For the first time, Vaslav Nijinsky stood behind the stage at the premiere. From the murmurs, he could tell that the audience was restless, moving around in their chairs and talking to each other. The dancers at the back of the stage were also restless, some warming up, others stepping around carelessly, others talking to each other in a cluster and avoiding his gaze. Like any experienced dancer, he knew how important the atmosphere behind the stage was for the success of a performance. If the dancers have doubts, it is the road to disaster. He knew that most of them did not like the ballet he had created, did not understand what he wanted from them and what he wanted to achieve. But at least the theatre was packed, even though the entrance fee was double.
For the last four years, all of Paris has been crazy for the Russian ballet and for him, the young wild man Vaslav Nijinsky. Tonight was the premiere of a daring new ballet, in which modern composer Igor Stravinsky, expert on pagan Russia Nicholas Roerich and the brilliant 24-year-old choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky joined forces. It was also rumoured that the unscrupulous impresario Sergei Diaghilev was giving away free tickets just to keep the theatre empty.
The premiere of Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) was the third performance of the “Russian Ballet” at the new Champs-Elysées theatre. The first premiere last year, L’Aprés-midi d’un faune (Prelude to a Faune Afternoon), in which he himself played the faune, caused such a scandal that he had to change the onanistic ending for the following performances. Only two weeks before, his Jeux had been greeted with whistles and jeers, despite the music written by Claude Debussy. Jeux was dismissed by the critics as premature and ugly. Nijinsky knew that Sergei Diaghilev was beginning to question the correctness of his decision to leave the choreography of the ballet to his protégé Nijinsky. But he knew of himself that he was the best dancer in the world and also the best choreographer.
The stage manager tapped his cane three times on the floor, a sign that all those not performing should retreat far behind the stage. He saw Diaghilev standing in his usual place, solemn and majestic, his face expressing nothing. Down in the pit, the conductor had already raised his hands, his wand in his left hand. Vaslav Nijinsky caught his breath, closed his eyes and waited to hear the sound of music. It was 29 May 1913.
One night around 1920, Zelda Fitzgerald, the disaffected heroine of the autobiographical novel Spare Me a Waltz, was introduced to the principal dancer of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company at the Châtelet Theatre, where she was performing. She asked her, “How did you get into ballet?” And she answered, “I was born in it.” This was the case with most Russian dancers at the beginning of the 20th century, and this was also true of Vaslav Fomich Nijinsky, born on 12 March 1889.
His parents were already dancers in a travelling theatre and his childhood was connected with dance. His mother and father were convinced that just as children should be able to walk, so should their children be able to dance. His older brother Stanislav and his sister Bronja, who later worked closely with him throughout his career, were also dancers. But before that, times were very hard for the Nijinsky family. Sometimes they could afford a warm apartment if the group was performing in a major city theatre, other times the children were left hungry in a cold room while the parents performed with clowns in the city streets.
When Nijinsky was nine years old, his parents divorced because his mother could no longer bear the vagabond life. She settled with her children in St. Petersburg. The Mariinsky Theatre, originally called the Tsar’s Theatre School, received thousands of applications each year for only twenty vacancies. Those who were accepted were guaranteed a future, as the Tsar’s treasury covered the cost of their education. After finishing his studies, the pupil was regularly employed in the ensemble of the Mariinsky Theatre.
In August 1898, Nijinsky was called for an audition along with 309 other candidates. He had to jump in the air, turn around, wave his arms, roll on the floor, then doctors listened to his heart and checked his eyesight and hearing. He was admitted on a trial basis for one year and, as he made progress in his studies, he was officially admitted to the school. The schooling was hard and rather military, and Nijinsky complained at home that his classmates were stabbing him: ‘But are you a girl to dance so well?’
He was called Japachik because of his slightly slanted Tartar eyes. One of the privileges of attending the Mariinsky Theatre was dancing small roles in its ballet, opera or drama productions. For example, Nijinsky received 20 kopeks each for the roles of the mouse in The Nutcracker and the pawn in Swan Lake.
His sister Bronja, who was also a pupil at the school, had heard rumours even then that the 15-year-old Nijinsky was a future ballet star. His dance roles were so good that even the teachers gave him a standing ovation. Around 1905, despite the events that undermined the power of the Tsar, the Mariinsky Theatre remained a closed and almost monastic system. Therefore, every innovation was greeted with doubts but also with enthusiasm.
At that time, the famous dancer Isadora Duncan came to visit St Petersburg and her performance at the Mariinsky Theatre was a sensation for traditional Russian ballet. She danced alone, barefoot and dressed in a kind of tunic to music that was not ballet music. She was self-taught and did not rely on technical virtuosity, but on feeling, emotion and improvisation. But at that time few were convinced that even in Russian ballet something had to change and adapt to the new times.
Mikhail Fokine, who was a good dancer and also a skilled choreographer, suggested to the theatre management that the outdated costumes should be removed, that the hands should be used more freely and the posture more relaxed, and that the dancers should also be allowed to dance barefoot, but the suggestion did not go through. He was one of the few who saw the prima ballerina only as the first among equals and not as a star around whom everything revolved, and he encouraged dancers to show their individual skills while dancing. No one understood better what Fokine was trying to achieve than Vaslav Nijinsky.
