Vaslav Nijinsky

Russian dancer and choreographer

• Born: March 12, 1890
• Birthplace: Kiev, Ukraine, Russian Empire
• Died: April 8, 1950
• Place of death: London, England

With the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who enlisted him as a premier dancer in the Ballets Russes company, Nijinsky established the popularity of Russian ballet throughout the Western world in the second decade of the twentieth century. As a choreographer, he was also instrumental in adapting dance movements to the new music of the twentieth century, especially that of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

Early Life

Vaslav Nijinsky (VAH-sluhf nih-ZHIHN-skee) was born in Kiev when his Polish dancer parents, Eleonora Nikolayevich and Thomas Nizhinsky, were on tour in the Ukraine. When young Vaslav was two, his parents took him to Warsaw for baptism in the Roman Catholic religion. Vaslav was the second of three children. An elder brother, Stanislav, was mentally retarded following a fall at age six. The youngest was Bronisława, who became a celebrated ballerina in St. Petersburg. After Thomas deserted the family, Eleonora took the children to St. Petersburg and enrolled Vaslav, then age nine, in the Imperial School of Ballet. The celebrated dancer Nicholas Legat noticed his athleticism and recommended his admittance. He began his studies there in 1898, graduating in 1907. He quickly caught the eyes of the critics with his exceptional leaping ability. Aside from dance, Nijinsky was a poor student and was teased by other boys for his Tatar-like features. Young Nijinsky never made a real friend there.

In 1902, Nijinsky’s dance instructor was Mikhail Obukhov, who protected him from the cruelty of the other boys. During these years Nijinsky also learned how to play the piano, flute, balalaika, and accordion. In January, 1905, Nijinsky was caught in the crowds during the demonstrations against the government when Cossacks attacked. On this “Bloody Sunday,” Nijinsky was bloodied by a knout from one of the Cossacks. He was not politically inclined and spent most of his hours devoted to music. He was not an avid reader but was absorbed by Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-1850), which he and his sister read together. He also read Fyodor Dostoevski’s Idiot (1868; The Idiot, 1887). He was very moved by the main character in this last story, Prince Myshkin, a Christlike simpleton with whom he apparently identified. His favorite composers were the Russian Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov and the German Richard Wagner.

Life’s Work

With American dancer Isadora Duncan’s visit to the Russian capital came Nijinsky’s fascination with her. The choreographer Michel Fokine decided to stage a short ballet in her honor and chose Nijinsky for a small part. His manner and style were very appealing to the St. Petersburg critics, who were more attracted by the dramatic abilities of dancers than by their technique. Famed dancer Tamara Karsavina was so attracted by the splendor of his leaps that she promised to dance with him. His first real applause came on January 31, 1906, during a special dance for eight people inserted into the Mozart opera Don Giovanni at the Mariinsky Theater. Nijinsky was the only one who had not yet graduated, but he stole the short dance to take his first solo bow. Weeks later the program was repeated, and this time the dancers included the acclaimed Anna Pavlova.

Several small parts followed that year, and, after his graduation performance on April 29, even the most celebrated Mathilde Kchessinskaya expressed a desire to dance with him. He was readily admitted to the Imperial Ballet Company, and that summer he vacationed at Krasnoe Selo, where he danced with Kchessinskaya before the military troops. Following a solo dance before Czar Nicholas II, the emperor presented him with a gold watch. Before autumn he was contacted by his father and visited him in Nizhni Novgorod. They danced together and had a very friendly reunion. That was to be the last time that they met.

Back in St. Petersburg, the family moved to a well-to-do district near the Hermitage. Nijinsky was only a member of the Corps de Ballet, but he accepted offers to instruct children in the art of dance, for which he received one hundred rubles per hour. When his first season began he had opportunities to dance solo pieces and a pas de deux with Karsavina. In the winter, his roles increased in importance and frequency, and he soon found a patron in Prince Pavel Dmitryevich Lvov. The prince introduced him to Sergei Diaghilev in the early winter of 1908.

