This rawness was strikingly at odds with the academic clarity of Rudolf’s Giselle—the elegant, airy Irina Kolpakova, so slender and exquisitely proportioned that she was often likened to a porcelain figurine. She, too, was young and inexperienced, but while some found her cold by comparison with Rudolf, others noticed a new freedom, “as if he had awakened something in her.” To Vera Krasovskaya “the two came together to complement one another perfectly”; yet the ballerina herself admits that she was not then sufficiently receptive to Rudolf’s radical approach.
It was very strange for me, strange for everybody. It was a period in the Kirov when we tried to keep to tradition in order to help the audience understand the time and the place. Rudik had strength and energy, and his acting was fresh and new, but I wasn’t really ready to see that. I was a very traditional ballerina at that time. I wasn’t at all excited when I heard that I was cast opposite Rudik; I wanted my husband [Vladilen Semyonov] to partner me. I needed a prince, not a little boy saying love words.
There were others who felt similarly, that by depriving the hero of his breeding Rudolf’s interpretation went too far beyond the bounds of convention. The feminine quality in his dancing, so alien to Soviet males, also divided people: The great ballerina Alla Shelest, his next Giselle, loved the “tenderness that breathed from his Albrecht,” but for his contemporary Serge Vikulov, this touch of androgyny was risible: “With Kolpakova and Nureyev we had a girl and another girl as the boy: You couldn’t believe in their love.”
Rudolf did, in fact, unbalance the ballet that night, but not in the way Vikulov implied. When he danced Albrecht the character ceased to be a supporting role, because all eyes were on him. Even during the heroine’s key moment—the famous mad scene at the end of act 1—he diverted the audience’s attention to himself simply by doing nothing. Instead of reacting with standard horror to Giselle’s crazed despair, Rudolf concealed his feelings “behind a mask of inertia,” proving the power of stillness and stage presence over mimetic noise. Olga Moiseyeva asked him later, “Rudik, why didn’t you do something? She’s dying.” “I know,” he replied. “I decided to do nothing because I felt nothing.”* “With him there was no faking onstage, and as a result, the emotional impact was staggering.”
Faina Rokhind watched Rudolf through her opera glasses from the third circle, thinking of the great Russian dancers she had seen: Ulanova; Dudinskaya; her idol, Chaboukiani; and of legends such as Pavlova and Nijinsky. “And I told myself ‘the name of Nureyev will be among them.’ For me that performance was a shock which affected the rest of my life. When I saw Laurentia I knew Rudolf was going to be a great dancer. When I saw Giselle I knew he was going to be a genius.” As the curtain came down the applause was so tumultuous that it seemed as though the vast crystal chandelier would come crashing to the ground. “This was possibly Rudik’s greatest performance the whole time he was in Leningrad,” writes Tamara.
The number of Nureyev fans grew with each performance. “Soon a wonderful thing began to happen. It was like a fever, a madness.” Girls would pick armfuls of lilacs from the Field of Mars and wear huge skirts in order to smuggle the flowers inside the theater, where they were banned. Next, balletomanes with seats in the “blind box” nearest the stage went into action, using ropes to lower the bouquets to a group waiting beneath. The completion of the final grand pas de deux was the signal. “Then suddenly, from everywhere, the stage would be strewn with flowers for Rudolf.”
Complicity among the fans turned to jealousy at any sign of favoritism (one went as far as informing on another to the Komsomol Committee). Inevitably the girls to whom Rudolf paid attention were those who had something to offer him. Silva Lon, who worked at the state theater booking agency in Moscow, would arrange tickets for him and somewhere to stay when he was in town. She often gave him books, and in return he sent her photographs of himself, and letters in which he confided thoughts on his performances. He was closest of all to Tamara, whom he would quiz whenever they met about what she had learned at the university that day. Her tutors had given him permission to attend lectures with her, and afterward the pair would have long discussions, particularly about the Silver Age poets of the 1920s and 1930s. He absolutely devoured a slim volume of Balmont’s verse she acquired for him from the faculty library, telling her that he had taken lines from “Sin miedo” [“Without fear”] as his motto: “It’s about me,” he said pointing to the following passage: “If you are a poet and wish to be powerful and to live forever in the memory of men, strike them to the heart with the melodious creations of your imagination, temper your thought upon the flame of passion.”
