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THE LIFE AND DEATH OF RUDOLF NUREYEV

A DANCER'S DECADENCE | November 27th 2007

Jeff Medaugh/Flickr

In the West Nureyev found stardom, but also a life of ruinous indulgence. James Woodall reads a new biography of the dancer by Julie Kavanagh, and decides that, on balance, the trade-off was worthwhile ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Was Rudolf Nureyev destroyed by the West? This might not be the question burning on everyone's lips right now. But two things put it into context. First, Nureyev is undoubtedly the one dancer of recent decades whom even the most determined balletophobe will have heard of. Second, an immense authorised biography has just appeared, leaving no stone in his extraordinary life unturned.

The Russian dancer died nearly 15 years ago. He would have turned 70 next year, so expect plenty of commemorations of the Tatar peasant in 2008. Born on a train at the height of Stalin's purges, Nureyev defected in 1961, aged 23, and ultimately brought a new kind of glamour--a special fire, even mass appeal--to a traditionally elitist art form. Yet in one sense, his fame, his very name, outshone anything he did on stage while he was alive, and have survived his wretched demise of AIDS in Paris.

Written by Julie Kavanagh, an arts journalist and previously the biographer of choreographer Frederick Ashton, "Nureyev: The Life" has been ten years in the making.

On Nureyev's art, she is exhaustive: his training, his star status at Leningrad's Kirov ballet company well before he defected, his revolutionary borrowings from female line and technique, his contributions to great ballet classics--La Bayadère, Swan Lake--in 1960s London and 1980s Paris.

Kavanagh is also unabashed about Nureyev's behaviour. The behind-the-scenes tantrums, the rudeness, the material and sexual excesses: it's all here. Yet she does not judge him. Should she? Reviewing her book in London's Sunday Times, John Carey berated her for not coming up with "a single new or interesting thought about the physical or metaphysical universe". This seems to be another way of saying that Kavanagh has refused to subject this most amoral of men to moral scrutiny.

Lamenting also, on Kavanagh's behalf, that Nureyev "should prove so unattractive as a human being", Carey quite misses the point. Nureyev was an artist, not a writer, or film-maker, or painter, for sure, but someone who injected passion, grace and drama into this most evanescent and complicated of performing arts. He fought for perfection knowing that it was both rare and achievable (at least in the ballet classics), and he stopped at nothing to reproduce, even improve upon, such perfection every time he went on stage. If this also made him obnoxious, so be it.

This sometimes makes for an eye-watering read. But Kavanagh's narrative is actually about otherworldly striving: how someone grappled with the sometimes insuperable demands of his chosen form, with an existential fear of failure, and with life--banal, clock-ticking and, in Nureyev's case, rather indecently luxurious--which made no sense whatsoever without the art. As late as 1979, Nureyev was still at it, though his powers began waning a decade earlier.

"You don't need to," someone told him. Nureyev replied: "If I stopped dancing for a minute, I'd die." The interlocutor commented later: "The trouble is his legs are turning into stone. He's torturing himself..."

It was Ninette de Valois, the somewhat puritanical founder of the Royal Ballet, who claimed that Nureyev was undone by the "hysterical effect of freedom": the West was his Achilles Heel. His downfall, she argued, came from surrounding himself with "a senseless money-making gang of friends", and a desire "to lick the whole map as fast as he could."

Such claims remain far more piercing than those of a dance-blind literary critic. Coming from a purist who'd understood Nureyev's aristocratic talent as soon as she saw him in the early 1960s, Dame Ninette had a point. Nureyev allowed himself to be loved for more than what he gave on stage, and exploited this adulation in ugly ways. Yet Kavanagh clearly adored him too much in his prime--she saw everything he did from the mid-1960s on--even to begrudge him his antics and later fallibilities.

Without the West, there would have been no Nureyev as the world knows him. Had he stayed in Soviet Russia after the Kirov's 1961 Paris tour, when he defected, he'd have become a nobody. This was a time when Russia silenced and sometimes destroyed its most prominent artists: there, he'd have been ostracised and exiled. (KGB agents were already investigating his suspicious sexual behaviour.) Nureyev craved acceptance and, yes, a great deal more, as does anyone who is supernaturally gifted. That Western audiences fell little short of worship for him is a measure of his genius--and lends his story an aura of myth. That he threw much away in priapic self-indulgence was his personal problem, and our loss.

(James Woodall is a writer based in Berlin.)