Since the early 19th century, ballet has been an art with women at its centre. Male dancers were only on stage to emphasise her gracefulness, not to be recognised as dance artists. In the spring of 1905, Nijinsky was already dancing the role of Faun in a student reprise of Acis and Galatea, although at 16 he was still two years short of finishing his studies. Even the critics were impressed, and it was then that for the first time, the audience was calling his name as strongly as the ballerina’s. It was Fokine who achieved this change of taste in the audience. His choreography was as much for the ballerina as for her dancer.
He then appeared several more times at the Mariinsky Theatre, first in 1906 as a partner of the famous ballerina Anna Pavlova. When she noticed that the audience applauded him more than her, she no longer wanted him as a partner. Instead, Nijinsky danced more with Mathilde Kshessinskaya, then still the first star in the ballet sky. Many dancers had rich “patrons” at that time. Anna Pavlova’s mother, who was a feather and later became a dancer, had many lovers, from a general, a prince and a theatre director to a well-known critic.
Submission and exploitation have traditionally been part of the life of Russian dancers. The first dancers and actors in Russia were essentially servants trained by their masters to perform in private theatres on their estates. Although some of them were talented artists, they were nothing more than occasional servants or henchmen for their masters. Prince Nikolai Yusupov, who owned a private theatre in the 1790s, thus required dancers to strip naked on stage at the end of a performance.
Nijinsky’s Success in Paris
There are several stories about how, after a love quarrel with the dancer Maria Gorshkova, Nijinsky met his first serious lover, Prince Pavel Lvov. The Prince paid an actor 1000 roubles to introduce him to Nijinsky. He was a rich man and one of the first to own a car in the city. He lied to Nijinsky that he was only passing on the declarations of love of a princess who was in love with him.
After several meetings, this unknown princess gradually disappeared more and more from the conversations between the Prince and Nijinsky, until they became lovers. “He loved me as a man loves a child, and I loved him because I knew he wanted me well,” Nijinsky wrote years later. The Prince was very giving; he paid all his mother’s debts, paid for a large new apartment, no longer had to teach rich children to dance, taught him to play tennis and gave him a dacha by the sea. While his mother and sister Bronja argued how nice it was for rich people to help artists on their way to success, they quietly accepted their son’s homosexuality, which had been forbidden in Tsarist Russia since 1835, but before that it was quite widespread among masters and servants and nobody made much of a fuss about it.
In 1907, Nijinsky had one of his greatest initial successes with the role of a slave in the Baroque fantasy Le Pavillon d’Armide (Armida’s Pavilion); Fokine wrote the role especially for him. Sergei Diaghilev, an impresario, patron and organiser, once attended a rehearsal for the ballet. He had a lot of talent, just no money. But he was convinced that this too could be solved. Nijinsky soon signed a contract to dance in Diaghilev’s “Russian Season”, and was due to go to Paris in the spring of 1909. He was paid 2,500 French francs for a two-month performance, which was very little compared to the first star of Diaghilev’s operatic programme, the singer Fyodor Chaliapin, who was richer by as much as 55,000 French francs.
Shortly afterwards, Nijinsky and Diaghilev became lovers, although Nijinsky did not break off contact with Prince Lvov. Diaghilev managed to raise enough sponsorship in Russia, mainly from wealthy merchants and noblemen, to organise a tour of France. The most generous were Baron Dmitry Günzburg and the French impresario Gabriel Astruc, who also brought Artur Rubinstein and Mata Hari to Paris and introduced them to the public.
The weeks in Paris were weeks of constant rehearsals. Diaghilev was tireless, noticing every light bulb on the ceiling that was flickering, hearing when the orchestra played the wrong note, taking care of the hairdressers, the hairdressers and photographers, and distributing sponsor tickets. On 19 May 1909, all the tickets were sold out at the Châtelet Theatre.
Le Pavillon d’Armide (Armida’s Pavilion) was the first performance in which Nijinsky appeared. His body moved perfectly on stage and at the end of his pas de trois he disappeared from the stage with an extraordinary leap, instead of walking off with dignity as planned. The audience went wild, followed by rapturous applause.
This was soon followed by the premiere of Les Sylphides (Silfide) with Anna Pavlova and Nijinsky. Before the arrival of the Russian ballet in Paris, the French considered ballet more or less a dying art. The dancers painted by Edgar Degas in the old Paris Opera House were far from being beauties; miserable human beings waiting to be taken as mistresses by a rich merchant from a stage that was little more than a brothel. You could see their bodies before the show, when the ballerinas were warming up behind the stage.
Outside Russia, there were no classically trained male dancers, so Nijinsky and the other male members of the company were a real discovery for the Parisians. Until their arrival in Paris, ballet was considered so unmanly that male roles were usually danced by ballerinas dressed as men.