Increasingly solipsistic, Rudolf found he was moved most by literature that reminded him of himself. When he managed to get hold of a copy of Inostrannaya Literatura containing J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, he was captivated by the sensitive outcast Holden Caulfield, that fellow champion of youthful rebellion, and had just finished reading it when Tamara called at the Pushkins’ apartment to see him. Pointing at the magazine, he exclaimed, “No sleep for you tonight! You won’t be able to put this down!” Xenia, who was also in the room, overheard him, and said that she would love to read it, too. Rudolf’s reaction left both women speechless: “What do you need it for, Xenia Josifovna?… Tamara can have thirty new thoughts in the time it takes you to come up with one!” With those words he disappeared out the door. Xenia was visibly shattered—her humiliation made worse by the fact that his young friend had witnessed it—but, incapable of blaming Rudolf, she directed her resentment at Tamara, who found that she was no longer welcome at Rossi Street. With a guilty sense of collusion, the pair went out of their way to avoid Xenia. Whenever they attended a concert together, Xenia would invariably be waiting outside the Philharmonic Hall to take Rudolf home. “Xana!” he would exclaim under his breath, as they rushed toward another exit.
It’s hard to know whether it was the shame Rudolf felt about the nature of his relationship with Xenia that accounted for his brutal behavior toward her or the shame he felt he was expected to show—when they were alone together, things may have been quite different. Whatever the case, Xenia was unable to break free. “She was completely obsessed by him,” remarked one friend. “She wanted to live his life, and she enjoyed sharing his fame.” “For the rest of her life there was only one person for her,” said another. “I think she made up some kind of fairy tale for herself in her mind, building up the situation into romantic love.”
Their “odd ménage” may have been even more complex. Years later Rudolf confided to friends that while he was living with the Pushkins he had made Xenia pregnant, “But she didn’t want to let the baby live.” Again, in 1992, only months before he died, he confessed to his Vaganova schoolmate Egon Bischoff about his involvement, adding: “What would you say if I told you I might have had a child by her?” Pushkin, he said, never knew about the pregnancy or its termination. “I was quite shocked,” said Bischoff. “I hadn’t thought the relationship would go that far.”
For Xenia to have undergone an illegal abortion would seem to have been the ultimate degradation, but in fact the procedure at that time was fairly matter-of-fact. “Everybody did it,” said one friend of Rudolf’s. “I did it six times. It was only a question of paying.” More controversial is whether or not Rudolf’s claim is true: There were two other women whom he said he made pregnant before he defected, and three more in the West. Fathering a child—and specifically a son—was a lasting ambition for Rudolf: It was a way of duplicating himself. But did it amount to more than a fantasy? Ninel Kurgapkina, whom Rudolf also claimed to have impregnated in Russia, dismisses the suggestion with a burst of laughter. “Erunda [bullshit]! It was Xenia,” she insists.
There was, actually, an infatuation of sorts between the two dancers. “But not like those liaisons fraught with jealousy,” said Xenia’s young friend Alla Bor. “It was very open. Ninel was very pretty and very playful, and Rudik was always around her, laughing and having fun.”
The ballerina Alla Osipenko agrees. “He was always so bright and alert and smiling that we naturally assumed he was in love.” Outsiders assumed the flirtation was physical, but the two were determined to keep people guessing. Rudolf told some friends that he did have an affair with Ninel, and others that he wanted to but didn’t. Ninel joked to a dancer acquaintance that she had “practically to rape Rudolf,” but now insists that they were no more than friends. “A lot of people thought we were lovers, but we weren’t. We had a romance, but we didn’t make love. If he hadn’t defected, maybe we could have had some sort of relationship. We were very, very close and I was good-looking then. Even when I met him years later, he said, ‘What a shame that we didn’t.’ ”
During an end-of-the-year tour of Egypt, they had a lot of fun together in Africa, “which meant that we slept very little.” On New Year’s Eve the whole company attended a banquet where a famous Egyptian belly dancer provided the entertainment. When dinner was over, she sidled seductively up to the Kirov table and invited everyone to dance. Only Rudolf rose from his chair and followed her onto the floor. With his eyes fixed on the ghazi’s shimmering low-slung skirt, he began imitating her hip movements, contrasting voluptuous gyrations with rapid convulsions, spins, and shimmies, building up to a climax of such intensity that he appeared to be locked in a kind of trance.
