Here's Joan Acocella's review of Julie Kavanagh's new Nureyev biography.
Naturally, I must have it.
I've always enjoyed Joan Acocella. Her introduction to the unexpurgated diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky is a great example of the clarity and beauty of both her writing and thought. She reviews Kavanagh's book with sympathy and insight.
It's interesting to see that Nureyev's reputation is taking another downward turn. Diane Solway's generally admiring biography was a high point; now people are rethinking (again). So it goes. What's unusual about this particular period of revision is that, for the first time in my knowledge, people are attacking him for what has otherwise been considered his strength: his "wild," primal nature, his beyond-rock-star charisma. Acocella writes, "Nureyev, and the 'Nureyev phenomenon,' did not appeal to our higher instincts."
That's a criticism now.
And a timely one, considering that our main problem today is an *explosion* of not-higher-instincts ranging from a war-happy "Bring it on" President to trigger-happy Blackwater mercenaries to leash-and-hood-happy interrogators to the power-drill-enamored folks on the other side. In light of these horrific explosions of id, it's interesting to read Acocella write, "It seems to me...that there was a connection between Nureyev's lack of moral feeling and the general unintelligence of his work--both his performances and his productions." I don't think anyone would or could have made a connection like that before now. The primal, the unthinking, the animalistic, has darker associations than before. What Nureyev was onstage becomes an extension of what he was offstage--a dish-throwing megalomaniac. It's funny; after I read Solway's biography of him, I do remember putting the book down and thinking "It's lucky he became a dancer instead of a dictator." (Because a dictator, in temperament if not title, is the only kind of head of state that he could ever be.)
But what's *really* interesting about all this is its other side. Nureyev the unthinking brute animal is completely contradicted by Nureyev the highly deliberate and refined: "Nureyev found [the ordinary Soviet male dancer] ugly, so he modelled himself on the female dancers. He cultivated a highly pulled-up torso and...stood on a high half-point. Everything about him was stretched, angled, 'placed'--like a ballerina." This finicky configuration is the exact opposite of the wildness that he somehow conveyed *through* it. (Also, it was daring and innovative.)
That, of course, is why we're still writing about him. He wasn't just one thing. As with Jack Kerouac, "it is precisely his contradictions...that make him so compelling after all."
