Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  For the lead role of Ferhad, Rudolf contributed many of his own ideas, helping Grigorovich reinvent the typical macho Soviet lead. The dancer’s main inspiration was Apollo, Balanchine’s extraordinarily limpid masterpiece to Stravinsky’s score, which Alicia Alonso’s company had brought to Russia three years earlier. Rudolf had left Leningrad without permission in order to see the company perform the ballet in Moscow, resulting in a salary deduction and official reprimand on his return, but he had no regrets. “I was agog.… I thought, How strange, how weird, how wonderful!” Conveying his excitement to Grigorovich, Rudolf would try to reconstruct specific steps he remembered from the ballet. “It came back to me … and in a general way I said, well, he did this move and that move, and that one.” And with Grigorovich incorporating his own unusual images drawn from Persian miniatures, the process of collaboration was a stimulating time for them both. “They were literally walking on air, unable to hide their mutual pleasure,” said dancer Nikita Dolgushin.

  Beginning with Ferhad’s first flying entry, Grigorovich created his hero as a revelation of Rudolf himself. Enacting the dancer’s own belief in the equal status of the male lead, Ferhad doesn’t shadow and support his lover like a stock ballet partner, but in a lyrical pas de deux imitates the youthful heroine’s light gazelle leaps and fluttery hands in a mirror image of her. As Virsaladze was sitting in the studio one afternoon watching Rudolf and his partner rehearse this duet, he turned to Grigorovich and said, “I don’t think that we’ll ever see anything like this again.” But as the final run-through of Legend of Love was taking place onstage, Rudolf began gathering up his things to leave; the rehearsal had run overtime, and the dancer was due to work on his first performance with Alla Shelest of Laurentia. “Rudik, where are you going? I haven’t yet said we’re finished.” “Yuri Nikolaivich, I’m off to rehearse some proper dances!” Rudolf replied, defiantly walking away. Grigorovich was enraged, and shouted after him that if he left now there would be no coming back. Rudolf ignored him. Vera Krasovskaya, who was sitting in the empty theater, watched it all happen, and when it became clear that Grigorovich intended to carry out his threat, begged Virsaladze, his mentor and close friend, to intervene. According to Krasovskaya, he tried but failed. Two days later the choreographer denounced Rudolf in an official letter of complaint to the Kirov’s administrative director, Georgi Korkin.

  On 18 February at 13:30 during the stage rehearsal of the ballet The Legend of Love, I suggested to the performer of the role of Ferhad, the dancer R. Nureyev, to begin the work. He not only refused to do so, but even used improper language.

  As this is not the first time that R. Nureyev has behaved so unceremoniously at work and I have been unsuccessful in attempting to explain to him that such behavior is inadmissible, I have to ask you to protect the work in performance from escapades of this kind, which are giving a pernicious example to the whole company.

  Choreographer Y. Grigorovich 20

  February 1961

  However, for Rudolf, a near-contemporary like Grigorovich with only one other ballet to his name was not someone of great importance. Besides, working on the ballet had fired ambitions of his own to choreograph, and lately he had been discussing with Nikita Dolgushin the possibility of collaborating on a piece to a Bach score. “We knew that Balanchine had staged Concerto Barocco to this music. And although we had never seen it, it was inspiring just to think what it could be like: We imagined it to be unique, elegant, and graceful.” To Rudolf, Balanchine was omnipotent, the supreme creator. Nevertheless, a month later when The Legend of Love was complete and Rudolf saw it performed onstage for the first time with Alexander Gribov as Ferhad, he regretted his behavior, considering the role to be the biggest lost opportunity of his career.

  Western critics find it hard to understand the appeal of Legend of Love (dismissed by Arlene Croce as conventional Soviet kitsch), but in Russia it was regarded as a triumph, “a dissertation on the art of choreography.” Hoping that Sergeyev might be persuaded to break the impasse over the ballet, Rudolf went to see him to plead his case. He knew that the director was jealous of Grigorovich and might welcome the chance to exert his own power. Sure enough, Sergeyev not only gave Rudolf his word that he would be cast in the role of Ferhad the following season but, eager to take credit for promoting the dancer, promised him two important debuts: The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake. “The score is 2–0. We win!” Rudolf announced triumphantly to Tamara as soon as he heard the news.

