Location: Home > Biography > General > Rudolf Nureyev: The Life

Rudolf Nureyev: The Life

Author: Julie Kavanagh
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Category: Book

List Price: ~~Ł9.99~~
Buy New: Ł4.99
You Save: Ł5.00 (50%)

New (20) Used (2) from Ł4.99

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3 reviews
Sales Rank: 3949

Media: Paperback
Pages: 800
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.5

ISBN: 0141029692
EAN: 9780141029696
ASIN: 0141029692

Publication Date: July 3, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours

Also Available In:

•	Hardcover - Rudolf Nureyev: The Life

Similar Items:

•	No Way Home: A Cuban Dancer's Story
•	The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters
•	Letters of Noel Coward (Diaries, Letters and Essays)
•	Darcey Bussell: A Celebration
•	The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

Customer Reviews:

1 out of 5 stars

a flawed account January 28, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

Julie Kavanagh seemingly had access to a number of people important in Nureyev's life who had never before spoken to a biographer. Given this, it's surprising that she seems to have so little regard for her subject either personally or professionally. If you want to read about what went on in the gay bars of New York in the 60s and 70s, then this is the book for you. If you want to read about a dancer and director who had a significant effect on classical dance in the second half of the last century, look elsewhere. Nor will you find an account of the complex and interesting man who was Rudolf Nureyev. And beware: the book is peppered with factual inaccuracies.

5 out of 5 stars

This book is a no-holds-barred triumph January 27, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Rudolf Nureyev, one of very few icons of 20th-century high culture who entirely transcends the art form in which he earned his fame, deserves a biography befitting his status. In Julie Kavanagh's Rudolf Nureyev: The Life he has found one. I knew next to nothing about ballet before picking up this wonderfully hefty volume. I came away from it wanting to rent every available DVD of Nureyev dancing. The author finds a way of walking the layman (or woman) through the complex technical passages, explaining exactly how his greatness grew out of a combination of cussed perfectionism and a charismatic humanity that cannot be worked up at the barre. But the exhaustively researched narrative is about so much more than dance. You turn the pages eager to discover what fresh celebrity he will befriend, which new city he will conquer, which nose he will put out of joint. It is a riveting portrait of an epically complex man - a sensitive monster, a Soviet-reared libertine who accumulated homes, money and lovers with unbridled avidity. His biographer does not flinch in the face of the bestialities, although she is also careful to attribute them to a horrific childhood and the shock to Nureyev's moral system that came with his dramatic escape to the west. The story of his rise is intoxicating. The story of his decline is almost unbearable. The dying fall of the last fifty pages, his powers bled away by arthritis and Aids till he ended up living all but ferally like Prometheus on a lonely Italian rock, counts as the most powerful climax to a biography I've ever read. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

5 out of 5 stars

ALL RUDI, ALL THE TIME November 8, 2007
9 out of 10 found this review helpful

Kavanagh's "Nureyev" is another first-rate dance biography, fully matching her marvelous account of Frederick Ashton. Nureyev was more a great star than a great dancer, yet his impact on male ballet dancers worldwide was transformative. Before Rudi, they were mostly earthbound dullards, either crudely straight or mincingly effeminate; after Rudi, men in ballet became nearly as turned out, pulled up, and extended as ballerinas, with a protean animalism that enabled them to live gay yet seem to love their women onstage.

Unlike her predecessor Richard Buckle, whose dance bios read like transcribed engagement books, Kavanagh offers a nearly perfect balance of details and distillation, compellingly tracing arcs in her subject's life. She pays extra attention to Rudi's first years in the West, richly detailing his two key relationships--with Margot Fonteyn, whom he ignited just as she was about to retire, and with Eric Bruhn, the one dancer he would learn from and the love of his life--plus the recasting of his dancing into a fusion of Russian and Western. Rudi's restless gay life is all there, yet without prurience. Eventually he settled down, for a time, with Wallace Potts, an all-American gay boy whose goodness and devotion shine through very attractively (other acolytes followed). In these pages, Rudi lives just like a coddled star athlete: no matter how beastly his conduct, somebody always satisfies his needs and keeps his ego fully inflated. A fine biography and a great read.