Premier danseur: ballet's greatest superstar, Rudolf Nureyev, defined his era - includes excerpt from Diane Solway's 'Nureyev: His Life'

Thirty-seven years ago a young member of Leningrad's touring Kirov Ballet announced to French authorities at Paris's Le Bourget airport that he wished to remain in their country. Rudolf Nureyev was the first artistic defector from the Soviet Union to make international headlines, and there was barely a time in the succeeding three decades, until his death from AIDS complications in January 1993 at age 54, when he did not occupy the public spotlight. On more than one occasion, he even turned on the switch.

Nureyev made ballet dancing a man's game again; not since Vaslav Nijinsky, in the decade before World War I, had classical dance generated a superstar. Nureyev lacked the ideal proportions for ballet, and he revised traditional ballets at whim to boost his own role. He was an egomaniac, a lifelong rebel given to violent mood shifts, temper tantrums, and caustic anti-Semitic remarks, yet he was unbelievably loyal to a few friends. He worshiped money, yet he often donated his services to good causes like the Martha Graham dance company.

He was an all-around pain in the gluteus maximus, yet he was an electrifying presence with a phenomenal jump and an expressive attack that won him international adulation. He extended the career of the most beloved ballerina of her time -- Margot Fonteyn -- by more than a decade, although she was old enough to be his mother. And during his tenure as dance director of the Paris Opera Ballet, he transformed the troupe into what many veterans in the field acknowledge is the finest ballet company in the world today.

The literature on Nureyev is not scanty. One must ignore his own "as told to" autobiography with its self-mythologizing and, for fear of endangering his former colleagues, its reticence about life in the Soviet Union. Although three books on Nureyev in English have been published in recent years, two have never made it over the Atlantic from the United Kingdom. They will all have to yield to Diane Solway's Nureyev: His Life (William Morrow, $27.50), which is incredibly lengthy, incredibly well-documented, and incredibly candid about the dancer's personal and professional life.

Nureyev's arrival in the West and the dance boom seem to have coincided. With his gloriously high Tatar cheekbones, his penchant for the latest '60s mod outfits, and his thirst for all kinds of experiences, he came to represent ballet for an entire generation that kept looking for his successor until Mikhail Baryshnikov (a very different kind of dancer) came along. Yet as Solway recounts his career in dizzying detail, Nureyev emerges in a rounded portrait that has eluded previous biographers. He danced with virtually every company. He took many lovers, yet he felt spiritually close to only one, the extra-ordinary Danish danseur noble, Erik Bruhn, whose elegant attack and classical proportions complemented Nureyev's feral demeanor. Bruhn had class; Nureyev had passion.

Solway has profited from the break-up of the Soviet Union to avail herself of previously restricted files. They add up to a grim picture of life in the Russian ballet world, where homosexuality among dancers simply didn't officially exist. And she doesn't spare us the details of Nureyev's final years -- the endless "and friends" tours that revealed the dancer's waning powers, the disastrous attempt to emulate Yul Brynner in The King and I, the physical debilitation of AIDS and the attempt to conceal it from the world, the race against the clock to stage La Bayadere for the Paris Opera Ballet, the numerous, unreciprocated crushes on younger men.

Nearly six years after his death, the Nureyev image is in the process of disintegration. Few of the ballets an he created or that were choreographed for him survive. You can see him abundantly on video (earlier this year Nonesuch released his Nijinsky tribute with the Joffrey Ballet), but the mists of time are already enveloping the legend. Ballet is a more serious, more punctilious art form today, as the choreographer's word and respect for tradition have become law. It is, however, rarely as much fun.

An excerpt from Nureyev: His Life

At 23, Rudolf Nureyev had already established himself as an explosively talented and temperamental artist. Sheer willpower had propelled him through every transition of his life. As a teenager in Russia's Ural Mountains, he learned to dance, over his father's objections. As a rising star in Leningrad's Kirov Ballet, he refused to show a seemly loyalty to the Communist Party. Although the Kirov saw him as a security risk, he was added at the last minute to its historic first tour to Paris in 1961. There he caused a sensation onstage and, soon after, became the first Soviet artist ever to defect to the West.

Shortly after his defection, Nureyev traveled to Copenhagen to perform and train with the Danish Royal Ballet, largely because he wanted to meet and study the technique of ballet star Erik Bruhn. The young Russian could not have known how his arrival would recharge the older dancer. At 32, Bruhn was at the pinnnacle of his career, yet he felt he was at a dead end. Brooding and self-critical, the handsome Dane experienced stardom as an isolating and lonely affair. In dance and, soon, in love, Nureyev's presence offered Bruhn a stimulus he had despaired of ever finding.