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Rudolf Nureyev: The Life
 
 

Rudolf Nureyev: The Life (Hardcover)

by Julie Kavanagh (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 800 pages
  • Publisher: Fig Tree (17 Sep 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1905490151
  • ISBN-13: 978-1905490158
  • Product Dimensions: 23.8 x 15.8 x 5.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 190,372 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #20 in  Books > Biography > Theatre & Performance Art > Ballet
    #25 in  Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Music > Styles > Classical Music > Ballet
    #25 in  Books > Music, Stage & Screen > Performing Arts > Dance > Ballet

Product Description

Product Description

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 Through previously unpublished letters the author traces Nureyev's passionate and deeply troubled relationship with the great Danish dancer Erik Bruhn, and tells the story of his poignant,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.


From the Inside Flap

She went back to the table where the KGB men were sitting drinking cognacs.
'I forgot to say something to Rudolf,' she said smiling at Strizevsky, who
once again, nodded his assent - the girl was clearly infatuated with
Nureyev and reluctant to let him go. Whispering very quickly, she said to
Rudolf, 'You see the two men there at the bar? They're French policemen.
You have to go to them and say that you want to stay." Then we made a big
play of saying goodbye, and I left him, went to the bar and ordered a
coffee.'

Rudolf realized that it was his only chance. 'So I decide right there and
then that I'm not going back. This was goodbye time.' He jumped up from his
chair and rushed towards the bar, but Strizevsky came after him, and asked
him what was wrong. 'Nureyev was silent. And then he said, "I've made up my
mind." He didn't say what that was, but repeated that his decision was
firm, final and he wasn't going to change it.' Then, in what felt to Clara
like one second, Rudolf walked slowly- 'six steps exactly' - directly up to
the two French commisars. 'No jumping, no running, no screaming, no
hysteria, Quietly I say: "I would like to stay in your country."


Inside This Book (Learn More)
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Rudolf Nureyev: The Life
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Rudolf Nureyev: The Life 4.0 out of 5 stars (4)
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars ALL RUDI, ALL THE TIME, 8 Nov 2007
By John Stahle (New York City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Kavanagh's "Nureyev" is another first-rate dance biography, fully matching her marvelous account of Frederick Ashton. Nureyev was more a great star than a great dancer, yet his impact on male ballet dancers worldwide was transformative. Before Rudi, they were mostly earthbound dullards, either crudely straight or mincingly effeminate; after Rudi, men in ballet became nearly as turned out, pulled up, and extended as ballerinas, with a protean animalism that enabled them to live gay yet seem to love their women onstage.

Unlike her predecessor Richard Buckle, whose dance bios read like transcribed engagement books, Kavanagh offers a nearly perfect balance of details and distillation, compellingly tracing arcs in her subject's life. She pays extra attention to Rudi's first years in the West, richly detailing his two key relationships--with Margot Fonteyn, whom he ignited just as she was about to retire, and with Eric Bruhn, the one dancer he would learn from and the love of his life--plus the recasting of his dancing into a fusion of Russian and Western. Rudi's restless gay life is all there, yet without prurience. Eventually he settled down, for a time, with Wallace Potts, an all-American gay boy whose goodness and devotion shine through very attractively (other acolytes followed). In these pages, Rudi lives just like a coddled star athlete: no matter how beastly his conduct, somebody always satisfies his needs and keeps his ego fully inflated. A fine biography and a great read.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars a flawed account, 28 Jan 2008
Julie Kavanagh seemingly had access to a number of people important in Nureyev's life who had never before spoken to a biographer. Given this, it's surprising that she seems to have so little regard for her subject either personally or professionally. If you want to read about what went on in the gay bars of New York in the 60s and 70s, then this is the book for you. If you want to read about a dancer and director who had a significant effect on classical dance in the second half of the last century, look elsewhere. Nor will you find an account of the complex and interesting man who was Rudolf Nureyev. And beware: the book is peppered with factual inaccuracies.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a no-holds-barred triumph, 27 Jan 2008
Rudolf Nureyev, one of very few icons of 20th-century high culture who entirely transcends the art form in which he earned his fame, deserves a biography befitting his status. In Julie Kavanagh's Rudolf Nureyev: The Life he has found one. I knew next to nothing about ballet before picking up this wonderfully hefty volume. I came away from it wanting to rent every available DVD of Nureyev dancing. The author finds a way of walking the layman (or woman) through the complex technical passages, explaining exactly how his greatness grew out of a combination of cussed perfectionism and a charismatic humanity that cannot be worked up at the barre. But the exhaustively researched narrative is about so much more than dance. You turn the pages eager to discover what fresh celebrity he will befriend, which new city he will conquer, which nose he will put out of joint. It is a riveting portrait of an epically complex man - a sensitive monster, a Soviet-reared libertine who accumulated homes, money and lovers with unbridled avidity. His biographer does not flinch in the face of the bestialities, although she is also careful to attribute them to a horrific childhood and the shock to Nureyev's moral system that came with his dramatic escape to the west. The story of his rise is intoxicating. The story of his decline is almost unbearable. The dying fall of the last fifty pages, his powers bled away by arthritis and Aids till he ended up living all but ferally like Prometheus on a lonely Italian rock, counts as the most powerful climax to a biography I've ever read. I cannot recommend it highly enough.





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5.0 out of 5 stars Inspirational, sad
I did not expect to be so move by Nureyev's life - the narrative has a pattern which is something like "wanting and achieving goals despite all the odds and then being rejected"... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Jacques Dutronc

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