An insight to a life of dance, romance and mania

NIJINSKY A Life

Lucy Moore Profile Books, £25

Nijinsky’s flame burned gloriously for only a few years, yet his legend can still conjure a flicker of excitement among fans of the ballet.

Trained in the classical tradition in pre-revolutionary Russia, Vaslav Fomich Nijinsky was born in Kiev in 1889 and died in England in 1950. His fame as a dancer and choreographer rests almost entirely on the period from 1909 to 1918, on his association at that time with impresario Sergei Diaghilev, and on the work which will forever be associated with his artistic genius.

Those were the Paris years in which he urged new thinking, new training, new music and above all new interpretative physicality on a mystified world. They were years in which he moved from the romantic tragedy of Giselle to the eroticism of Scheherazade, developing his muscular musicality and fierce interpretative independence until both erupted first in the scandalous imagery of Apres-midi d’Un Faune and then the even more sacreligious (in balletic terms at least) of Le Sacre du Printemps, first performed in 1913.

Those nine years of controversy and acclaim ended in bitterness and creative uncertainty accelerating outbursts of mania. A lifetime punctured by incarceration in clinics, hospitals and asylums followed and his assets at his death amounted to £30.

Lucy Moore’s book provides immense detail in eight chapters to 1918 and compressing the remaining life into just one. Her twinges of whimsy unbalance her authority, given the extraordinary tale she has to tell and the astonishing list of personalities who gathered around Nijinsky’s time in the limelight.

They centred on the Svengali-like Diaghilev and his company the Ballet Russes, dancers who, like Nijinsky and his devoted sister Bronia, were drawn from the talents of what was then Russia’s Imperial Theatre. Some were joined by their patrons and lovers for their tours during their holidays from St Petersburg. Anna Pavlova herself, who was first partnered by Nijinsky when he was only 16, was the mistress of several influential, or aristocratic men, while another prima ballerina was, usefully, mistress to the Tsar.

However famous the dancers, much of the renown of the Ballet Russes was due to its associated artists such as Bakst, Fokine, Massine and Benois. And they were all in Paris, where Nijinsky, having left his lover Prince Pavel Lvov, settled into a life of dependence on Diaghilev which would collapse viciously with Nijinsky’s sudden marriage.

This was to Romola de Pulszky, whose adoration for the dancer was such that she contrived to be taken on by the Ballet Russes and thence invaded Nijinsky’s consciousness. Diaghilev’s reaction was a toxic mixture of grief and vengeance and a total sundering of their professional partnership.

The consequences for Nijinsky were complicated by war, revolution and permanent exile and then by recurrent insanity. Yet even in the asylum he danced, according to one visitor, ‘like a fairy-tale’.