  By now the pair had become almost inseparable; Rudolf trusted Tamara enough to confide in her, not his innermost feelings but thoughts about roles or intrigues at the theater, confident that he could count on her loyalty. Tamara, whose existence was “completely filled by Rudolf,” found that she had fallen in love. She lived for their long walks together, sometimes lasting five or six hours, and during the white nights, often until the morning. Their favorite route was along the Fontanka Canal to Nevsky Prospekt, on to the Field of Mars and along the Neva, past the Bronze Horseman into St. Isaac’s Square and back down Nevsky to Rossi Street. One day Rudolf admitted that after a rehearsal he had walked with a friend until very late. “Where? With whom?” she asked suspiciously. “I walked with Teja,” he said, describing the direction they had taken, the special circuit Tamara thought of as their own.

  It was only that spring that Rudolf had allowed Tamara to meet his young German friend (neither Liuba nor Leonid ever heard him mention Teja’s name), but sensing a rival for Rudolf’s affection, she disliked him from the start. The feeling was mutual: When Teja referred to Tamara he often called her “the Black Cat.” True to his nature, Rudolf began using them both for his own ends. He loved being photographed, and during walks with Tamara would choose locations for her to shoot him with her little camera, leaning against the railings of the Fontanka Embankment, in front of the Kirov Theater, the Russian Museum, the Summer Gardens.… From his first acquaintance with Teja, when he had asked the student to film American Ballet Theatre in his absence, he had profited from the use of his home-movie camera and projector, returning again and again to Teja’s lodgings to watch the footage. He became as excited by Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, a contemporary homage to Petipa, as he was by his first sight of Erik Bruhn’s dancing. Although Tamara had been able to make out no more than “a tiny man jumping” in extracts from Swan Lake and Don Quixote, Rudolf was transfixed by Bruhn’s lean, elegant line. “On the 8 mm film I saw what he can do with his legs. I wanted to learn that, how he does that.”

  As a study aid Rudolf asked Teja to film his own performances, and together they watched and discussed the results. Teja had a very good eye and was one of the few people from whom Rudolf would accept corrections on his technique. “They were comrades for each other, they learned from each other.” In this footage it is surprising to see how technically unpolished Rudolf still was at this point, awkwardly bent over the ballerina, his landings heavy, his turns corkscrewing down to a flat supporting foot. He was then being urged by the critics to refine his dancing, to strive for clarity in every step and work toward making his movements flow imperceptibly together. One suggested casting him more often in ensemble roles such as the Cavaliers’ Quartet in Raymonda, so that he would be forced to model his movements on Kirov paragons like the academically faultless Yuri Soloviev. But not only was compulsory uniformity contemptible to Rudolf, he was then deliberately “washing away the classical rules,” allowing innovation to take precedence over finesse. He could see his influence affecting his contemporaries, not the other way round. “A lot of us liked and tried to copy his new ways,” admits former Kirov soloist Vadim Desnitsky. Even the grudging Serge Vikulov had begun to imitate Rudolf’s coda of double assemblés in La Bayadère, while Boris Bregvadze, who particularly admired Rudolf’s speedy chaînés—“We did them fast, but his were even faster, and then he stopped dead”—was adopting a feature Rudolf had added to Corsaire, when instead of walking across the stage toward his partner, he performed a se
quence of steps, then ran in a circle toward her. “It has stayed to this day.”