It was during this tour of the Middle East that a young man approached Rudolf in the hotel foyer one night and tried to start a conversation with him. “Do you speak English?” “Nyet.” “Parlez-vous français?” “Nyet.” “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” “Nyet.” “Parla Italiano?” “Nyet.” For Rudolf the encounter was shaming, not because of its possible homosexual intent—and certainly not because of the company ban on contact with strangers—but because it made him seem provincial. “So as soon as I went back to Russia I found a teacher straightaway to learn English.” When his sister Rosa asked why, he explained that “he didn’t want to be deaf and dumb when he was abroad.”
Back in Leningrad, Rudolf’s disregard for rules became more brazen than ever: One scandal followed another, as if he were deliberately refueling his growing reputation as a monstre sacré, indulging what Kenneth Tynan once called “the athletics of personality.” He had several clashes with Mikhail Mikhailovich Mikhailov, a company répétiteur known for his old-school ways and civilized demeanor. (“You could spot him in the street because of his upright carriage.”) Mikhailov was meticulous about retaining the traditions of Russian pantomime because he didn’t want to lose the flavor of the Imperial Theater. To Rudolf, however, this was an old-fashioned, posturing approach, more suited to opera than ballet. “He and Nureyev came from two different worlds,” says Igor Stupnikov. “It was a collision of pre- and post-revolution.” As Mikhailov’s specialty was the coaching of character roles, it was under his eye that Rudolf prepared for his first Don Quixote, a robustly comic four-act ballet, with Ninel Kurgapkina cast opposite him. After giving much time and thought to his new role (the playful lover from volume 2 of the Cervantes novel), Rudolf had developed a particular effect he wanted to achieve—a more distinct coloring of the classical steps with a Spanish idiom. Instead of running onstage to perform his variation, he decided to come out slowly and deliberately, like a toreador approaching a bull. Dismayed by Rudolf’s deviation from the correct tempo, Mikhailov stopped him and ordered him to do it again. The dancer quietly repeated his entrance, only this time it was even slower. “Rudik,” Kurgapkina whispered, “do it quickly just for Mikhailov, and then you can perform it onstage the way you want to do it.” “Why should I?” he demanded. “Why should I fake it for him if I’m going to do it my way on the stage?” Exclaiming that he refused to work under such conditions, “Pihal Pihalovich,” as Rudolf would now refer to him—Pihal means “fuck”—left the studio. “At that time no one could argue with Rudik.”
His debut in Don Quixote acquired more notoriety still, as Rudolf was prepared to sabotage a performance simply to make his point. The first acts passed without incident, but during the last intermission, which dragged on from twenty minutes to nearly an hour, it became obvious that something was wrong. In his dressing room, surrounded by flowers, the dancer sat with his legs casually propped up on a table, as both Sergeyev and Mikhailov remonstrated with him. He was refusing to go onstage in the fourth-act costume of short baggy trousers because these “lampshades,” as he called them, foreshortened the line of the leg. “Why should I?” he argued. “In the West, they’ve been dancing in tights for years.” As a disheveled Xenia—“terribly upset, on the verge of tears”—went rushing out into the auditorium to find Tamara in the hope that she could persuade him to change his mind, Rudolf’s dresser stood by patiently, holding the offending breeches in his hands. “Replace me with anyone you want. I’m not going onstage in them. They’re ugly. Only without pants,” he remarked implacably.
Finally Rudolf got his way and appeared onstage to a chorus of gasps. He looked naked! He was bound to be dismissed, just as Nijinsky had been fifty years earlier for daring in the presence of the dowager empress to wear “an indecent and improper costume” of Renaissance-style tights without the traditional covering of a pair of trunks. It was, in fact, a replay of the scandal of 1911, but whereas Nijinsky, after his triumphant debut in Giselle, had been summoned to the director’s office the next day and dismissed, Rudolf not only went unpunished but won the admiration of his male colleagues for having scored a pioneering victory. “After that night, no man could tolerate those pants. We were entering a new era and … Nureyev was a beacon of the future.”
