A POINT comes in the afterlife of an artist when, for the time being, biography has pretty much done its work. The essential history is known; the ambience is broadly understood; the relationship between the life and the work has yielded its chief mysteries. Barring bombshells any future surprises are apt to be minor: not revelations, just minutiae.
To judge by the title, the 90-minute documentary “Nureyev: The Russian Years,” written and produced by the British filmmaker John Bridcut, would promise to fall squarely into the category of marginalia. After all, when Rudolf Nureyev, the young sensation of the Kirov Ballet, bolted from the clutches of the K.G.B. to asylum in Paris, he was all of 23. That was in 1961, and his glory years lay before him.
Even so, the prelude behind the Iron Curtain proves a mesmerizing subject. Between previously unknown film clips of the young Nureyev in full flight and fresh interviews with associates whose lives he touched or inadvertently destroyed, the material is of novelistic richness.
A BBC production in association with WNET in New York, “Nureyev: The Russian Years” receives its American premiere on the PBS series “Great Performances” on Wednesday. (Check local listings.) The BBC broadcast, with six extra minutes, follows on Sept. 29.
Of special interest is the shadowy Teja Kremke (pronounced TAY-ah KREM-keh), an East German ballet student who met the young Nureyev in Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then), was smitten and urged him to seek his fortune in the West.
Credit for unearthing the connection to Mr. Kremke belongs to the British writer Julie Kavanagh, who began research for a new biography of Nureyev in 1997. Her book “Nureyev: The Life” is due from Pantheon on Oct. 2. Television rights to the project were sold to the BBC some time ago, and Ms. Kavanagh is listed as a consultant on Mr. Bridcut’s film.
Glamour, rough sex, intrigue, scandal: Nureyev had it all, and much that was not a matter of public record was common knowledge. Even so, he took many secrets to the grave when he died of complications from AIDS in 1993. Ms. Kavanagh has unearthed many of them, notably about his reckless, flamboyantly indiscreet love life.
But pillow talk was by no means her only research interest. With dogged persistence she eventually obtained access to Nureyev’s K.G.B. file, the court documents of his trial (in absentia) for treason and a cache of self-abasing love letters from Nureyev’s idol, Erik Bruhn, the Danish danseur noble. The surprise, in the case of the letters, was that Nureyev had not burned them. But the surprise about Mr. Kremke was that such a person existed at all. more…