Diaghilev’s success in Paris can be attributed mainly to the coherence of his performances. The excellent set, the colourful costumes, the music and the coordinated movements of the dancers were perfectly in tune with the new choreography. His scenes from the Orient were new and alien to the French, but for the Russians they were part of their history, as the Russian empire also included Bukhara, Samarkand, the Caucasus and Siberia.
When Diaghilev was looking for costumes for Prince Igor in 1908, he found everything he needed in the Tatar market in St Petersburg. But no matter where Nijinsky and the other dancers were, their day always started with a dance. “Dancing should be as simple as breathing. Each step should be a natural and harmonious consequence of the previous step.”
During the exercises, Nijinsky didn’t need a big mirror to correct his mistakes, as he controlled his muscles to perfection. Someone once told him that it was a pity he couldn’t see himself while dancing. “Not at all,” replied Nijinsky, “when I dance, I can always see myself. I can always see as clearly as if I were sitting among the spectators.”
After the rehearsal, he always rehearsed his characters for another hour or two. Lunch was late, around four in the afternoon, after which he often went for a walk in the Bologna Forest. On the day of the performance, he was at the theatre at half past seven and walked around the stage a few times.
Then he went to the changing room and changed. Most of the dancers crossed themselves before the performance, but Nijinsky never did, because he had already been blessed by his mother. This was followed by the ritual of sticking the dancing shoes into a bowl of rosin, which prevented them from slipping. Diaghilev usually watched the performance from the box, and that was when the dancers made a special effort. When the curtain came down at the end, Nijinsky bowed to the audience humbly and moderately, never giving the impression that he was demanding applause. But when he felt that his performance was not the best, he would correct the steps himself on stage after everyone had left. But even when he was satisfied with his dancing, he still repeated certain movements.
Dinner was in a Parisian restaurant with a small group of people. They were often joined by the poet Jean Cocteau. After dinner, Nijinsky would go to his hotel, knowing that the next day he would have a busy rehearsal or performance, while Diaghilev and the others would wander around Paris, sometimes to the luxury brothel Le Chabanais. When Nijinsky went to bed, he knew that he had achieved a lot; enthusiastic audiences, critical acclaim, his own creative satisfaction.
The season ended in Châtelet on 18 June, followed by two special performances, one at the Opera and the other at a private party. These private performances were an important part of the Ballets Russes’ performance, giving Diaghilev access to wealthy private sponsors and providing him with additional income. Nijinsky was still able to perform at the Opera, but he was too ill to perform at a private party. The tap water was poor and Nijinsky was used to being able to drink water from fountains in St Petersburg. He became infected and was bedridden for a month. He was nursed by his mother and sister Bronja.
Bargain
When he was almost well, Diaghilev came to him and offered to live with him and support him. Although he would not receive a salary, his expenses would be taken care of and his mother would receive 500 francs a month. “At first I did not agree,” Nijinsky later recalled, “but Diaghilev sat on my bed and persuaded me. He probably realised my value and was afraid I would leave him. But I really liked Diaghilev, and when he told me that love for a woman was a terrible thing, I believed him. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did.”
So he accepted the offer, not least because he saw no alternative and was convinced that he would not find himself in the real world. He had no idea how to buy a train ticket or book a hotel room, or how to organise a working day. He could not have lived the life with anyone else that he had lived with Diaghilev. He confessed to his sister Bronja that he could only live in the world of art. Everything that is outside this world does not interest him.
He did not find Diaghilev physically attractive, but he deeply admired him and he meant more to him than any man in the world. Under him, he became a star and a celebrity faster than he could have done under the rigid and conservative Mariinsky Theatre. Only as a star could he continue to live an independent artistic life. That was the bargain he made with himself that summer of 1909, and of course the price he paid.
They were an unusual couple. An imposing middle-aged man in a black jacket with a flower in the buttonhole, a collar with a black pearl, a monocle dangling on a string, a silver walking stick, dressed in white trousers, and a man in his twenties, more like an apprentice or a young clerk. When Isadora Duncan saw them together, she told Nijinsky what beautiful children these two men could have.
He no longer had to queue every other week with other dancers in front of the cashier to get paid. But he was also learning how hard it is to make money as an impresario. Although all the performances of the season were sold out, Diaghilev had to accept a significant financial loss in the end. None of the dancers knew this, because thanks to the generosity of their sponsors, Diaghilev managed to pay their salaries before putting them on the train to Russia.
But Diaghilev was already planning the next season and asked Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy to write the pieces for his ballet. After a holiday in Venice, Diaghilev and Nijinsky spent the winter in St Petersburg. Here they were in the company of Igor Stravinsky, a completely unknown composer, to whom Diaghilev entrusted the music for L’oiseau de feu (The Firebird), a piece intended for the French market, in the hope that Anna Pavlova would dance the lead role.
Throughout the winter, Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova prepared for their roles in the ballet Giselle. It was undoubtedly a great honour for such a young and to some extent inexperienced young man to be offered the lead role in this prestigious ballet. In the end, however, Anna Pavlova did not want to dance with him anymore: “I don’t want to share my success with Nijinsky in front of the audience. I don’t want to hear Nijinsky receive an ovation in a performance in which I am also dancing. Let the spectators who came to see Pavlova see only me. Vaslav has enough of his own audience to fill a theatre with.”