  Kirov ballerinas were now vying to dance with Rudolf—“They felt that his energy, his input, would rub off on them too,” Bregvadze says. Alla Shelest believed that together they could create a legendary partnership. Their performance of Laurentia in February had been just as thrilling as their Giselle. Noticeably more mature and self-confident than he had been with Dudinskaya, Rudolf still presented a version of the hero completely different from any before him, re-creating Frondoso in his own image—“more freedom-loving, more selfish and passionately in love.” His debuts that season, by contrast, were uneven. It was generally agreed that his two performances of the Prince in The Nutcracker two weeks earlier had been a disappointment. “I saw a lot of technical errors,” says Faina Rokhind. “And he danced without any emotion, as if he thought the part was not prestigious enough for him.” His Prince Désiré in The Sleeping Beauty in March, on the other hand, was a remarkable success: “It was as if he was born to play this; his elegance was completely natural,” says a Kirov contemporary who has never seen a better Désiré onstage before or since. Having taken note of Sergei Sorokin’s comment that désiré in French means “desired” (“It’s good,” he said, smiling. “I like that!”), Rudolf projected a powerful physical allure most apparent in the hunting scene, where beplumed and bedecked in lace and satin, he stalked the stage with real aristocratic command. His Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake at the beginning of April reverted, in the view of his fans, to being “very bad, not interesting, rough dancing,” wrote Galina Palshina. “And how we were waiting for this performance, which happened after his Sleeping Beauty!”

  Rudolf always considered the famous classical works to be ballerinas’ ballets, with the prince employed as no more than a foil and porteur. “Petipa didn’t want to make men dance. At all,” he said. “Just walk or stand like statue onstage.” His lack of conviction in the Petipa repertory was tangible (though not in The Sleeping Beauty, possibly because, as his teacher Igor Belsky pointed out, “He really felt the ballet’s history”). His failure in Swan Lake may also have been due to the fact that he was not given sufficient rehearsal time; he was then beginning to prepare his repertory (The Sleeping Beauty, La Bayadère, Don Quixote, Giselle, and Taras Bulba) for the Kirov’s forthcoming tour to the West.

  It was hard for Rudolf to accept that his dream of seeing Europe was about to be realized. He knew how dancers could be dropped from foreign excursions at any time and for any reason. Ninel Kurgapkina believes to this day that she was prevented from going abroad as a result of having been informed on while in East Germany for wearing trousers that were considered immodest. Alla Shelest’s name was on the list, then suddenly removed—probably as a result of the French impresario’s insistance on younger dancers. In the middle of rehearsing Rudolf and Alla Sizova in the Blue Bird pas de deux for Paris, Shelest, remembering that she would not be accompanying them, began to cry. Immediately understanding the reason, Rudolf came over to comfort her, and when she declined his offer to go back with him to the Pushkins, insisted on escorting her home. “We scarcely said a word on the way, but nevertheless I felt his warm sympathy toward me the entire time.”

  Considering the atmosphere of uncertainty surrounding the tour, it’s extraordinary that Rudolf allowed himself to jeopardize his chances only days before he was due to leave. He had been summoned with the other dancers for a routine preparatory session at Smolniy, an administrative center next door to Leningrad’s famous blue-and-white baroque cathedral, and after being lectured on the “modern international situation” and instructed how they should behave abroad, Rudolf and a colleague were taken to a separate room. There, heading the special committee responsible for vetoing dancers for the tour, was Vitaly Strizhevsky, who was officially deputy to the administrative director but in reality worked for the KGB, something most people were aware of. Why, he demanded, had neither of them joined Komsomol? “Because I’ve far more important things to do with my time than waste it on that kind of rubbish!” exclaimed Rudolf impulsively. According to Dolgushin, “It was exactly the kind of crazy thing he couldn’t resist saying.”

  It was clear Nureyev had to leave. As Baryshnikov said, “He would have died in Russia … they would kill him or he would kill himself. There was only one way.” “In Russia,” Rudolf later told a friend, “I did not belong to myself. I had a feeling that I had a big talent which people would recognize anywhere.” This talent had already been spotted, and the news dispatched to the West by Yuri Slonimsky, whose June 1960 article on Russian ballet in the Atlantic Monthly singled out Rudolf alone among the younger generation of Kirov dancers. Recounting how the Kirov Theater had been “literally besieged” for his December 12, 1959, performance of Giselle the critic described Rudolf’s Albrecht as “unlike anyone’s we have ever seen,” instantly recognizing the revolutionary impact of his dancing. “In a word, new people are interpreting even the deepest past in a new way. They are viewing this past in the light of modern techniques.” But after two and a half years of performing the Kirov’s limited repertory, Rudolf had begun to feel that he had absorbed as much as he could from Russia, and longed for the chance to amplify his knowledge and refine his technique. He was already leagues ahead of his compatriots. Balanchine’s Theme and Variations had been poorly received by Russian audiences unaccustomed to the severity of abstract work, but Rudolf had recognized it immediately as “the most beautiful ballet.” He vowed he would learn it, just as he promised himself that one day he would study Erik Bruhn’s method of dance. As critics and fans had commented recently, Rudolf’s dancing could be hectic and rough edged at times, whereas he had noticed that Bruhn, the ideal danseur noble, embodied the very qualities of purity, ease, and understatement that he knew he lacked. “Whether as friend, lover, or enemy,” he told himself, “I have to go to that camp and learn it all.”

