A brilliant dancer and brilliant choreographer, he gained scandalous fame as a Soviet defector and a man with an unconventional view of relationships. “He wanted to become a demigod, and this demigod, first created by his imagination, materialized and began to control his actions and aspirations,” a friend of his youth, Tamara Zakrzhevskaya, will say about Nureyev. The name of Rudolf Nureyev thundered throughout the world. He did an enormous amount for world ballet, glorifying the Russian school of dance throughout the planet. He trained the best foreign soloists. But the master paid a terrible price for his fame: oblivion in his homeland, loneliness, betrayal, a car accident, AIDS... Biographers put many celebrities in his bed: Mick Jagger, Leonard Bernstein, Yves Saint Laurent, Freddie Mercury, and others. The biography of the brilliant dancer after he left this world began to become overgrown with fictions and openly manipulated facts, which the author of this book undertook to expose.