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.

And there are interviews with friends and colleagues dating back to his initial folk dance forays in Ufa. Some of these people will be familiar to ballet aficionados, either because they are Kirov celebrities or simply becausetheyareintimateswhohave by now spoken either at a Nureyev tribute or to one of his many biographers. This doesn’t lessen the pleasure of seeing them speak in their homes about their experiences with Nureyev 50 years ago.

This being modern-day television, there is also great attention paid to Nureyev’s bisexual love life, namely his relationship with Menia Martinez, a Cuban girl who was studying at the Vaganova; Xenia Jurgenson, who was the wife of his Vaganova teacher and mentor, AlexanderPushkin, andTejaKremke, an East German student at Vaganova who made extensive video recordings of Nureyev onstage and off during his tenure at the Kirov. Kremke’s footage is fascinating, augmenting reprises of the by-now familiar footage of his 1958 “Le Corsaire” pas de deux with Alla Sizova and excerpts from a 1959 performance of “Laurencia” with Ninel Kurgapkina.

Nureyev in Russia is a more pleasant character than the superstar we encounter in chronicles of his Western career, where his greed, megalomania, and propensity to slapping, biting, and every other variety of tyrannical and temperamental display can become grating upon frequent recounting. In Russia, he was still in the process of finding himself, and, although volatile, narcissistic, and blinkered, the Russian Nureyev discloses a vulnerability that became considerably obscured by his adult behavior. (The interview footage with the mature Nureyev shown here depicts him as articulate, charming, and mellow, but he was frequently poisonous.)

Because he came so late to ballet training, Nureyev was obsessive about trying to develop a respectable academic technique; he improved rapidly and dramatically, if one can judge from the footage presented between 1958, when he joined the Kirov, and his last performances with the company in 1961.

Even the best of his Russian performances, however, are uneven. On the evidence of this footage, as well as what some of his former colleagues have recalled, there was always something not quite finished, not quite organic or completely personalized, in his execution of textbook academic steps. The truest picture of his dance qualities presented in “Nureyev: The Russian Years” is therefore not in the classical variations but in a 1963 television appearance that shows him performing an Armenian folk-dance variation from the Soviet ballet “Gayane,” as well as in Kremke’s footage of a towel-clad Nureyev launching an improvised romp on the grass, in which he seems to be performing a satirical take on the ballerina’s Act I entrance in “Sleeping Beauty.” The documentary often uses later footage of Nureyev’s work to visually amplify incidents and moods described during his Russian years.

More attention to detail, however, would have made this documentary more edifying and even more entertaining. The narrator blithely mispronounces the names of Russian cities and dancers. Ms. Sizova is never identified in the “Corsaire” footage, although she is just as extraordinary as Nureyev. In interviews, Ms. Kurgapkina is identified as a “Principal Dancer” of the Kirov, while another principal, Sergei Vikulov, is identified simply as “Dancer.” In present-day Vaganov Academy footage, we see a man teaching a class of boys; it would have been nice to know that he is former Kirovstar Boris Bregvadze, who Nureyev to some degree supplanted on the Kirov roster.

And at times, the documentary’s decision to withhold the full picture deprives the viewer of appreciation and understanding of what appears onscreen. On the day of Nureyev’s defection from Paris, from which he was to leave with the Kirov for its London debut, apparatchiks informed him he was instead to go back to Russia. He knew immediately that if he went back, he would never be able to leave Russia again; his reckless defiance of Soviet norms and regulations had finally caught up with him. Upon its arrival in London later that day, the membersoftheKirovcompanylearned that Nureyev had defected as they were making their way across the English Channel. The company was treated by British impresario Victor Hochhauser to a party to celebrate Kirov ballerina Alla Osipenko’s 29th birthday. Ms. Osipenko is shown cutting her cake surrounded by Inna Zubkovskaya, Irina Kolpakova, and Olga Moiseyeva, the four among the most glittering Kirov stars of the century. Their glassy, dutiful smiles do not make us privy to what they were thinking about what had just happened to Nureyev, to them, to the company, or to Russia itself. But everyone connected with the Kirov, from the dancers who subsequently denounced him, to those who remained loyal, was affected by the defection.

The documentary is honest about the fact that the defection was a catastrophe for his friends, who were subject to various punitive retaliations by the Soviet state. Kremke had frequently urged Nureyev to defect and, after the deed was done, sent him an approving letter that was intercepted by the authorities. As a result, Kremke was embargoed in East Germany most of his adult life, and died under what the documentary refers to as “mysterious circumstances” at age 37. What the documentary might have added is that Nureyev’s flight was equally catastrophic for the Kirov, which then became subject to much more stringent Communist Party interference. Many of the dancers ran into the arms of the party in the interests of career-advancement, whereas earlier the party and the Kremlin had not exerted quite as direct and intrusive a role. For Nureyev, the defection was of course a fantastic liberation but also a fatal breach with his culture, country, and ballet company from which, the documentary also makes clear, he never completely recovered.