It was not until Nijinsky first danced with the Diaghilev company in the Russian season in Paris in 1909 that audiences noticed his greatness. He soon became the showcase for Russian dance throughout Europe and South and North America. He was the “Favorite Slave” in Le Pavillon d’Armide, the “Poet” in Les Sylphides, the “Golden Slave” in Schéhérazade, “Harlequin” in Carnaval, and the transformed “Puppet” in Petrushka. Nijinsky developed a reputation for being exotic and otherworldly. Critics found his dancing technically perfect and his performances highly dramatic. Diaghilev saw in him also a choreographer and trained him as such. Their relationship became intimate, and, after Nijinsky became seriously ill with typhoid fever, Diaghilev nursed him back to health.

Nijinsky returned from Paris to dance the season with the Imperial Ballet Company, but when he danced in a shocking costume designed by Alexander Benois for the ballet Giselle, the theatrical authorities demanded that he alter it. When he refused, they gave him the option of apologizing or resigning from the company. He resigned. There is some suspicion that the affair was staged by Diaghilev to free the dancer from his five-year contract with the Imperial Ballet Company. Following his resignation in January, 1911, he returned to France that spring to join the next season with Diaghilev full-time. On April 9, the company abandoned its summer status, and at Monte Carlo, Diaghilev formed the permanent Ballets Russes. Fokine’s Specter of a Rose was first performed there as Nijinsky’s most famous role of a phantom was danced opposite Karsavina. On reaching Paris, the company thrilled French audiences with marvelous tableaux of Russian life in Fokine’s choreography of Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka with Nijinsky as the puppet. So popular were the dancers that the company was invited to London to celebrate the coronation of King George V.

The Ballets Russes was equally popular in the following year, but in Paris Nijinsky the dancer also became Nijinsky the choreographer. Fokine’s work had worn thin with Diaghilev, and the famed dancer choreographed Claude Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun. He reversed many of the classical postures as he struggled to create new dance forms, consciously breaking with the past. These new movements themselves were controversial, but the closing scene displayed an erotic episode that scandalized the audiences. Nevertheless, the reaction was a mixture of damnation and enthusiastic praise. Among the latter was a newspaper letter of sculptor Auguste Rodin. If the controversy over the Debussy piece was well known, it was soon eclipsed by one of greater dimensions. This was the reaction to Nijinsky’s choreography of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring , in which Nijinsky danced the leading role. The spasmic and frenzied motions were ill understood even by his followers, and audiences were repelled by the cacophonous rhythms of the composer. When it was first performed in Paris on May 29, 1913, it produced a near riot in the theater. That season, Nijinsky also choreographed Jeux, a ballet performed in modern dress that was never popular.

There followed tours to London and to South America. A year earlier, when the company was in Budapest, Nijinsky met Romola de Pulszky, a famous actor and daughter of the founder and first director of the National Gallery of Hungary, Karoly de Pulszky, a Pole whose family had long resided in Hungary. Attracted to Nijinsky, she was determined to become a member of the Ballets Russes. She took dancing lessons and, using her family influence, persuaded Diaghilev to take her to South America as a student dancer. En route to Argentina she and Nijinsky fell in love, and four days after landing they were married in Buenos Aires. So enraged was Diaghilev that he dismissed his famous star.

An independent Nijinsky and his bride went to London, where he started his own short-lived company. They then returned to Budapest, where their daughter Kyra was born. While in Hungary, they were caught in the maelstrom of World War I. As a Russian citizen, Nijinsky was declared a prisoner of war and detained. Nevertheless, Diaghilev, who was planning an American tour for the Ballets Russes, had a change of heart and negotiated for his release. When the couple arrived in New York early in 1916, the impresario met them with flowers, and a reconciliation took place. In autumn the company took a second tour of the United States, and the Nijinskys simply stayed there between tours. It was during the second American season that Nijinsky choreographed his last ballet, Tyl Eulenspiegel, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. In 1917, Nijinsky embarked on a four-month dancing tour of the United States and joined Diaghilev in Spain by June. There they planned another tour of South America, where Nijinsky last danced with the Ballets Russes on September 26 in Buenos Aires.

