Nureyev's arrival in the West and the dance boom seem to have coincided. They will all have to yield to Diane Solway's Nureyev: His Life (William Morrow, $27.50), which is incredibly lengthy, incredibly well-documented, and incredibly candid about the dancer's personal and professional life.
Although three books on Nureyev in English have been published in recent years, two have never made it over the Atlantic from the United Kingdom. One must ignore his own "as told to" autobiography with its self-mythologizing and, for fear of endangering his former colleagues, its reticence about life in the Soviet Union. And during his tenure as dance director of the Paris Opera Ballet, he transformed the troupe into what many veterans in the field acknowledge is the finest ballet company in the world today. He extended the career of the most beloved ballerina of her time - Margot Fonteyn - by more than a decade, although she was old enough to be his mother. He was an all-around pain in the gluteus maximus, yet he was an electrifying presence with a phenomenal jump and an expressive attack that won him international adulation. He worshiped money, yet he often donated his services to good causes like the Martha Graham dance company. He was an egomaniac, a lifelong rebel given to violent mood shifts, temper tantrums, and caustic anti-Semitic remarks, yet he was unbelievably loyal to a few friends. Nureyev lacked the ideal proportions for ballet, and he revised traditional ballets at whim to boost his own role. Nureyev made ballet dancing a man's game again not since Vaslav Nijinsky, in the decade before World War I, had classical dance generated a superstar. On more than one occasion, he even turned on the switch. Rudolf Nureyev was the first artistic defector from the Soviet Union to make international headlines, and there was barely a time in the succeeding three decades, until his death from AIDS complications in January 1993 at age 54, when he did not occupy the public spotlight.
Thirty-seven years ago a young member of Leningrad's touring Kirov Ballet announced to French authorities at Paris's Le Bourget airport that he wished to remain in their country.
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