“Nureyev embodied the heroic perfectionism of mid-century Soviet training, which was more insistently magnificent than anything in the West. Younger male dancers quickly copied him, strode the stage like tigers, after he’d shown the way. What we did not know, until the airing in August on PBS of a new BBC documentary and the publication this month of a massive new biography, was how hard-won that technique was, how iconoclastic he’d already been in Russia.”