One year later in St. Moritz, Nijinsky fell into severe depression. In 1919, he was diagnosed as an incurable schizophrenic. Romola stayed close to him for the next thirty-one years while he was in and out of asylums. In 1928, the Nijinskys sat in Diaghilev’s box to watch the Ballets Russes perform in Paris. When World War II began, the couple was again stranded in Hungary, and Nijinsky rejoiced on seeing Russian armies arriving in 1945. Two years later, the couple moved to London, where Nijinsky died after a kidney illness on April 8, 1950, at age sixty. Nijinsky was given a Roman Catholic funeral and buried outside London. Three years later, Serge Lifar arranged for the transfer of the body to Paris, at which time Bronisława Nijinska insisted on a new funeral in the Russian Orthodox rite.

Significance

An assessment of Vaslav Nijinsky’s impact necessarily includes both his dancing and his choreography. Parisian audiences were astonished by the gracefulness of his leaps. Until he performed with the Ballets Russes, Western audiences were unaccustomed to admiring the beauty of male dancers such as Nijinsky and others in the troupe. Nijinsky and his generation of dancers had already changed the image of the male dancer at home in St. Petersburg with the Imperial Ballet Company. Before this time, it was not unusual for females to assume male dancing roles. At other times, the male was expected to render mere support for the female star. After Nijinsky’s era, the female was not eclipsed, certainly, but the famed Polish dancer made it possible for later male stars such as Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov to emerge.

Nijinsky was equally innovative in choreography, but his contribution here was more by design than by instinct. A keen student of music, he was one of the first to appreciate the direction in which modern rhythms should take the art of dance. Hence Nijinsky choreographed Afternoon of a Faun, Jeux, The Rite of Spring, and Tyl Eulenspiegel in the new style for the Diaghilev company. These may have been the first truly creative ballets of the twentieth century. He surely surpassed his rival, Fokine, by using a bolder and more daring style. There was a sense of mystery to his dance and choreography that seemed to suit the new music of Igor Stravinsky and other modern composers. Nowhere was this match so evident as in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, a ballet that has become standard fare throughout much of the world.

Bibliography

Acocella, Joan. Genius and Madness: The Case of Nijinsky. Lincoln: Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts, University of Nebraska, 2001. The print version of a lecture by Acocella, dance critic for The New Yorker.

Buckle, Richard. Diaghilev. New York: Atheneum, 1979. Especially useful in the section entitled “The Fokine-Nijinsky Period” in this, the latest and most definitive biography yet written of Diaghilev.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Nijinsky. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. This work presents the basic information about the subject and is the standard, reliable work.

Gelatt, Roland. Nijinsky: The Film. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980. Gelatt wrote the text, and the book has sixty-two pages of photographs from the film. Other photographs are of Nijinsky himself.

Krasovskaia, Vera. Nijinsky. Translated by John E. Bowlt. New York: Schirmer Books, 1979. First published in Russia in 1974, this is the first Russian account of Nijinsky to be translated into English. Somewhat anecdotal and without a bibliography, the narration is a revealing portrait by another well-known dancer. Contains many photographs.

Nijinska, Bronisława. Bronisłava Nijinska: Early Memoirs. Edited and translated by Irina Nijinsky and Jean Rawlinson. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. A charming, readable account of her brother’s life as well as her own. The work reveals a magnificent eye for detail.

Nijinsky, Vaslav. The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. Translated from the Russian by Kyril FitzLyon, edited by Joan Acocella. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Nijinsky’s diaries, with entries from January 19 through March 4, 1919, chart the beginning of his descent into madness. This unexpurgated edition of the diaries includes a previously unpublished journal and some of Nijinsky’s poems, as well as an introduction by Acocella, see above.

Philip, Richard, and Mary Whitney. “The Living Legend of Nijinsky.” In Danseur: The Male in Ballet. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977. Containing an easy-to-read summary of Nijinsky’s career, this narrative stresses his innovations and influence. The text also contains twelve full-page photographs of the dancer and a bibliography.