From Russia With Love

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

At the top of the PBS documentary “Nureyev: The Russian Years,” which airs on Wednesday, narrator Kenneth Cranham describes Rudolf Nureyev as “the outstanding male dancer of his generation.” It would be more accurate to say that he was perhaps the most influential male dancer of his generation, but he was without a doubt the most highly publicized. This documentary is the latest investigation of a performer who has never been long out of the limelight, even in the 15 years since he died of AIDS. But there is enough new material included here that the wheel is not simply being reinvented; “Nureyev: The Russian Years” adds to the annals of Nureyev scholarship as well as creating a picture of the vanished ballet culture of the Soviet Union.

Expense has not been spared. The documentary contains video explorations of Nureyev’s home city of Ufa in the Central Asian republic of Bashkir, where he began folk dancing classes as a child; the Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg, where he began serious ballet training at the very late age of 17, and the city’s gorgeous old Mariinsky Theatre, where Nureyev danced with the Kirov Ballet for three seasons before defecting to Paris in 1961, at the age of 23.

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