Nureyev: His Life by Diane Solway Weidenfeld & Nicolson 625pp, £20 in UK
references to Maria Callas crop up throughout this biography, and with good reason. Both were capricious, quickly developed a reputation for being difficult divas - "I'd rather deal with ten Callases than one Nureyev," said a Covent Garden official in 1962 - and disappeared from the stage at a relatively early age. More importantly, both Nureyev and Callas revitalised an art form which prior to their emergence seemed dangerously moribund; their arrival injected new vitality and sensuality into ballet and opera respectively, and thanks to smart manipulation of mass media, brought new audiences into the theatre.
Although they shared the same agent - a man notorious for ensuring his clients received high fees - the two performers seem to have met only once, when Aristotle Onassis invited Nureyev to join himself and Callas at their tables in Maxim's of Paris. After his defection to Russia, rather like Callas's break with La Scala in 1959, the dancer became an avid socialite, as though determined to make up for the deprivations of his youth. Nureyev's early years were wretched, spent with his fatherless family in a single room during the second World War. Not until he defected at the age of twenty-three did he ever spend a night in a room alone. When Nureyev pere returned home, relations with his son were persistently troubled, as Rudolf was determined to dance, despite parental hostility and the limitations of living in a provincial city far removed from Leningrad and Moscow.
Dancing was an instinctive, feral activity for Nureyev, and from the start observers commented on a wild primitivism in his performance, a quality which had not been seen since Nijinsky almost half a century earlier. He brought attention back to the male dancer, powerfully demonstrating that his role was not just to be a support for the prima ballerina. In his youth he lacked discipline but a powerful determination to succeed meant he taught himself to watch and learn from others. It was only in his last years that arrogance seems to have taken over and he refused to take advice. But in his prime, what marked Nureyev apart was the combination of an extraordinary talent with a ferocious, single-minded focus on his art.
Instinct too explains his defection in June 1961. The consensus on this event used to be that Nureyev had planned to stay in Paris when the other members of the Kirov company flew to London. In fact, it transpires he was to be punished for disciplinary lapses by being sent back to Moscow with the implicit threat that he would never be allowed out of Soviet Russia again. Nureyev panicked, the French friends who had come to see him off at the airport rallied round, and he was whisked away from his minders before they could bundle him on to a plane. It was an unpremeditated act with enormous consequences, since it occurred at the height of the Cold War.
Although he only died in January 1993 and there are plenty of his performances recorded on film, already Nureyev seems as distant a figure as Nijinsky or Pavlova. All performing arts are elusive, and no matter how well described, their essence can never be caught. Rudolf Nureyev always had such a physical, sexual presence on stage that no words could ever hope to recreate him. So this biography fails despite itself when Diane Solway ventures to talk about the man as a dancer.
However, she does capture Nureyev's character very well, and an intensely unpleasant one it seems to have been. He was greedy, selfish and grabbing, with little thought for anyone else. His temperament may be explained in part by youthful deprivation, but this does not excuse a lot of nasty behaviour in later life. On stage, Nureyev deserved applause; off it, he should have been roundly booed.