Portrait of the artist in the interior

Exhibition for the 75th anniversary of Rudolf Nureyev

In the Gallery "House of Nashchokin" a photo exhibition was opened for the 75th anniversary of Rudolf Nureyev

Rudolf Nureyev in the interior of the Parisian apartment on the embankment Voltaire, 1986

*Rudolf Nureyev laid the foundation for the "ballet" emigration. In 1970, one of the best ballerinas of the Kirov Theater Natalya Makarova remained in London. In 1974, during the tour of the Bolshoi Theater in Canada, Mikhail Baryshnikov became a “defeator”. In 1979, during a tour of the Bolshoi Theater in New York, Alexander Godunov asked for political asylum.

The day of June 16, 1961, the most important thing in the fate of the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev, became a sign of a bad point in the history of Russian ballet. Then, together with the troupe of the Kirov Theater, Nureyev was on tour in Paris. When all the artists arrived at Le-Bourg Airport to fly to London to continue the tour, Nureev was taken away from Nureyev and ordered to return to Moscow. And then he made his famous jump over the heads of the assigned gesniks and was free. The first stripes of French newspapers were spatched with headlines: “Ballet Star and Drama at Le-Bourg Airport”, “Leap into freedom” ...*

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The train for Nureyev always remained a metaphor of his life, because he himself was born on the train

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Bad behavior

This run was preceded by many other events. In 1958, he, along with his partner, Ninel Kurgapkina toured the GDR. Ninel wore trousers, which seemed natural to everyone, but the director of the State Committee forces wrote in the report that “the ballerina even came to the Dresden Gallery in an obscene form” (that is, in trousers). Kurgapkin stopped letting go abroad. “I did not know what to do,” she recalled. - I ran around the authorities. Even Rudik dragged behind her in the regional party committee. It didn't help. " Nureyeva shocked this case - he was much more defenseless before the organs.

Rudolf Nureyev, performance in the Paris Palace of Sports, June 10, 1974

Once in Paris, he could not breathe in the air of freedom, he later described, as he was admired by the quarters of Saint-Germain, Saint-Cloud Park, Louvre Halls. He returned to the hotel on the very morning, as on that day, June 16. However, all this was described in the reports of “competent comrades” to Moscow. The Chairman of the KGB Shelepin reported to the Central Committee of the CPSU: “The data came from Paris that Nureev Rudolf Khamitovich was leaving for the city and returned to the hotel late at night. He established close relations with French artists, including homosexuals. Despite the preventive conversations held with him, Nureev did not change his behavior ... ”The correspondence court over the“ defector ”condemned him for“ treason to the motherland ”to seven years of imprisonment with confiscation of property (the court decision was canceled by the Prosecutor General only in 1998, five years after his death).

“All my luggage flew to London,” Nureev recalled. - The suitcases are all the most precious than I owned: a collection of ballet shoes and a little that I bought everywhere where I perform: in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Egypt ... I can never restore this. The wig that I ordered for the role of Albert in Giseli was also lost. This blonde, curly and very romantic wig I joked "Marilyn Monroe." But most of all, I regret my very first purchase in Paris - a beautiful electric train, a symbol of the charm that trains, railways, the smoke of stations have always caused in me, are all -becking promises, distant horizons and mystery that I always felt in them. ” The train for Nureyev always remained a metaphor for his life, because he himself was born on the train that went to the Far East ...

Dear toys

Once in the West, Nureev became one of the most famous and most expensive world ballet celebrities. He was lonely and spent almost all his funds on the purchase of real estate (including the island in the Mediterranean Sea) and works of art. Exhibition "Life in photographs. Paris is New York ”-this is a kind of photocopier from performances of different years, graphic portraits of the artist of James Wayet, as well as unique pictures of the luxurious interiors of the Nureyev’s apartment in Paris, taken after the dancer’s death by the most famous British photographers, the world, concrete and fictional, which he lived.

Gallery Director Natalya Rurikova says that “by what was collected, bought, acquired, we can judge the inner world of the dancer. The collection reveals it not only as a great artist, but also as a very special person. ” Nureev collected oriental fabrics, carpets, bronze, painting, furniture from Karelian birch. Perhaps the tendency to luxury was a reaction to the poverty in which he was in childhood, when there was often no food in the house of his parents and when a group of gifted children from Bashkiria was sent to a ballet school to Leningrad, his father did not have money for a ticket ...

Exhibits of the auction Christie's, 1994

The whole unique collection of Rudolf Nureev was sold after his death at the Christie's auction and is now preserved only in the photographs presented at the exhibition.

Photos: Jean Gaumy, Lord Snowdon, Fritz von Der Schulenburg