Nureyev: His Life [Hardcover]

Diane Solway (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1998

Everyone knows the name Rudolf Nureyev, but does anyone know the man behind the myth? Diane Solway does; she spent over four years and conducted more than 200 interviews with his family, his friends and lovers, his colleagues, and even his doctors to research Nureyev: His Life the first book to capture him as he was onstage and off -- a great artist whose talent was matched only by his steely will to succeed.

Here is his professional career: his famed partnership with Margot Fonteyn, his personal transformation of the Royal Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet, his impact on dance companies all over the world, his collaborations with Martha Graham and Paul Taylor, and, behind all his accomplishments, the athletic grace and profound understanding that was his gift of genius. Here, too, is the private Nureyev: his Soviet childhood, his inner demons, the men and women who were willing to devote their lives to him. Solway chronicles his flamboyant, extravagant lifestyle, his celebrity-studded circle of friends -- Jacqueline Onassis, Andy Warhol, and Marlene Dietrich, to name only three -- his stormy love affairs, his homosexual promiscuity, and his death from AIDS in 1993.

Nureyev was his own masterpiece, a man always in the process of reinventing himself. Diane Solway's superb biography is as brilliant and as fascinating as the dazzling dancer at center stage.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

From the moment of his birth aboard a train speeding through Stalinist Russia, until his death of AIDS in 1993, Rudolf Nureyev seemed to travel through life at the velocity of a triple pirouette. His professional accomplishments are stunning. Despite starting his ballet training much later most dancers, Nureyev won a coveted spot at the famous Maryinsky (later the Kirov) ballet school in St. Petersburg and went on to become one of the company's favorite dancers. By the end of his first year in the West--in 1961 he became the first Soviet dancer to defect when he stayed in Paris after the rest of the Kirov returned to the U.S.S.R--he had performed with the major ballet companies in both Europe and the United States, and formed his legendary partnership with British dancer Dame Margot Fonteyn. He reinvigorated contemporary ballet, particularly the importance of male dancers, by energizing his favorite traditional roles with unrestrained sexuality and unparalleled technical virtuosity. His personal life was equally full. He carried on affairs with men and women alike--most notable among these was his intense, decades-long involvement with his professional idol Erik Bruhn and his penchant for sexy young call-boys. He hung out at Studio 54 and crisscrossed the Atlantic with his socialite friends, but he also made time to mentor talented young dancers, including Paris Opera Ballet star Sylvie Guillem.

Biographer Diane Solway, who wrote Dance Against Time, a biography of Joffrey Ballet dancer Edward Sterle, has produced an exhaustively comprehensive report on Nureyev's life. The book's most important accomplishment is that it succeeds in correcting many of the myths that still cloak the story of Nureyev's life--she credibly suggests, for instance, that his defection was not premeditated. The flamboyant dancer, known to wear jeweled jock straps, was responsible for propagating most of the stories that grew up around him. He published a ghostwritten autobiography rife with inaccuracies in the early '60s, and much of the information about his first 20 or so years in the Soviet Union has remained inaccessible until very recently. Solway traveled to Russia to piece together her subject's early life with recently declassified documents and interviews with his friends, family, and even a few detractors. She also drew from another rare book, Rudolf Nureyev: Three Years in the Kirov Theater. The result is a biography that objectively addresses the facts and fictions of an extraordinary life to create a vivid and balanced portrait.

From Library Journal

A journalist who specializes in entertainment, Solway conducted more than 200 interviews to get the goods on one of the world's great dancers.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 625 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co; 1st edition (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688128734
• ISBN-13: 978-0688128739
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,416,665 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gripping, fascinating story of the man who changed ballet., August 2, 1999

By 

Theodore G. Mihran (Schenectady, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nureyev: His Life (Hardcover)

Diane Solway has researched and written an altogether fascinating biography of Rudolf Nureyev, the dancer who changed classical ballet in the 20th century. He was born to a impoverished family in Russia and untimately died on his private island purchased with the millions he made during his dance career--a true-life rags-to-riches story. But it is so much more...

What a career Nureyev had! As a child he danced to provide an escape from the poverty of his youth. Almost forcing his way into Russian ballet schools, he astonished even his detractors by his grace and vitality. Solway recreates the scene of his defection from Russia in gripping detail. From that moment on, Russia's loss--which they tried hard to ignore, not even allowing Nureyev to see his mother until she was on her deathbed--became the West's priceless gain.