This winter, the Mariinsky Theatre was full of intrigue and jealousy. The young Diaghilev dancers, the so-called “Diaghilists”, were opposed to the old guard of “imperialists”, led by the dancer Kshesinskaya and Nikolai Legat, with their outdated ideas and close links to the Tsarist court. And Nijinsky was a frequent target of attacks by the “imperialists”. This depressed him and Bronja was worried: “He is completely alone and avoids people. More and more he remains only the god of ballet and no more my Vaslav, my brother and dear friend.”
But Nijinsky was also a star in Paris and as such exposed to attacks from Fokine, who was a choreographer but also an excellent dancer and demanded for himself the roles that Diaghilev gave to Nijinsky. Others demanded that their names be written in larger letters than the others. It was not clear who was to be listed as having written the music for Scheherazade, a ballet which was an enormous success, as there were in fact several composers. Here, Nijinsky danced his role as a slave, and this role was actually all about sex. He danced in gold harem pants, his skin was painted dark blue, he crawled around the stage like a lecherous half-animal, half-snake, obsessed with lust, finally he dishonoured Zobeida and then died at her feet.
Nijinsky and Diaghilev spent a lot of time in Venice over the summer, so they returned to Russia only in September and missed the opening performance of the Mariinsky Theatre, where the atmosphere was even worse than last season. Kshesinskaya was still on the war footing with Diaghilev and his dancers and the admirers of Nijinsky, Pavlova and Karsavina, who worshipped them almost divinely. When it became known that Kshesinskaya had declared that she was spitting on such gods, they wrote her a letter: ‘It is much easier to spit down on you from up here than you can spit on us from down here.’
When Nijinsky returned to St Petersburg, he was still silent and inaccessible to other people. Then he confided to Bronja what he and Diaghilev had talked about that summer. The Ballets Russes had become so successful that Diaghilev decided to set up his own permanent ballet company, working ten months a year, rather than having to make up a ballet company from the dancers who were only available to him in the summer months. The ballet company would be made up of well-paid dancers, with whom he would sign a three-year contract. This would, of course, mean that they would have to give up their position as permanent members of the Mariinsky Theatre and would thus lose all the social security and status that such a position brought them. Only the biggest names in ballet would be able to choose to dance as members of the Mariinsky Ballet in the Diaghilev Ballet Company because of their position.
New ballet company
This meant that Nijinsky would be the star of the new ballet company, although his commitment to the Mariinsky would remain in force until 1912. The plans for the new ballet company were ambitious. First, Diaghilev was to stage Petrushka as a new ballet, with music by Stravinsky. L’Aprés-midi d’un faune (Prelude to a Faune Afternoon), based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, with music by Claude Debussy, was to be staged next.
Nijinsky first danced in Giselle at the Mariinsky Theatre in January 1911 to a standing ovation. He danced in a new costume specially made for him. The next morning he was awakened by a telephone call from the Mariinsky’s management. His mother and Bronja were waiting for him to return home, hoping that he would be promoted to the position of “premier danseur”, just as Karsavina had recently been promoted to prima ballerina with an annual salary of 6000 roubles.
But Nijinsky came back pale as a sheet, saying he had been sacked for wearing an “indecent and inappropriate” costume in the presence of Her Majesty Maria Feodorovna, the mother of the Russian Tsar. He will only be excused if he apologises and reapplies for membership of the ballet company.
Nijinsky remained silent, turned around and wanted to leave. The bureaucrats panicked. They immediately offered him a salary of 9000 roubles for 20 ballet performances. This would give him enough time to perform abroad. Nevertheless, he remained silent and they immediately increased his salary to 12 000 roubles. He then bowed and said haughtily that he did not want to remain a member of the Mariinsky Theatre, from which he had been thrown out as if he were useless. If they want him to return, he will accept their apology, but he expects that a written petition will specifically demand his return.
The official costume of the Mariinsky Theatre for this performance was a long tunic, which the dancers wore over a ballet leotard with tight shorts, so that nothing indecent could be seen. However, in the costume worn by Nijinsky, which he had already performed in Paris, the tunic was much shorter, there were no shorts and the dancer’s buttocks were visible. “Paris is tolerant of things that are unthinkable in St Petersburg, especially in the Tsar’s theatre,” the Mariinsky explained to him.
When Grand Duke Sergei, one of Matilda Kshessinskaya’s lovers, came backstage during the interval and demanded that Nijinsky take off his inappropriate costume, Nijinsky smoothly refused. Opinions are divided as to whether Diaghilev deliberately provoked a scandal with this costume, and Nijinsky would probably have bowed to the will of the theatre management if he had not already been guaranteed a position in Diaghilev’s new ballet company. Be that as it may, Nijinsky was now under Diaghilev’s complete disapproval.
