When you come right down to it, a biography that reads like a long, juicy, semi-scandalous, semi-moralizing People magazine article is a perfect first take on the life of Rudolf Nureyev, one suited to the era in which the dance star died, of AIDS, in 1993 at the age of 54. But from the perspective of history - and Nureyev is one of the few dancers (and few stars of any medium) almost certain to be of interest to history - it will take a more scholarly and dispassionate viewpoint to give the more substantial treatment this enormously talented and influential man deserves.
Nureyev's brief life spanned four decades of celebrity, and in each, as Otis Stuart's " Perpetual Motion" makes clear, he had a different image, one that matched the prevailing political and social atmosphere, the zeitgeist. It seems almost unbelievable that Nureyev was the first defector, but he was just that: Before he bolted from the clutches of the KGB in 1961, no Soviet artist had made this kind of run for freedom, with its implied criticism of the USSR.
Later in the swinging 1960s, with his famous partner, British ballerina Margot Fonteyn, Nureyev became a hip superstar busted notoriously at a pot party in San Francisco. In the 1970s, " Rudi" starred in a Ken Russell film (" Valentino" ) and frequented gay bars, indulging in practices, lovingly described by Stuart, suggestive of orgies.
In the 1980s, " Rudolf" became a businessman and successful corporate manager (of the renownedly difficult, politically Byzantine Paris Opera Ballet), amassing a fortune estimated between $50 million and $80 million. He also entered on a long struggle to survive AIDS, whose symptoms he first experienced in 1983, hiding this from himself, for a time, as well as the world. In the 1990s, before the disease ended his life, he returned to post-Cold War Russia, dancing again.
Yet Nureyev was an artist greater than the sum of his many newsworthy incarnations. While Stuart recounts his anecdotes, culled from scores of interviews with Nureyev associates, with humor and relish, he almost never speaks in his own voice except to thrill over a gay-related factoid.
In the end, Stuart fails to subordinate fact-finding to the interpretative, thoughtful analysis demanded by a portrait of such a complex figure, and seems to conclude that Nureyev's war record as a gay icon (and secondarily a pop icon) makes his artistic career interesting: " Nureyev," he decides, " was among the first of [a] new breed, a star who stayed famous for being famous." This is actually a complete reversal of the truth. Nureyev's exceptional artistic genius forms the illustrious foundation to which his mere celebrity is incidental. Finally " Perpetual Motion" leaves us wanting some understanding, not of the Nureyev phenomenon, but of the Nureyev achievement.
Anita Finkel is editor and publisher of the New Dance Review and Collier's Encyclopedia, She has a Ph.D. in Medieval and Renaissance English literature. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Connoisseur, Geo, Dance Magazine and many other magazines, journals and anthologies.
"Perpetual Motion: The Public and Private Lives of Rudolf Nureyev," by Otis Stuart. Illustrated. 317 pages. New York: Simon & Schuster. $24