Rudolf Nureyev

Rudolf Nureyev: The Tatar Who Took the Stage Back

At Le Bourget airport on 16 June 1961, a twenty-three-year-old Kirov dancer was told he was being flown to Moscow for a Kremlin gala. When he balked, he was told his mother was gravely ill. He understood that both were lies and that a prison cell was waiting. With help from French police and a Parisian socialite named Clara Saint, who had a line to the culture minister André Malraux, Rudolf Nureyev broke from his KGB minders and asked for asylum — the first Soviet artist to defect during the Cold War, and an international sensation within hours.

Born on a Moving Train

Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev was born on 17 March 1938 aboard a Trans-Siberian train near Lake Baikal, while his mother Farida travelled to Vladivostok, where his father Khamit, a Red Army political commissar, was stationed. He was the only son among four children of a Tatar Muslim family with roots in Bashkortostan and the Kazan Governorate, and he never treated that as incidental: "I cannot define exactly what it means to me to be a Tatar, and not a Russian, but I feel this difference in myself. Our Tatar blood flows somehow faster and is always ready to boil."

Starting Seven Years Late

He grew up in relative poverty. His mother took him to a performance of *Song of the Cranes*, and the experience settled the rest of his life; local teachers pushed him toward formal training. But the war had wrecked Soviet cultural life, and he could not enter a major school until he was seventeen. He was accepted by the Bolshoi and turned it down for Leningrad, entering the Vaganova Academy in 1955, where the great teacher Alexander Pushkin took a professional interest in him and moved him into his own home. He graduated in 1958 straight into the Kirov as a principal, dancing fifteen roles in three years opposite ballerinas including Natalia Dudinskaya and Ninel Kurgapkina. He was also a permanent problem: he once halted a performance of *Don Quixote* for forty minutes rather than wear the customary trousers instead of tights.

The Week After

Within a week of asking for asylum he had signed with the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas and was dancing *The Sleeping Beauty* with Nina Vyroubova. On a Danish tour he met Erik Bruhn of the Royal Danish Ballet, who became his lover. Soviet authorities set his family and even Pushkin to writing letters urging him home. None of it worked.

Fonteyn

In October 1961 Margot Fonteyn secretly invited him to a London gala for the Royal Academy of Dance, where he danced *Poème Tragique* and the Black Swan pas de deux with Rosella Hightower. Ninette de Valois then invited him to partner Fonteyn the following season, and they first danced together on 21 February 1962. What followed is the most famous partnership in ballet. She was nineteen years his senior; the *Daily Express* wrote that she "shed half her years to match him with contrasting grace and sparkle," and the *Sunday Observer* called him a "Nijinsky reborn." London critics reached for James Dean. The critic Richard Buckle summed up the cultural effect: "What the telly did for art, what Billy Graham did for religion and what the Duke of Bedford did for architecture, Nureyev has done for ballet." They went on dancing together for a quarter of a century; their final performance, *Baroque Pas de Trois*, was on 16 September 1988, when Fonteyn was sixty-nine and Nureyev fifty.

Rewriting the Male Role

He stayed with the Royal Ballet until 1970 and used the platform to redefine the job. In his own stagings of *Swan Lake*, *Giselle* and *La Bayàdère* he expanded the male choreography, raising both the technical and dramatic demands on the man in an art form that had been organised around the ballerina for a century. He also crossed a line nobody in classical ballet crossed, dancing with Martha Graham and other modern choreographers and effectively making modern dance respectable inside the classical world.

Paris

In 1983 he became director of the Paris Opera Ballet, serving until 1989 as director and chief choreographer. He lifted the company sharply and mentored a generation — Sylvie Guillem, Isabelle Guérin, Manuel Legris, Élisabeth Platel. Legris described the experience of working with him: he was "a high-speed train (he was a TGV)," and being near him required you "to surpass oneself." His *Sleeping Beauty* remains in the repertoire and his *Romeo and Juliet* was a popular success.

The Diagnosis

He tested positive for HIV in 1984 and denied for years that anything was wrong. His private life had been conducted with the same refusal to be managed: the volatile affair with Bruhn from 1961 to 1966, and a friendship that outlasted it until Bruhn's death in 1986; a long attachment to Wallace Potts, whose loyalty a friend said he valued above any other; a later relationship with Robert Tracy, who observed afterwards, "He was content not to commit himself to one person. I was happy not to be committed too, it meant I was free."

He declined sharply from the summer of 1991. In March 1992, with advanced AIDS, he travelled to Kazan and appeared as a conductor at the Musa Cälil theatre. On 6 May 1992 he conducted Prokofiev's *Romeo and Juliet* at an American Ballet Theatre benefit at the Metropolitan Opera House. His last public appearance was on 8 October 1992, at the premiere of his *La Bayàdère* at the Palais Garnier, where Jack Lang made him Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He died in Paris on 6 January 1993, aged fifty-four. His diagnosis was not made public until that morning.

Why Rudolf Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Nureyev for a reason unusual in dance: he was not the cleanest technician of his generation, and he knew it. What he had instead was an analytic relationship to his own body, forced on him by starting seven years late. He said so himself: "I approach dancing from a different angle than those who begin dancing at eight or nine. Those who have studied from the beginning never question anything." John Tooley made the same observation — the late start gave him decisive impetus to acquire maximum technical skill, because nothing about it had ever been automatic.

Out of that came the creative act he is genuinely owed credit for: the systematic rebuilding of the male repertoire. His productions of the nineteenth-century classics gave the man real choreography rather than portering duty, and the standard never went back. Pierre Bergé put the scale of him in scoring terms: "It is extraordinary to have 19 points out of 20... However, to have 21 out of 20 is even much rarer. And this was the situation with Nureyev." Unveiling his monument in Kazan in 2018, Tatarstan's president said such people "are born once in a hundred years."

The counter-case is that a large part of the legend is charisma, and charisma is not intellect. He was a tyrant to work with, reckless with himself, and his stagings remain contested among purists. He was also fortunate in his partner: without Fonteyn to dance against, the Nijinsky comparisons might never have stuck at all.

Legacy

Oleg Vinogradov of the Mariinsky delivered the plainest verdict: "What Nureyev did in the West, he could never have done here." His funeral was held in the marble foyer of the Palais Garnier. At Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, music from the last act of *Giselle* played as the coffin was lowered, and his ballet shoes were thrown in with white lilies; his grave is draped with a kilim, a nod to the carpets he collected obsessively. The contents of his Manhattan and Paris apartments later sold at Christie's for $7.94 million and $2.79 million. He left an estimated $33 million to the foundation he had started in 1975, renamed for him in 1994, whose purpose is to keep his choreography performed to standard. He is generally described as the preeminent male ballet dancer of the twentieth century — and, more usefully, as the man who made that a category worth arguing about.