At the Mariinsky Theatre, they tried every means to make him change his mind, but now Diaghilev was in charge and he refused all attempts at reconciliation. At the same time, he telegraphed to Paris and suggested that this “scandal” should be used to publicise the new ballet company. In the meantime, Diaghilev was slowly completing his ballet company. Bronja, who had resigned from the Mariinsky Theatre, also joined the group. The prima ballerina Karsavina promised to dance for him when she was not engaged at the Mariinsky Theatre.
Diaghilev and Nijinsky left Russia in March for Monte Carlo, where the group was to spend the winter. Here, in late April, the opera staged the ballet Le spectre de la Rose (The Spirit of the Rose), which tells the story of a young woman returning from a ball, who sits in an armchair and falls asleep, dreaming of the young man who gave her the rose she still holds in her hand. Actually, this was the first solo that was only for the dancer.
Jean Cocteau watched the ballet from the back of the stage: “What grace combined with brutality. I can still hear the applause, see the young man, made up with theatrical make-up, sweating, panting, with one hand pressed to his heart and the other leaning on the railing. He collapsed into an armchair from the effort and a few seconds later staggered off the stage, bowing to the audience with a smile on his mouth.”
If Scheherazade made Nijinsky a sex symbol, then Le Spectre de la Rose (The Spirit of the Rose) cemented his status as a romantic hero.
But Nijinsky’s greatest success came in 1911 with Petrushka, the unfortunate clown, a Russian version of the folk hero known in all European cultures as Pierrot or Pulcinella, partly as a fable, partly as “commedia dell arte”.
It premiered in Paris in June 1911. Petrushka is one of the three puppets of the Wizard. He loves the empty-headed ballerina who flirts with him and then leaves him for the Moor. The Moor challenges him to a duel and kills him. The last scene shows Nijinsky as Petrushka’s ghost leaving the world he has destroyed.
Nijinsky has managed to create the illusion that Petrushka is a puppet imitating a human being, while the ballerina and Maver can do nothing but be human beings pretending to be puppets. Petrushka has become a symbol of Nijinsky’s personality, a trapped genius in the docile body of a puppet, struggling to become human but failing.
During the two years of their life together, it became obvious how Nijinsky was completely dependent on Diaghilev even in practical matters. While he liked to give, he demanded the whole personality of the recipient. Everything Nijinsky received had to come from Diaghilev, everything had to be handed over to him. Nijinsky also had a servant, Zujkov, who carefully supervised what he did and reported to Diaghilev. They had separate sex lives and separate bedrooms.
Nijinsky has repeatedly managed to evade the control of his servant Zujkov. “He thought I was going for a walk, but I was chasing after strays.” After contracting gonorrhoea in St Petersburg in 1908, Nijinsky feared sexual diseases, but he was convinced that the Paris police controlled prostitutes and that he had nothing to fear. “But what I was doing was terrible,” he recounted.
One day, while talking to a prostitute near La Fayette, he noticed an elderly man with two children watching him from a carriage. He was sure he recognised him. “It was a moral blow for me, I turned away and blushed.” Nijinsky did not despise these women, but even admired them for their beauty and simplicity.
Favn’s afternoon
Early in 1911, he and his sister Bronja began choreographing the prelude to L’Aprés-midi d’un faune (Prelude to a Faune Afternoon). They worked at home without piano accompaniment, as no one would have known what kind of ballet Nijinsky was planning. It was not easy to work with him. What he demanded of his sister was often beyond the limits of human ability. Although she understood that this ballet required extreme precision, that every mistake in rhythm and every disagreement, however small, could destroy the whole composition, she was sometimes unable to carry out everything as her brother demanded.
In the spring, on their way to Paris, Diaghilev and Nijinsky visited the rhythm school of Emile Jaques-Dalcroz in Dresden, who, although he did not teach dance, understood that music could only be fully understood through movement, and developed a system of teaching based on singing as well as on playing and improvisation. The choreography of his fauna demanded of Nijinsky a new and radical relationship between music and dance.
Nijinsky was attracted to the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss and especially Stravinsky, all of whom wrote music that seemed almost impossible to dance to. It was too decadent, therefore too modern. But Nijinsky, who wanted to create something new, needed just that.
That winter, for the first time, he did not return to Russia, but the ballet company danced in London and Central Europe. The dancers stopped in Budapest in March 1912. This stop brought a turning point in Nijinsky’s life. Nineteen-year-old Romola de Pulszky sat next to her mother among the audience in the opera house. Enchanted by the colourfulness of the performance, the beauty and the passion on stage, she wanted to get to know Nijinsky in every way possible. She did not succeed this time, but she was convinced that she had to persevere.
Rehearsals for the Faun began in Monte Carlo in the spring of 1912. At that time, it was high season there. The hotels were full of English and French aristocrats, American millionaires, maharajas and bearded grand dukes, and the Aga Khan generously gave diamonds to the dancers. If Nijinsky had already found it difficult to tell his sister what he actually wanted to achieve with this piece, it was virtually impossible to get through to the other dancers.
He demanded that every movement or step must be exactly as he had imagined it in his choreography. He demanded perfection of movement from the dancers, just as he had imagined their roles. Diaghilev himself began to have doubts about the performance, but he knew that it had to succeed both artistically and financially, because he was in debt.
