Rudolf Nureyev: The Life

by JulieKavanagh (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $3.23

  Born on a train in Stalin's Russia, Rudolf Nureyev was ballet's first pop icon. No other dancer of our time has generated the same excitement - both on and off stage. Nureyev's achievements and conquests became legendary: he rose out of Tatar peasant poverty to become the Kirov's thrilling maverick star; slept with his beloved mentor's wife; defected to the West in l961; sparked Rudimania across the globe; gave his rabid sexuality full reign; established the most rhapsodic partnership in dance history with the middle-aged Margot Fonteyn; reinvented male technique; gatecrashed modern dance; moulded new stars; and staged Russia's unknown ballet masterpieces in the West. Julie Kavanagh's uncompromising and magnificent biography, ten years in the making, is a brilliant tribute to a superstar the world can never forget.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2007

  $3.23

  Ballet's first pop icon, Rudolf Nureyev revolutionised an old art form, bringing a new young audience to opera houses, and sparking Rudimania across the globe. From his birth on a train in Siberia at the height of Stalin's Terrors, Nureyev's life was extraordinary. His career was decided at the age of 8 and nine years later, leaving his Tatar peasant family behind him, he realised his dream of studying at the Kirov's school. The account of Nureyev's Leningrad years has never been more compellingly told, focusing on a teacher of genius who moulded the late starter into a star; the guilty affair with his beloved mentor's wife; and the dancer's homosexual rite of passage, a secret liaison with an East German student who was the catalyst behind Nureyev's escape to the West.The 1961 defection was just the beginning. Nureyev spent the rest of his life breaking barriers, re-inventing male technique; 'crashing the gates' of modern dance; iconoclastically changing ballet's most hallowed classics; and making dance history by partnering England's prima ballerina assoluta Margot Fonteyn - a woman twice his age. Through previously unpublished letters the author traces Nureyev's passionate and deeply troubled relationship with the great Danish dancer Erik Bruhn, and tells the story of his poignant, on-off 'marriage' to a young American film student. Then there were the women; women of all ages were dazzled by the star, a few successfully seduced him, others simply enslaved themselves. Sex was a driving force for Nureyev, but conjoined to the sinner was always the saint, and it was this Byronic duality in himself of 'dirt and deity' that Nureyev used his ballets to explore.This definitive biography, nine years in the making, draws for the first time on private papers, diaries and home-movie footage, and includes reminiscences from scores of colleagues and friends, the closest of whom had hitherto refused to co-operate with any writer. Julie Kavanagh, herself a former dancer, examines with authority Nureyev's legacy as a choreographer and director (an inspirational Diaghilev figure to young proteges like Sylvie Guillem), and her memories of the star's greatest years creates a sense of the exultation and heart-bursting impact of watching Nureyev on stage.