Is Ivan Vasiliev the new Nureyev?

Vasiliev, aged 21, has been compared to Mikhail Baryshnikov and to Rudolf Nureyev. He is a miracle of physics. He not only jumps higher than anybody else but he stays longer in the air. Despite his romantic looks — his picture is on the wall at Russian Vogue — he is imperfectly built as a dancer. His centre of gravity is said to be a little low, and he is on the short side. But just as Kate Moss made her imperfections part of her charisma, so Vasiliev is a tour de force on stage.

I went to watch him perform the one-act ballet Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, staged by Roland Petit, in Moscow. He looks stocky and muscular on stage, topless and wearing jeans. He is an extraordinary combination of power and grace. In this ballet, he has to hurl chairs and overturn tables, but then appears to fly through the air.

The curtain calls last almost as long as the ballet. The glamorous Russian audience, looking more Imperial than Soviet, rise from their seats. Some rush down the aisle to take pictures on mobile phones. Vasiliev is shiny with sweat and his rib cage heaves, but his youthful face is serene.

The making of a Bolshoi dancer is blood, toil, tears and sweat. Billy Elliot would last about five minutes. I watch a ballet class before the performance. The Bolshoi dancers train for up to seven hours a day. The stars have their own bar at the back of the room. A young male who looks like Romeo, and indeed has played him, spins dazzlingly across the room until he staggers from dizziness. My Bolshoi companion surveys him critically. Good legs, nice lines, clean movements, needs development.

The female dancers have a hauteur which comes with being the very best. The dancers are scouted from academies and trained to perfection.

Outstanding boys are harder to come by now. In the old Soviet days, the Bolshoi was a passport to prestige and, literally, to freedom, since defecting Bolshoi dancers were a hazard of foreign tours.

Now Russian boys want to be pop stars and footballers like everybody else. The Bolshoi is one of the last bastions of unrelentingly high standards and hard work. Perhaps that is why its artistic director, Yuri Burlaka, is so wedded to the epic ballets of the past, rather than more experimental work.

The most ambitious of these is Spartacus, which will open the Bolshoi season at the Royal Opera House in July. Ivan Vasiliev takes the title role, in a poignant transformation from boy star to male lead. The photographer Damir Ysupov, who took this photograph, has watched Vasiliev change from "a young active boy to a generous, thoughtful man". He adds that the character of Vasiliev is motion. When he is not dancing, he is much less himself.

When I meet Vasiliev in a hotel lobby I glance twice to make sure it is him. Dressed in a brown jacket and jeans, he is slighter and smaller than I remember him on stage. He is good-looking in a gentle, tousled way, but not electrifying. He is simply a young man. He takes out a cigarette and looks slyly around to make sure that Roland Petit has not seen him. "He will kill me," he says, with a dimpled, conspiratorial grin.

Vasiliev is thoughtful on the subject of dance, otherwise he is playful and restless. I ask him how a young man of 21 can understand the manly courage and suffering of Spartacus and he says: "Before, I was just in love with dancing.

But when I prepared for Spartacus, something inside me changed me, I started to think of things more deeply and to live my character."

I ask about influences over him. Does he see himself in the tradition of Baryshnikov or Nureyev?

He replies: "When I was a boy I admired Baryshnikov for his technique, but now I am grown up I feel closer to Nureyev. Because it comes from inside him. The power and the anger of living."

But what about the jumping? Isn't that a gift of boyhood? As Vasiliev's muscles grow heavier, how will he be able to fly through the air?

Like Peter Pan, he refuses to renounce this part of him: "I am still developing the jump!" he protests. "As a child I did not have that sort of co-ordination, I couldn't do the splits as I can now. And I can spin more."

So how does he do it. What is the secret of the jump? "I have engines in my legs." His eyes shine at his little joke.

Vasiliev has lived with his older brother and his parents in Moscow since he was spotted in his home town of Minsk and whisked off to the Bolshoi. His girlfriend is the glamorous Bolshoi principal dancer Natalia Osipova. They will perform together in Le Corsaire at the Royal Opera House, as part of the Bolshoi season.

Apart from constraints on smoking and what he can eat, Vasiliev is as happy as a lion cub.

I wonder if he would like to settle in the West, in the way of some of the Bolshoi legends, but Vasiliev looks puzzled. He is a post-Cold War child, with no experience of hardship, paranoia or limitations.

"I have heard stories about the old Soviet Union," he says, as if these were ancient, exotic tales.

"It sounded hard and difficult and you had to belong to the Party. But I am truly free and for an artist, personal freedom is the main necessity. This is my home, I would not want to move from here."

Outside Moscow, his two favourite places are London and New York. He says that he loves Covent Garden, the jugglers, the parks. "I would like to stay in Buckingham Palace this time," he says, with more fits of giggles.

The reason he loves is New York is "because it is always in motion".

In life, as in dance, the Jumper cannot stay still.

The Bolshoi's Spartacus is from July 19-31 at the Royal Opera House. roh.org.uk