The critics, on the other hand, were shocked by the arrogance underlying his Don Quixote. “Why on earth does Nureyev—sporting his ‘trendy’ haircut—feel he has to stalk the stage with such an air of imperturbable disinterest?” wrote Vera Krasovskaya. “He should learn not to play so fecklessly with his own talent.” Valeria Chistyakova also deplored the visible indifference he showed onstage. “This is unforgivable behavior … and implies disrespect not only for one’s own talent but also for one’s audience.” Their comments were justifiable enough. Unchallenged by the lack of dances for the male lead, Rudolf made no attempt to hide his boredom as he sat onstage, smiling and nodding to a friend whom he had spotted in the orchestra. The audience, however, showed no sign of displeasure; when the final curtain came down, the theater exploded, flowers cascaded around the dancers, and a large group of Americans—the entire cast of My Fair Lady, then touring Russia—“went crazy.”
Afterward the star of the production, Lola Fisher, was taken around to meet Rudolf by Liuba, who had been helping a student friend show her the sights. As they arrived at the stage door, “an exultant Rudik” appeared with his arms full of flowers and, pushing past the mob of autograph hunters, headed straight toward them.
Lola began telling him what a wonderful impression he’d made on her. There wasn’t any need for translation, for even if Rudik hadn’t known any English, her shining eyes and the expression on her face spoke for themselves. At that point, Rudik did something that provoked a storm of indignation among his female fans. He presented all the flowers he’d been given to Lola, as if in recognition of her own talent.
Such tactlessness caused intense resentment among Rudolf’s most fanatical admirers, who overnight turned hostile, shouting abuse as he walked down the street and telephoning him at all hours, “making life unbearable for the Pushkin household.” It was rumored they were going to throw birch twigs instead of flowers onstage—“the equivalent of a public slap in the face”—but this never happened. Only a note attached to a small bunch of violets appeared among the bouquets one night with the words, “An ass will always be an ass, even if you cover him with flowers!”
Yet notwithstanding his undiplomatic behavior toward his fans, Rudolf realized it would be unwise to accept Lola Fisher’s invitation to supper that night. Instead, while Xenia stood watchfully by, waiting to drive him home, he agreed to a less conspicuous meeting the following day. As Ru
dolf walked into the restaurant of the Grand Hotel Europa to meet Lola and her actor colleagues for breakfast, the entire company stood up to applaud—his first Western ovation.
A month later, when Rudolf was cast opposite Alla Shelest for two performances of Giselle, the Leningrad balletomanes were concerned not that he would eclipse her—no one could do that; her own stage personality was transfixing—but that he was too inexperienced to be paired with a dancer “whose name is sacred.” One of her fans took it upon herself to visit the ballerina in order to dissuade her from dancing with him, but she had hardly begun to make her case before Shelest silenced her: “What are you saying, Natasha? Nureyev is an epoch in ballet.”
Shelest had liked and admired him from their first rehearsal, noting his “unusual inner liveliness,” his instant reactions and sensitivity to every nuance of meaning. “It was not necessary to explain to him why you did it that way and no other.” They formed a deep bond of sympathy and mutual respect. “It was Shelest,” remarks Vadim Kiselev, “who gave Rudolf a taste for changing himself. She taught him how from five percent you can achieve a hundred.” Although a woman steeped in culture, Shelest was a dowdy figure offstage, plain-faced and plump, yet when she began to dance, something remarkable took place: She could hypnotize the audience into seeing her as a beauty. Noticing that Rudolf’s impetuous, “hooligan-boy” interpretation negated the fact that Albrecht is an aristocrat, she spent hours in the studio helping him to concentrate and moderate his interpretation. But on the evening of June 30 even Rudolf’s most doting followers were apprehensive. “I was very wary,” remembers Faina Rokhind. “But what a marvelous performance they gave! Shelest allowed Rudik a lot of freedom; he had become so much more independent in the role.” “There were many worries because he was dancing with Shelest,” Galina Palshina wrote in her journal, “but everything went well. He was made for this role, for this ballet.… I was so excited I couldn’t sleep.”
Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342) Page 12