A Simple Man

The dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky was one of the most celebrated, brilliant and mad artists of the 20th century. He seemed to confirm the link that many believe exists between madness and artistry because both involve a certain unhinging of one’s imagination from immediate reality. He left, according to Joan Acocella, editor of the riveting new unexpurgated edition of his diary, “the only sustained, on-the-spot (not retrospective) written account, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis.”

Nijinsky wrote tirelessly for 6 1/2 weeks beginning Jan. 19, 1919, soon after he had abruptly left the stage to move into a villa in St. Moritz, Switzerland, with his wife and 3-year-old daughter, Kyra. Less than two months later his diary ended, and he boarded a train and was taken by his wife and in-laws to Zurich to begin years of involuntary hospitalizations. His chronic schizophrenia would last until his death in 1950.

Before his mental breakdown, Nijinsky, who danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, was considered the greatest male dancer of his time. His dancing suggested startling new images of sensuality and androgyny. With shatteringly contemporary images of sexuality, Nijinsky brought ballet into the modern age, posing questions about gender identity that dance has spent the rest of the 20th century exploring.

The origin of these questions will become more clear with the publication of the first complete and original publication of Nijinsky’s diary in English and 16 accompanying letters to family and friends. Until now, the dance world has had to make do with the heavily abridged and revised 1936 version of the diary, edited by Nijinsky’s wife, Romola Nijinsky. Acocella’s version restores, for the first time, the 40% of the diary that Romola excised, including, most notably, the portions dealing with sexuality and unflattering comments about her.

It is clear why Romola wanted the diary cut. Nijinsky’s portrait confirms that she not only stole Nijinsky from the impresario Sergei Diaghilev (Acocella suggests Nijinsky was thereafter heterosexual) but more tellingly that she was a selfishly manipulative force in Nijinsky’s life. Acocella suggests in her introduction that Nijinsky was essentially heterosexual and became homosexual only to further himself in the politics of the Russian ballet world. Sex is the source of many entanglements in this story, and in her introduction, Acocella also reveals the identity of the long-mysterious doctor who initially hospitalized Nijinsky as Dr. Hans Curt Frankel, a St. Moritz physician with whom Romola was having an affair.

Nijinsky’s complete diary, in addition to giving the anatomy of a mental breakdown, is an extraordinary portrait, through Nijinsky’s emotional lens, of the relationship between the artist and society.

Nijinsky’s performing and choreography changed irrevocably our notions not just of artistry and sanity but, more important, of male expressivity in dance. His vehicles for doing so were such ballets as Mikhail Fokine’s “Le Spectre de la Rose,” “Petrushka” and “Scheherezade,” works in which he played a rose, a puppet and a golden slave. Nijinsky’s performances presented, for the first time, the male dancer as a symbol, his flesh mutable and his roles metaphorical, qualities that, until the early 20th century, had been exclusively in the domain of female dancers.

By age 23, Nijinsky had created three ballets whose existence alone would have assured him a place in dance history: “L’Apres-midi d’un Faune,” a ballet that broke with both classicism and anti-classicism; “Jeux,” a portrait of a menage a trois and the first ballet set in its own time; and “Le Sacre du printemps,” the single most controversial premiere in the entire history of dance because of the novelty of the choreography and the jarring nature of Igor Stravinsky’s score. This trilogy of dances galvanized the world of dance as never before, with provocations of masculinity, gender and eroticism.

In a brilliant introduction, Acocella, who is dance critic for the New Yorker, presents a rich historical and medical context for the riddles of Nijinsky’s creations. In so doing, she profoundly shapes our understanding and reception of the diary. We have to read it as a modernist document with a quality of abstraction akin to Nijinsky’s acting in his ballets and drawing on his tormented psyche.

In Romola’s version, Nijinsky’s text was so sanitized and cleaned up, and Romola’s controlling presence so stifling, that it simply read as a choppy string of random ramblings. In restoring it, a task aided considerably by Kyril Fitzlyon’s meticulous and fluent translation, Acocella reveals Nijinsky’s diary as a tightly coherent portrait of his aesthetic rendered as pathology.

Nijinsky’s world was based in sensation rather than analysis. “I write a lot. I want to understand,” he pens at one point, revealing how, during those weeks of confinement in St. Moritz, writing served as a mediating force for sensations that once found their expression through dance.

Reading Nijinsky’s complete diary is like seeing “The Last Supper” fully cleaned and restored after decades of grime and neglect. At points, the diary reads as if it were a novel because of the way Nijinksy renders the tension between what was going on in the St. Moritz household and what was going on in his mind, sensing that his wife and in-laws were making clandestine arrangements for him. Much of Nijinsky’s thinking in the diary is cloaked in what Acocella identifies as “circumstantiality” and “loosening of associations.” This is when Nijinsky repeatedly becomes distracted from his train of thought by too many associative details:

“I love beauty because I feel it and therefore understand it. Thinking people write nonsense about beauty. Beauty cannot be discussed. Beauty cannot be criticized. Beauty is not criticism. I am not criticism. Criticism is an attempt to be clever. I do not try to be clever. I flaunt my beauty. I feel love for beauty. I am not looking for straight noses. I like straight noses. I like my wife’s nose because it has feeling.”

As Nijinsky’s aesthetic sensibility turned inward, the same powers of invention that gave novel form to his dances reordered his perceptions of the world around him. The same mind that could render the spirit and flesh so mutable onstage now rendered daily reality as subject to a similar scrambling. “I am afraid for the death of reason. I want the death of intellect,” Nijinsky writes, reflecting his trust of feeling over material objects and of sentiment over talk, beliefs that echo throughout the diary, as he writes about “feeling” a person or “weeping in his heart.”

In the process, Nijinsky is both spectator and victim, unable to help himself. “I am a simple man who has suffered a lot,” he writes in the second notebook, “On Death.” “I am not afraid of bullets and poison. I am afraid of spiritual death. I will not go insane.” Rarely has the line between reason and madness seemed so tenuous and the struggle to keep one’s balance so fierce yet futile. Onstage, the disorganization of his mind gave us stylized portraits of onanism (“Faune”), an emotionally cold menage a trois (“Jeux”) and caldrons of collective sexual fury (“Sacre”). Estranged from the stage, his mind became his medium as he assembled and reassembled reality as he once plotted choreographic order in these ballets.

The British ballet historian Richard Buckle described Nijinsky’s life as “10 years growing, 10 years learning, 10 years dancing, and 30 years in eclipse.” Nijinsky’s story has fascinated for decades because it suggests the most extreme risks and challenges of remaking one’s body as the artistic medium of dance. Now with Nijinsky’s diary at last available in its entirety, in a richly literate and annotated translation, his final tortured effort to communicate his inner demons is complete. Acocella is a masterful midwife to this extraordinary tale.