In the West this amazing young man turned into a human dynamo, insisting that contracts be written to allow him to dance every night rather than the customary once or twice a month. Solway follows his transatlantic crossings in dizzying detail as he dances one night in New York, the next night in Paris, and the following night at a festival in mid-Europe. He extended his career far beyond the usual span for a male dancer, eventually forming his own companies so that he could continue to perform. He insisted on learning the stylized awkward steps for modern ballet, and his name filled many houses for benefit performances with modern dance groups. He staged and choreographed many classical ballets, acted in motion pictures, and acted the part of the king in "The King and I" on stage. In his declining years, he learned conducting techinques, and led several European orchestras in concert programs.

My son gave me this book for my birthday, and included with it the video "Fonteyn and Nureyev." What an inspired gift! Words can go only so far in describing dance--even the words of the dance critics whom Solway generously quotes. Nureyev's partnership with Fonteyn is the stuff of legends! This unlikely pair--she supposedly near the end of her careet and he just starting his--packed houses and evoked hour-long curtain calls with their emotion-packed virtuoso performances so clearly evident in the video and convincingly described by Solway.

In this day and age we are fascinated by the details of the sex lives of celebrities. Here, too, Solway does not dissappoint, although almost everything she quotes is not from Nureyev's mouth but from companions who may perhaps put their own personal agendas ahead of the literal truth. Nureyev became a icon for the gay community, and some were angry that he did not use his death from AIDS as a beacon for their cause.

Whatever his motivation, here is the gripping life story of a man who was driven to accomplish more in his half-century of frenzied life than any of us could possibly imagine. I am immensely grateful for Nureyev's richly creative life and, as well, for Diane Solways carefully detailed account of it.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars In fairness, a moderate success......., July 7, 2000

By 

[e-mail] (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nureyev: His Life (Hardcover)

With all the good reviews this work is receiving here, I feel that I must point out some of its short-comings. While the information in the book is exhaustive (sometimes to the point of seeming pretentious, as when Solway spends a footnote to provide the married name of an informant after having used her maiden name on the same page--why not just use the established convention of writing first, maiden, and last names?), the obvious research seems often tenuous. Solway's sources are frequently not identified; she writes numerous quotations without noting speakers' or informants' names. Are they Nureyev's words? Did one of his friends or family members say them? Did Solway invent them? How is one to know? How is one to credit the accuracy of a statement at all without the author's establishing of the source's credibility?

There is, of course, a great deal of credited information here, probably most that is not related to the dancer's sexual exploits already in print elsewhere. There is much that I did not know about the "hidden years" in Russia and near the end of the dancer's life. If the information is accurate, these bits are a valuable addition to the permanent body of knowledge about Nureyev (the reason for my 3 star rating).

However, I found the tone of the book uncomfortable. While it is presented as a serious biography, it seemed more akin to a (very weighty) gossip column to me. One other Amazon reviewer noted the presence of lots of stories about Nureyev's lovers (about 2 1/2 pages of speculation on whether Dame Margot Fonteyn was one of them--no definite conclusion). There are also the requisite _enfant terrible_ stories. But mostly missing are the stories of Nureyev's sweetness and generosity. I remember hearing one of his female colleagues say that, if you wanted him to dance for free at a gala you were planning, "all you have to do is cry a little" and he would do anything you wanted. I remember witnessing his evident devastated humility when he accidentally overbalanced a young Royal Ballet ballerina and nearly dropped her from a "bum lift" in a performance of _Fille mal Gardee_. This man could hardly have been the one described by Solway.

Solway does give attention to Nureyev's enormous drive, courage, and indomitability. In that, she is fair to him and to his legend. However, despite the length of the book, there is much missing from it, in my opinion.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the most detailed account of Nureyev's life, January 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Nureyev: His Life (Hardcover)

Compared to all the previous books about Rudolf Nureyev, Diane Solaway's "Nureyev: His Life" stands out as the most detailed, most researched and most complete account of the ballet dancer's life. Those who are interested in Russian culture, Tatar history, ballet, lives of gay celebrities, lifestyles of the rich and famous, etc. will find this book totally fascinating.