed his own personality into his work, Rudolf was immensely impressed. “You get a most weird and, to most critics, upsetting version by Glenn Gould,” he told the New York critic Walter Terry twenty years later. “But my God! What a titanic talent! Such a talent and inborn sense of dynamism.”

  Rudolf’s friendship with Menia and his fervor for Gould only fanned his curiosity about the world outside: “Western art, Western choreography, people … he wanted to travel and see. Travel and see.” He would study photographs of Margot Fonteyn and other Royal Ballet artists in a calendar, as well as in copies of the Dancing Times, which an English friend of Menia’s regularly sent to her. “He wanted to dance with all those stars. He had already decided to leave.” As indeed he had. Leo had two passports then, as the original was due to expire; Rudolf knew this, and one day he took his roommate aside and pleaded to be given the passport Leo was going to discard. “He said, ‘We can change the pictures. It will be all right if the two of us keep this quiet,’ but I was too afraid—I thought we would both end up in prison in Siberia. Yet I knew at that moment that he was going to defect one day. It came as no surprise to me when he did.”

  For a student performance in June 1957, Rudolf danced the Diana and Acteon pas de deux with the outstandingly gifted Alla Sizova, a performance that attracted no particular attention from the fans or critics but marked the beginning of an intense collaboration with Pushkin: “I could not lose a second of that time. I had to hear everything. I had to extort knowledge from him. I was preparing my steps on my own a lot then, in the evening. I would bring him to the studio and ask, ‘How shall I do this movement. Like this? Or like this?’ ” By now his only rival at school was a remarkable pupil in the parallel class of Boris Shavrov, already being compared to Nijinsky because of his extraordinary jumps. Yuri Soloviev was the great hope for the future, and had an adoring following among the teachers and students: “He was our type of dancer, whereas we couldn’t really learn from Rudolf at that time,” says Leo. “Yuri was a dancer’s dancer—the kind that Misha Baryshnikov became: a ballet textbook—as exact as the Law of Vaganova. Perfect.” Sergiu, who was less of a Soloviev fan, remembers how pleased Rudolf looked when he told him that he found Yuri’s angelic but expressionless face “boring, plain boring.” It was hard not to be jealous of the fact that Soloviev was the school favorite, and yet his sweet nature made disliking him impossible. Besides, Rudolf himself admired Soloviev enormously. The dancer’s extraordinary elevation and academic purity were the very qualities that he was working so hard to attain. In London years later, he would tell gushing fans, “You think I’m good? You want to see Soloviev!”

  Among the male dancers in Leningrad there was no one else whom Rudolf revered. Konstantin Sergeyev was at the end of his career as a danseur noble, and the principals who succeeded him, such as the virile, athletic Askold Makarov and Boris Bregvadze, were fundamentally character dancers. The glory of the Kirov was in its ballerinas—it was a period almost as rich as the golden age of Olga Spessivtseva and Pavlova. Among the veterans there was the inspirational Natalia Dudinskaya as well as Alla Shelest, both of whose performances Rudolf never missed. Young stars included Irina Kolpakova, Alla Osipenko, and Ninel Kurgapkina, and among the new names emerging from the school were Alla Sizova and Natalia Makarova.

  Male dancing was very rough in Russia at the time: they did not believe in lyrical passages, they did not believe that man could execute woman’s steps, and that’s what I was doing. They could not believe it, they could not be emotional; they could not really find that negative feeling which men are never permitted there; it was always positive.

  Had Rudolf’s idol, Vakhtang Chaboukiani, still been in the company and in his prime, Rudolf might well have developed into a very different dancer, but as he saw no role model among the men, he began consciously to assimilate technical skills from the ballerinas. These included distinctively feminine qualities such as split extensions, high attitudes, soft, expressive arms, and—his most audacious plagiarism of all—the use of a high relevé that looked almost as if he were on pointe. In Leonid Yakobson’s Spartacus, which premiered in 1956, Rudolf would have seen ballerinas dancing not in pointe shoes but in sandals on three-quarter pointes—a departure that was considered anarchic by traditionalists. By adopting this innovation himself, and by introducing a high retiré position of the foot in pirouettes (which he later told Mikhail Baryshnikov he had taken from pictures he had seen of Western dancers), Rudolf discovered that he could make his legs appear much longer than they actually were. “This sense that he created of really lifting himself up with everything stretched gave a very Western look to his dancing,” says Baryshnikov. “At that time it really was unheard of to do those things. Russian male dancers were sturdy, thick, very much influenced by the bravura dancing of Chaboukiani. Guys were big.” “There was no female style among the boys in the school,” agrees Marguerite Alfimova. “Rudolf was learning from all of us and danced with lovely plastique. And he enjoyed dancing the female parts, which none of the other men would have been able to do.”

  With his acute visual memory Rudolf knew the ballerinas’ repertory as well as his own. When Baryshnikov arrived at the school a decade later, people were still talking about the way he used to seize an opportunity to show the girls how the Petipa variations should be performed. As Baryshnikov recalled:

  Before class, when everybod
y was standing and warming up, he would do Kitri’s variation from the first act [of Don Quixote] full out, which made a few people kind of uncomfortable. But full out and really good … and with the panache.… It was not being a queen … to him it was just another dance, not being a man dancing a woman’s role.