The ballet Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was first presented to the public on 29 May 1912 and everyone was nervous. Fawn’s costume was painted on Nijinsky’s tight-fitting clothes, making him look more naked than clothed. He wore a cap with golden hair and two small flowers on his head, his ears had been lengthened with wax and the make-up on his face made him look almost animalistic. In such a costume it was difficult to tell where the dancer’s masculine and animal nature ended and began.
The story of the ballet is about the slow sexual awakening of a young faun, who becomes fascinated by a group of bathing nymphs. When he approaches them, they run away, only one returns because she has forgotten her veil. But this faun taunts and then runs away frightened, and the faun triumphantly carries away her veil. The last scene, in which the faun bends her face over the stolen veil and starts to shiver, was a clear enough illustration of the orgasm of masturbation, and it was a sensation.
At first, the audience didn’t know whether to clap or whistle. For the first time in the history of the Ballets Russes, Nijinsky returned to the stage as the dancers were preparing to take their bows and announced that they would repeat the scene. When the curtain fell for the second time, applause broke out, punctuated by whistles.
The next day, the Figaro newspaper did not publish a critique, but on its front page condemned the “dirty” last act. The sculptor Auguste Rodin then published a letter in Le Matin in which he said: “I would like every artist who loves art to see this unique personification of the ideals of beauty in ancient Greece.” The scandal went beyond France to America, where one newspaper wrote on its front page: ‘Corrupt Paris has finally been shocked. Stravinsky also spoke out: “Of course, Nijinsky only made love to a nymphine scarf. Diaghilev would not have allowed him anything else.”
In London, Nijinsky got the idea for his next ballet, Jeux, a modern, indeed futuristic ballet depicting a tennis match in a garden at dusk, with the girls already dancing around the lights. Despite Diaghilev’s concerns about Nijinsky’s experimentation, he asked Debussy to write the music. A tour of Europe followed in the summer of 1912, and in the spring of 1913 the ballet company was back in Monte Carlo and rehearsals for Jeux began.
Sister Bronja, meanwhile, married one of the dancers and Nijinsky felt her absence painfully. The premiere of the ballet Jeux took place in Paris in May 1913. The applause was modest, and critics criticised the work for its lightness, modern dress and strange movements. Audiences were used to seeing Nijinsky as something otherworldly, unreal – an animal, a bird, a puppet, an Indian deity, even a slave, something that separated him from everyday life. They were not used to seeing him as something like them, simply a young man in the present time.
But the modernist way of playing was something that Nijinsky and Diaghilev had been familiarising themselves with recently. In Italy, they met Fillipp Marinetti and the Futurists, and were fascinated by the ultra-modern, atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg.
However, Prelude to the Fauna’s Afternoon and Jeux were not the only ballets whose choreography Diaghilev entrusted to Nijinsky. It had been a few years since Stravinsky had come up with the idea of a ballet called Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), which would depict the pagan spring rituals of the former Russia, where, during a celebration, a young virgin sacrifices herself to the god of spring. Stravinsky had already written the music and collaborated with Nijinsky almost throughout the rehearsals. Both were influenced by the ideas of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze that in dance every musical note should be accompanied by a corresponding movement. In fact, there was no real melody and the dancers had to follow the rhythm.
Nijinsky was already very nervous during the rehearsals, as he saw that the dancers were inappropriately following his demands. He was driven forward by the knowledge that he was creating something new, and was very hurt when Bronja told him that she was pregnant and could not take the lead role. That’s when he lost his nerve and started shouting, “Only you can do this dance Bronja and no one else! You deliberately want to ruin my work, just like everyone else!”
On 29 May 1913, the whole of Paris turned out for the premiere of Rite of Spring, which meant something. The publicity did its bit, too, as the show promised true art that transcended the boundaries of space and time. “Whatever happens, you must dance the ballet to the end”, Diaghilev instructed the dancers.
As soon as the curtain went up, there were whistles and grumbles. The dancers behind the stage began to sweat in their thick costumes. The music was dissonant and alien, and the choreography was a radical departure from classical ballet. Around 40 protesters who were disrupting the performance were removed from the theatre by riot police, but the noise did not stop there. Critics in the newspapers condemned the ballet, which is now known to have been a revolution in the expression of the movement. Diaghilev accompanied this with the words, “This is exactly what I wanted.”
Romola and marriage
In June, Nijinsky and Diaghilev travelled to London. But they had a companion on the way. Romola de Pulszky, a young girl who had seen Nijinsky dancing in Budapest, had it in her head to become a dancer and followed her idol everywhere. “A dilettante”, Nijinsky commented, but it was hard to shake off.
In London, the reviews for Rite of Spring were more subdued and one journalist wrote that perhaps in a few years people will realise that there are other things in music and ballet than beauty and tenderness. But neither Jeux nor Rite of Spring brought in enough money to cover the costs, and Diaghilev was convinced that these two ballets could no longer be performed. Besides, Nijinsky was not bringing him enough money at the moment. He would leave him to travel alone with the ballet company on a tour of South America.