  Rudolf’s defection was “prepared inside,” but nevertheless, he still felt that he needed to gauge the reaction of his friends. During a long walk with Leonid a few days before his departure, Rudolf asked him, “What would you think if I stayed in the West?” The question shocked Leonid profoundly, but keeping his answer deliberately oblique, he replied, “Do you know what nostalgia means?” He wanted to remind Rudolf of the lifestyle he loved and would be leaving behind—Leningrad’s “kitchen culture,” where a gathering of friends around a table had come to mean more to him than his family. Sensing his unease, Rudolf tried to make light of what he had said as no more than a hypothetical possibility, and made Leonid promise not to say a word about their conversation to anyone.

  Rudolf, it was true, felt entirely at ease in his close circle—a milieu far removed from the theater’s world of rumor and scandal. And yet for an artist, a society dependent on friends can also be constricting. Rudolf felt increasingly trapped by circumstances at home. Now that Xenia could see how much of a hold Teja had on him, she had reverted to being jealous and contentious, going out of her way to cause trouble between them. “They have quarrelled—Xana is the reason,” Elizaveta Pazhi told a friend. Xenia would never stop loving Rudolf—“There was only one person until her death, he was like a god for her”—but at the same time she found herself involuntarily attracted to Teja. If Rudolf sensed the growing sexual chemistry between them he would have felt the kind of distaste and disenchantment experienced by Chinko Rafique, taken up by the Pushkins a decade later:

  I got very disillusioned and almost didn’t want to dance. It was a feeling that there was a very harsh and sordid reality behind these people about whom I had such illusions. Xenia was predatory. She was sexually predatory, and I do think, looking back, that Pushkin really suffered a lot. I think he experienced enormous humiliation because of that. There was a lot of hurt. You could feel it. I think for Pushkin it was a very unhappy situation, and he had to close his eyes and really make his own private peace with himself for having to handle Xenia’s excesses.

  Liuba h
as always believed that Rudolf’s involvement with Xenia was a key reason why he “escaped to the West.” Ninel Kurgapkina also agrees that it was a situation from which he badly wanted to extricate himself. “He was not very proud when he talked of Xenia. He didn’t feel good thinking about her.” But even more of an incentive to leave Russia was the realization that he would never be free to follow his true sexual instincts while he was there. “I did not have the possibility of choosing my friends according to my taste. It was as if someone battered me morally. I was very unhappy.” By now people within the Kirov were beginning to find out about Rudolf’s homosexuality, “although,” says Gabriella Komleva, “it was clear that he hadn’t quite sorted himself out: it was a little of this, a little of that.”

  In fact he was far more consistent in his choice of male love than Teja, who had already begun his pursuit of the Indonesian student whom he later married. Konstantin Russu remembers Rudolf bursting in on one occasion and making a jealous scene. “Teja often had someone, or maybe he just told Rudolf that he had someone else,” said Ute Mitreuter. “He could be very manipulative with people.” In the Stasi statement Teja was forced to write about his relationship with Rudolf, he said that in April, when the school went on a trip to Moscow, he had decided to sever the link between them.

  After I had come back, he often tried to meet me in the dormitory or at school, but I avoided him. One week after my return he ran into me in the street and confronted me about why I had broken off our friendship. For me there were many reasons.… During the last couple of days before our separating he had tried to start an abnormal relationship with me.… It had become completely clear that because of this there would always be a distance between the two of us.