"From his birth on a train in Siberia at the height of Stalin's Terrors, Rudolf Nureyev's life was extraordinary. His career was decided at the age of eight, and nine years later, leaving his Tatar peasant family behind him, he realized his dream of studying at the Kirov's school. This account of Nureyev's Leningrad years focuses on a teacher of genius who moulded the late starter into a star; the guilty affair with his beloved mentor's wife; and the dancer's homosexual rite of passage, a secret liaison with an East German student who was the catalyst behind Nureyev's escape to the West. The 1961 defection was just the beginning. Nureyev spent the rest of his life breaking barriers, reinventing male technique: 'crashing the gates' of modern dance; iconoclastically changing ballet's most hallowed classics; and making dance history by partnering England's prima ballerina assoluta, Margot Fonteyn - a woman twice his age." "This biography, ten years in the making, draws for the first time on private papers, diaries and home-movie footage, and includes reminiscences from colleagues and friends, the closest of whom had hitherto refused to co-operate with any writer."--Jacket.