On 15 August 1913, Nijinsky boarded a ship in Cherbourg with a ballet company and sailed to South America. Romola was with them, in a first-class cabin, as close to Nijinsky as possible. She knew that now that Diaghilev was not with her, Nijinsky could hardly escape. They met on the decks, greeted each other politely, and Romola was sure she caught a smile and a glance from him now and then. “Where others have failed, I will succeed,” she was sure.
Sometimes they would sit together at dinner and take part in the carnival atmosphere with South American music playing. They were not very good at communicating, as Nijinsky spoke Russian and Romola spoke French. Then one day, the trip leader, who was in charge of the technical side of the ballet company, approached her and asked if he could talk to her.
“Miss Romola, since Nijinsky cannot say it himself, he asked me to ask you if you would marry him.” Romola thought it was a joke, felt humiliated, burst into tears and ran to her cabin. “Maybe it’s true?” she thought, as she calmed down and went to the deck, where Nijinsky was waiting for her, took her by the hand and said, “Miss, would you marry me?” And she answered, “Oui, oui, oui. Yes, yes, yes.”
Some tried to dissuade her from marrying, fearing that Nijinsky would break her heart. “He is completely heartless and his attitude towards Diaghilev is more than friendship.” The fiancés sent a telegram to Romolina’s mother asking her permission, but did not inform Diaghilev. They married in Buenos Aires, he was 24 and she was 21. They could not afford a honeymoon as rehearsals started immediately.
The mother found out about her son’s marriage in the newspapers and was desperate because he had not consulted her and was engaged to a woman she had never heard of. Diaghilev was in Venice when he heard the news. He was in despair, burst into tears, began to scream and to curse shamelessly. For him, it was a divorce weighed down by shared business interests. He had made Nijinsky a star and it was Nijinsky who was bringing the money into the coffers. In theory, there was no money to share, and Nijinsky never signed any contract with the Ballets Russes that obliged him to do anything.
Diaghilev wasted no time, of course. Left without a “premier danseur” for the next season, he quickly found a replacement in 18-year-old Leonid Massin. He took him to auditions and then to his bed.
The ballet company travelled from Buenos Aires to Montevideo and then to Rio de Janeiro. On the way back to Europe, Romola spent most of the time in the cabin, as she found out she was pregnant. They returned to Europe at the end of November, but were not met by Diaghilev in Cadiz. Nijinsky had always hoped that his ex-partner would come to terms with the marriage.
When he was handed a telegram informing him that Diaghilev no longer needed him in the dance group, his world came crashing down. Now he had a wife to look after, a child on the way, no permanent residence and no job. All he had left was a few suitcases of clothes, which he took with him to South America. After three years away from Russia, he no longer even had a valid passport.
But Russian ballet dancers were extremely popular, so he had no shortage of offers. The Paris Opera offered him 90,000 francs for twenty performances in May 1914, and he was still hoping to dance with Diaghilev. He turned down the Paris Opera’s offer and accepted that of Cambridge Circus in London, although he had said only a few years before that it was an honour for a ballet dancer to dance in a place where dog shows were held and circus acrobats also danced. One well-known critic observed his dancing in London with disappointment: “He no longer dances like a god. Some of that mystical glow that used to surround his dancing is gone.”
It was also the last time Bronja danced with him and the last time she saw her brother dance. Afterwards, Nijinsky had a high fever and probably a nervous breakdown. He was unable to perform in the next three performances and the season was over for him. When he recovered, he went to dance for King Alfonso of Spain, returned to Paris again, but was unable to reconcile with Diaghilev. The latter refused to accept him, but he also met with a cold reception from his former ballet company.
He went to Vienna, where Romola gave birth to a daughter, Kira. He greatly enjoyed the company of his wife and daughter and all unpleasantness was forgotten. When he heard that Archduke Ferdinand and his wife had been killed in Sarajevo, it seemed a distant event that could not affect his life.
Nijinsky Prisoner of war
At the end of July 1914, the couple travelled to Budapest to show their granddaughter to her grandmother. From there they planned to go to St. Petersburg. But on 29 July, Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary and all train departures to the east were cancelled. A few days later a police officer came to them and told them that as citizens of an enemy country they were prisoners of war and would have to spend some time under house arrest. This did not make anyone happy.
Romola’s mother urged her daughter to get a divorce so that she could become a Hungarian citizen again, but Romola refused to live in her mother’s house. Nijinsky was unhappy at not being able to practise and dance, and bitter at seeing the young men going to the front. “All these young men are going to their deaths. And why?”
Then help came from an unexpected quarter. Diaghilev needed a star for his American tour, the King of Spain intervened, the Duke of Alba and the management of the Metropolitan Opera, the US State Department and the Ambassador in Vienna. Thus, in April 1916, Nijinsky and his family set foot on American soil. They were met at the port by Diaghilev and Massine with a bouquet of flowers for Romolo. But this was not a true reconciliation. At dinner together, they discussed money and who owed what to whom, and Nijinsky said to Diaghilev:
“Now I have a family to support, but I am ready to do my best for the Russian Ballet. I am the same, I have not changed in my attitude towards you. I am grateful for your past friendship and it is up to you to decide whether we will unite on the path to the same goal. Please understand me.”
