Red Star White Nights The Life and Death of Yuri Soloviev

Red Star, White Nights: The Life and Death of Yuri Soloviev is a biography of one of history's greatest dancers, who ended his own life in a snow-bound Russian dacha in 1977 at the age of thirty-six. Red Star, White Nights is also a personal memoir by Lisa Whitaker, who befriended Soloviev when he toured Australia in 1969. It is autobiography, too, describing Whitaker's travels to Russia after Perestroika to find his family and uncover the mystery of his fate.Soloviev was a government-decorated icon in the USSR, and an international star as well. On tour with the Kirov, he was idolized by audiences and critics. In words and over one hundred photos, many never before published, his phenomenal talent lives again.The book is the culmination of decades of research, during which the authors interviewed Soloviev's family, friends, and colleagues to peel back layers of accrued myth and reduction. Soloviev's suicide was his response to both personal and institutional repression, a bombshell hurled at Soviet officialdom. Soloviev's psychology reflected the stringency of the Soviet system and the individual vagaries of a turbulent family. Red Star, White Nights is informed by Whitaker's experience in Russian research and Lobenthal's many accounts of Russian culture and ballet.