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In the artistic relationship of Nureyev and Fonteyn, he is the dominant force, amending, criticizing, suggesting. It comes naturally to him, just as his gifts for choreography do. His restaging of the Kirov's full-length Raymonda was a pretty, sugar-spun spectacle and, along with Nureyev's offstage antics, the roaring sensation of last year's Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy. Last October he rechoreographed the Petipa-Ivanov version of Swan Lake in Vienna. In his strong belief that "the Amazonian takeover" of the ballet has resulted in an appalling denigration of the male, Nureyev scissored Tchaikovsky's music, jiggered dances, and virtually reworked every number until the dreamy fairytale prince emerged as a rip-snorting hero who dominated both the dance and drama.
The Tartar. Nureyev was in fact born in motion—on a train rattling across the icy stretches of Siberia. It was 1938, and his peasant mother was en route to visit his father, a soldier assigned to teach Communist doctrine to a Russian artillery unit stationed just then in Vladivostok. But Nureyev does not feel Russian. Both his parents, he proudly points out, are descendants of the "magnificent race of Bashkir warriors," and therefore "I am Tartar, not Russian." The Tartar temperament, he explains, is a "curious mixture of tenderness and brutality."
With his father away on war duty, his mother moved in with her brother-in-law and another family in the town of Ufa on the dark steppes west of the Ural Mountains. Nureyev lived in one room with nine other people, including his three sisters. "My prevailing memory," he says, "is one of hunger—consistent, gnawing hunger." To get food, mostly goat cheese and potatoes, his mother peddled all of his father's civilian clothes piece by piece—belts, suspenders, boots. "Daddy's grey suit was really quite tender," the children would say. Since he had no shoes, his mother had to carry him to school on her back, and since he had no overcoat, he had to wear his sister's hand-me-down cape. Understandably, he became the class oddball, and a loner from the beginning.
When he was seven, one of the teachers taught him a few Bashkir folk dances, and he was soon touring the local hospitals with the school troupe. One night the Ufa Opera Ballet imported a name ballerina and, though he did not have the price of a ticket, Nureyev went by the theater determined somehow to get in. As fate would have it, the crush of the crowd was so great that the doors of the theater collapsed and in he went. It was the first ballet he had ever seen. "Watching the dancers that night," he recalls, "I had the absolute certitude that I had been born to dance."
Meanwhile, his teachers were besieging his parents with letters complaining about his incorrigible behavior at school: "He jumps like a frog and that's about all he knows; he even dances on the staircase landings." His father ordered him to give up dancing. He acquiesced, but invented excuses to slip away at night to neighboring villages to perform with a touring folk-dance group. The performances were held by the light of kerosene lamps on an improvised stage suspended between two trucks.