(Your faithful blogger is off recharging his cultural batteries until Dec. 1. In the meantime, I thought it would be fun to re-examine some of the most interesting books from the four years of “Joe’s View.” First up, a terrific biography from 2008 now available in paperback.)
Biographies tend to fall into one of two categories — trashy cut-and-paste affairs that stress personal scandal over professional accomplishment, or exhaustively footnoted tomes that keep us at a slight remove from important figures.
What makes Julie Kavanagh’s “Nureyev” (Pantheon Books) so special is that the writer gives us a full account of Rudolf Nureyev’s life and career on stage at the same time that she provides an unsparing view of the man’s wildly dramatic — and sometimes sordid — personal life.
Kavanagh trained in ballet before she turned to journalism, so she has a special appreciation of Nureyev’s devotion to dance and the excitement he generated in the West after his defection from the Soviet Union in 1961.
Nureyev had already established himself as one of the great young dancers in Russia when he decided to bolt in Paris, from a state-sanctioned tour.
Because this happened at the height of the Cold War, the decision made headlines all over the world and gave Nureyev instant international celebrity.
What Kavanagh makes clear is that the young man’s decision was a purely aesthetic one — he was desperate to break out of the classical tradition of Russian ballet and to explore what was happening in the world of modern dance and to connect with innovators such as his fellow Russian George Balanchine (whose mixture of classical technique and innovative choreography made New York City Ballet into what was perhaps the greatest dance troupe of that time).
Nureyev’s explosive entry into the West raised the profile of dance and made the Russian a household name, what one chronicler quoted by Kavanagh called “ballet’s first pop star, the long-haired icon for the decade’s spirit of rebellion and sexual freedom.”
The dancer was on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” was photographed by Richard Avedon and hobnobbed with the international jet set.
Behind the scenes, Nureyev became infamous for his explosive temper and often whimsical demands, but Kavanagh presents him as a phenomenal work horse, maintaining a punishing schedule that kept him traveling almost constantly for 30 years.
Even the man’s critics admit he brought new life to the ballet, sparking a personal renaissance in the career of his superstar partner Margot Fonteyn (who seemed to be nearing the end of her distinguished career when Nureyev pushed her to a new plateau).
Kavanagh writes of Fonteyn: “She claimed that it was her belief that the audience was looking at him, not her, that had allowed her to relax, and ‘really dance for the first time.’”
Nureyev and Fonteyn were swept into the 1960s lifestyle revolutions along with pop stars, generating page one news when they attended a San Francisco party that ended with a drug bust.
The book delves into Nureyev’s apparently insatiable sex drive, but in a way that makes it clear that hedonism was one of the dancer’s few personal outlets. Kavanagh separates the many one night (one hour?) stands in the artist’s life from his great love for fellow dancer Erik Bruhn and other attachments that were nearly as intense.
The sadness of any dancer’s limited time on stage was intensified by Nureyev finding out in the early 1980s that he was HIV positive. He spent the subsequent decade filling his schedule with as many jobs as he could find, with sidetracks into theater (a disastrous tour of “The King and I”) and conducting classical music. The way that he kept going right to the bitter end (in 1993) is both poignant and inspiring.
Kavanagh tells Nureyev’s story so dramatically — and tells us so much about the world of dance beyond her subject’s life — that few readers will complain about the 698-page length of her account.
