Word: bashkir
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...born hungry. His parents were Tartar peasants from Ufa, in Bashkir near the Ural Mountains. "Our Tartar blood runs faster," he wrote later, "always ready to boil." Especially during World War II his parents and three sisters and he faced extreme privation, living in one room with two other families. From age six, when he saw his first dance performance, he was obsessed by movement. His father hoped his bright son would become a doctor or an engineer...
...newest fad is for even more atomization: not just republics but pieces of republics and even single cities are proclaiming themselves sovereign. Within the Russian federation, the Chuvash, Buryat, Kalmyk, Tatar, Mari, Komi, Yakut, Karelian and Bashkir autonomous republics, each the homeland of a distinct ethnic group, have all called for some form of separatism. Districts like the Irkutsk region of Siberia have adopted declarations of "equality and independence," and the city of Nizhni-Novgorod has petitioned the federation for special status...
...dancer's fans will be bowled over by the 29 color and 146 black-and-white pictures, most of them previously unpublished, that illustrate this big, handsome book. Dance Critic Clive Barnes' chronicle charts the dancer's career back to its beginnings in the remote Bashkir Republic of the U.S.S.R., where, as a teenager, Rudi jumped and twirled in local folk dances. Battling the disapproval of his Tatar father, a Communist commissar, the youth made his way into Leningrad's celebrated Kirov company. Following his defection in Paris in 1961, he danced non-stop in virtually...
...many ways Nureyev is more alone than he was on first coming to the West. He speaks wistfully of the beautiful rivers of Ufa, in Bashkir, where he spent his childhood. It is touching to hear him refer involuntarily to the Leningrad Kirov Ballet as "we." Nearing his peak, today Nureyev dances with the familiar bravado, but also a consistency he did not have ten years ago. Finally willing to jettison his princely plumage, he uncovered a gift for simplicity that makes it seem plausible he will some day be as relaxed dancing with his shoes...
When he was seven, one of the teachers taught him a few Bashkir folk dances, and he was soon touring the local hospitals with the school troupe. One night the Ufa Opera Ballet imported a name ballerina and, though he did not have the price of a ticket, Nureyev went by the theater determined somehow to get in. As fate would have it, the crush of the crowd was so great that the doors of the theater collapsed and in he went. It was the first ballet he had ever seen. "Watching the dancers that night," he recalls...