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The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky (Magill Book Reviews)

Nijinsky. The name alone conjures up a host of magical images—the sensual faun, the heartbroken clown, the androgynous slave, all the glamour and exoticism of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In a career brief even by dancers’ standards, Vaslav Nijinsky managed to create a legend that has grown to mythic proportions since his departure from the stage in 1917. He was the first to put the male dancer—as sexual presence—at the center of ballet, and his gravity-defying leaps, passionate characterizations, and revolutionary choreography have all become a golden part of dance history.

Yet Nijinsky has entered the world’s consciousness not only as a romantic embodiment of ecstatic movement but as a figure of the suffering romantic genius who burns brightly and briefly and is extinguished in his prime. Nijinsky’s suffering took the form of a mental collapse, a slide into schizophrenia that is recounted in almost unbearably raw terms in his famous diary. Produced in six short weeks between January and March, 1919, these four notebooks of propulsive writing—a mixture of penetrating observations and opaque, delusional incantations—record the terrifying, almost moment-by-moment experience of a mind losing its ability to negotiate reality. Under the influence of Tolstoy and the scrutiny of his wife, Romola, Nijinsky locked himself up in his Swiss villa and poured out a stream of vicious indictments and utopian visions, rehearsing old battles on the one hand and scheming to convert the world from materialistic rationality to passionate feeling on the other. His key theme is the celebration of his newly-recognized divinity; the other is a coarsely detailed preoccupation with the body and with sex. After six fevered weeks of writing, vacillating between the belief that he has been abandoned by God and that he in fact is God, his mind gave way, and for the next thirty years of his life he was hopelessly non-communicative.

Romola published the diary in 1936 but in a severely bowdlerized form: disguising identities, rearranging sequences, cleaning up the repetitive, increasingly disorganized writing of the original, and eliminating up to forty percent of the text (all of the passages about sex and defecation certainly, along with anything else that detracted from the romantic image of an artist of genius struck down in the pursuit of his art). It was a shameless deception. Amazingly, however, the original notebooks remained in tact, and now, with the first ever publication of the complete text of the diary, the full and horrifyingly poignant story of the man, his illness, and his obsessions can be known. Joan Acocella, dance critic for The New Yorker, is a model guide, introducing the edition with a brisk but comprehensive overview and annotating tactfully throughout. It may be impossible to dislodge the mythic Nijinsky from the communal consciousness, but this unexpurgated edition of his diary gives back the real human being behind the dancing genius.