© Penguin Fig Tree more Ian Palmer reviews

This multi-faceted portrait is of course by Richard Avedon, that poet of the photographer’s lens, and it sits as the cover image for Julie Kavanagh’s new biography Rudolf Nureyev, which more than any other book seeks to explain that slippery mass of conundrums and contradictions that was the greatest star dancer of the 20th Century. Born of peasant birth on a train, he died of an AIDS-related illness, having amassed a great fortune and properties around the world, and the tale which saw this happen – his dramatic defection at Le Bourget airport, his renowned partnership with Britain’s adored yet ageing ballerina, his assumption of the Directorship of the Paris Opera Ballet – has long seen writers attracted to its drama. Nureyev himself (always one to cash in on his most marketable qualities) initially saw its potential and together with his long-standing friend, the critic Nigel Gosling, penned a youthful autobiography, which is perhaps more of a curiosity than an authoritative text. Another notable biography was Diane Solway’s 1998 Nureyev: His Life, but not even this comes as close to authoritative as Julie Kavanagh’s, upon which she has spent a decade of research.

The coup of her book is to have uncovered long-lost details surrounding his early years in Russia, first at the school in Ufa and later at the Vaganova Academy and Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. She is especially fascinating in her discussion of the relationship between Nureyev and his teacher, the legendary Kirov professor, Alexander Pushkin, whose classes Nureyev considered to be “two holy hours”. Kavanagh is the first to have written about his friendship with a young East German dancer named Teja Kremke who not only awoke in Nureyev the homosexual inclinations which dominated his later (rampant) sexuality, but also revealed to him, via illegally filmed recordings of American Ballet Theatre, the glories of Balanchine’s choreography and the superb nobility of style proposed by that prince of dancers, Erik Bruhn. It was to both these men that Nureyev made pilgrimage upon his defection to the West in 1961, and though he saw in Balanchine the Fokine to his Nijinsky, Balanchine was less inclined to work with his fellow St. Petersburg alumnus: after consultation with Lincoln Kirstein he refused to allow Nureyev to join the New York City Ballet, nor even to dance his repertoire. (This decision was later revoked when Balanchine, keen to raise funds for his School of American Ballet Theatre, allowed Nureyev to dance Apollo in a special gala performance).
 

With Bruhn, Nureyev fared a little better, first by taking class with him and developing a taste for the quick, fleet-footed Bournonville style, and later starting a passionate, though ultimately destructive affair. For the very first time, Bruhn’s letters to Nureyev have been published and they reveal the achingly powerful torment, the black-coloured fog, which so afflicted Bruhn’s life and his career. (Bruhn, at Nureyev’s request, destroyed any sent in return.) It seems somehow inevitable that the love of these two emotional forces should have been doomed from the first, yet even though their affair ended in painful separation, Nureyev always considered Bruhn to have been his life’s only love.

It was thus that Nureyev arrived in the West a nomad and it was thus that he would ever be. With the Royal Ballet he is portrayed as a lonely figure, whose fame the other dancers resented, who sought to bend and mangle the company’s classic productions so that he might appear on stage as much as possible, and whose career there eventually seemed only sustained to prolong that of Margot Fonteyn. As Director of the Paris Opera Ballet he is shown in embattled isolation - his dancers and his coaches revolting against him, his choreography despised, his protégés snubbed. Yet against this, Kavanagh also paints the vision of Nureyev the star, of Nureyev the maelstrom whose iconic pop status swept up the world that clamoured to see him perform and whose balletic innovations so influenced present classical interpretation. This Nureyev partied with the stars, held lavish dinners, frequented the bathhouses (and as in her Ashton biography the level of sexual detail is perhaps too much). Fashion, pop, glamour, fame, wealth: it is these elements of his life which have always seduced, but where Kavanagh also succeeds is in attempting to reveal the mysterious figure behind the dance, a figure explained in the early, poverty-stricken years at Ufa in his tiny familial home and later bullied in Petersburg; one which Nureyev tried so hard to keep from the public. Though the subject of the cover photograph tries to retain his superior arrogance, underneath there lies another story.