Wild Thing.('Nureyev: The Life')(Book review)

If ever there was an artist who invited the retributive sort of biography that is in fashion these days, it is Rudolf Nureyev. Nureyev, as a friend of his put it, did things that are "absolutely out of our habits." He dropped ballerinas on the floor, threw dinner plates at people, and blew his nose on hotel towels. He repaid his greatest benefactor by going to bed with the man's wife. But Julie Kavanagh, in her "Nureyev: The Life" (Pantheon; $37.50), doesn't go for the bait. Nureyev may have behaved badly, she says, but he was bigger than that.

Nureyev was born in 1938, and, like most Soviet citizens who didn't starve to death in the years that followed, he almost did. He grew up in Ufa, a small town in the republic of Bashkiria. The family was Tatar, and poor--the father was a security guard in a factory. But Ufa had an opera house, and, one New Year's Eve, Nureyev's mother bought a single ticket to the ballet and sneaked her whole family in, including the seven-year-old Rudolf. He later said that it was that night, as he watched "The Song of the Cranes," a sort of Bashkirian "Swan Lake," that he received the call. In dance biographies, one hears suspiciously often of these thunderclaps, but I think they should be credited if they are soon followed by intense study. Within a year, Rudolf was enrolled in a ballet class, and from then on he thought of little else. His older sister Rosa, who was also studying dance, sometimes brought home costumes for him to look at. "I would spread them out on the bed and gaze at them," he later recalled. "I would fondle them for hours, smooth them and smell them. . . . I was like a dope addict." But, because he was stuck in Bashkiria, it was not until he was almost past his teens that he found his way to a serious professional school, the Kirov Ballet's Vaganova Academy, in Leningrad.

Kavanagh is especially good on Nu-reyev's early years, when his arrogance was most explainable and touching. On his first day at the Vaganova school, she writes, "the pale seventeen-year-old, wearing a thin sweater tightly cinched with a large belt to emphasize his slim waist, and carrying his belongings in a bag no bigger than a briefcase, was shown his living quarters--a large, light dormitory shared with nineteen other students whom Rudolf decided to ignore." He soon began studying with Alexander Pushkin, a renowned men's teacher and a sort of saint of Russian ballet. Pushkin's specialty was turning rangy teen-age boys into classical artists. As his students reported, the combinations that he assigned felt natural to the body, at the same time that they seemed to take you to the very center of classicism: harmony, "sweet reason." Pushkin was also extremely kind and patient; you couldn't provoke him. Finally, he cultivated individuality. If he asked for one step and you did another, you were not scolded. In all the world, it would have been hard to find a better teacher for the young Nureyev, who was way behind in his training, and sensitive about that--indeed, sensitive about everything. He later described his daily class with Pushkin as "two holy hours." In his other hours, he broke every rule in the school and swore at every teacher and coach, but Pushkin came to his rescue. When he had tantrums at rehearsals, Pushkin would be called in. "Rudik," he would say, "one can't behave like this. Try some pirouettes . . . that will calm you down."

In 1958, at the age of twenty, Nureyev was asked to join the Kirov. The following year, he tore a ligament in his leg and needed special care, so Pushkin invited him to move in with him and his wife, Xenia, a pretty and strong-willed forty-two-year-old dancer, who had just retired. Nureyev was soon in bed with Xenia. This painful story was whispered about for years. (It was presented as fact in Diane Solway's 1998 biography, "Nureyev.") Kavanagh defends Nureyev. Xenia, she says, seduced him, and she was not a person one said no to. Nureyev was frightened and ashamed but also curious. So it happened, and Xenia fell in love. She darned his socks and cooked his dinners. She attended his classes and rehearsals, and she shooed away any of his friends who might compete for his time. Did Pushkin realize what was going on? No one knows, Kavanagh says, but the couple's apartment consisted of only one room. I doubt that he was fooled. His attentions to ...