Word: bashkir
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...peasant mother was en route to visit his father, a soldier assigned to teach Communist doctrine to a Russian artillery unit stationed just then in Vladivostok. But Nureyev does not feel Russian. Both his parents, he proudly points out, are descendants of the "magnificent race of Bashkir warriors," and therefore "I am Tartar, not Russian." The Tartar temperament, he explains, is a "curious mixture of tenderness and brutality...
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...