Book Review: Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh

This is a Thoroughly Exhaustive Biography of the One of the World’s Greatest Dancers

Encompassing the life and career of the 20th century’s premier ballet dancer, Rudolf Nureyev, is a daunting challenge. He studied behind the Iron Curtain in his formative years. He bravely defected from the Soviet dictatorship 60 years ago. He triumphed over death threats and oppression by Communists—and their Western spies and sympathizers—as well as poverty, disease and persecution for being gay and danced in the grandest theaters in the greatest ballets. Nureyev mastered the dance, enthralling audiences from Paris, Vienna and Chicago to New York, London and Russia. Rudolf Nureyev earned a reputation as a wild, feral dancer—magnetic, brilliant and enthusiastic—and Julie Kavanagh captures this in her exhaustive Nureyev: The Life.

The 2007 biography, which I read in an electronic version—the publisher, Pantheon Books, owned by Random House, left the version unmolested, as far as I know—is thorough, if not without flaws. Fine arts intellectuals, including scholars, are Nureyev: The Life…