Diaghilev and Massine then returned to Europe, where Diaghilev was to lead a small company of primitive dancers, while Nijinsky remained in America as artistic director of the Russian Ballet, preparing for a tour of America in September. He immediately began preparations for two new ballets, Till Eulenspiegel and Mephisto valse (Mephisto Waltz). But he was a poor organiser. Nobody ever knew exactly when they were going to rehearse and what they were going to rehearse, and when they needed him, he was not there and they had to look for him.
Till was praised by critics in New York, but Nijinsky was not satisfied. He was aware that this was a return to the beginning of his career, when he danced Petrushka. In December, the tour arrived on the West Coast of America and danced to half-empty houses. Audiences in Wichita, Spokane and Tallahassee were not at all prepared to watch a Russian ballet. One racist critic wrote after Scheherazade that he had to restrain himself from jumping on stage and “beating up a black man who was making love to a white princess”.
In Los Angeles, Nijinsky bumped into his admirer Charlie Chaplin. “When Nijinsky appeared on stage, I felt as if I had been electrocuted. I’ve seen some geniuses and Nijinsky is one of them. He was hypnotic, god-like, and every leap he made was a flight into another world.” He invited him to see him filming his movie in Hollywood, which at that time was nothing but a desert with a few wooden shacks. For three days, Nijinsky sat in the desert, getting sadder every day, while Chaplin shot scene after scene of comedy.
In some ways, Nijinsky had a lot in common with the film stars of the 1910s and 1920s. The icons of those years – Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Valentino, Jack Dempsey and many others – came from poor backgrounds, often immigrants. They were all driven forward by ambition, but often could not live with their fame. Mummies and mental confusion were often their ultimate fate.
At Diaghilev’s invitation, Nijinsky and his family soon went on tour to Madrid and then again to South America. He hated it, but Diaghilev almost forced him to take part. He finally realised that he and Diaghilev would never reconcile, because Diaghilev only needed him to fill his coffers and no longer as a choreographer and creative artist.
As the tour continued, his mental state became more and more worrying. Romola was now doing things for him, including writing interviews for the newspapers, as Nijinsky’s thoughts became more and more absent and irritable. He only spoke when he shouted at the dancers in rehearsals, and every wrong step made him terribly upset and he started swearing. In rehearsals, he would always take refuge in the darkest corner of the stage and repeat certain movements endlessly. It seemed that normal life was a completely alien world to him and that others were forcing him to get used to it.
Sometimes he wandered around the city for hours at night, ranting against the war and hiring security guards, convinced that everything that went wrong was an attack on his life. He began to hate appearances. One day in Buenos Aires, he refused to perform. The police had to be called because not performing was a breach of contract. Fearing that he would be arrested, Nijinsky rushed on stage and danced better than ever.
In Montevideo, he complained before the show that his feet were wet and hurt. Before the ballet started, the national anthem and popular tunes were played several times while people argued with him behind the stage and asked him to perform anyway. When he did perform, he did some incredible jumps that raised such dust on stage that the audience in the front row started coughing. The ovation almost never stopped.
The twilight of the mind
Nijinsky and Romola returned to Europe in late autumn 1917 and rented a mountain hut in St. Moritz. After so many years of living in hotels with a pile of suitcases, they realised how pleasant it was to live in their own home. Nijinsky practised every day on the terrace and loved this home life. Winter came early in 1918 and the days changed to nights and snow. There was also a letter from his sister Bronja and his mother. They wrote that the Bolsheviks had taken over and they had taken refuge in Kiev, but that they were fine and thanked him for the money he had sent them.
A ceasefire was then signed and the family hoped for a peaceful future. But Romola noticed that Nijinsky had been taking long walks in the woods for hours, where he was supposed to be meditating. He did not tell her that he was hallucinating at this time. In his diary he described his terrifying walks through streams of blood in the snow. God spoke to him and told him to jump into the abyss. At the last moment he caught himself behind a tree. Then God told him to go home and tell his wife that he had gone mad. He also told him to lie down in the snow, run and come back.
There were other signs that something was wrong, but periods of clear thinking, which could last for days, alternated with a foggy mind. He began to draw strange insects with human faces and glittering eyes. One day, for no reason at all, he attacked an English nanny and tried to strangle her. The terrified girl immediately returned to England.
Romola consulted a local doctor who had studied with Dr Eugene Bleurer , the psychiatrist who invented the name schizophrenia eight years ago. He and Nijinsky did some written tests, then he prescribed a sedative.
In January 1919, Nijinsky decided to give a recital at the Suvretta House Hotel to show how dance is made. There were about 100 people seated in the hall. Nijinsky also took a chair, sat in front of the audience, watched them motionless and remained silent. After almost half an hour of silence, Romola came up to him and whispered to him to start dancing. “How dare you disturb me. I am not a machine. I will dance when I want to!” he shouted in exasperation.
Romola left the hall with tears in her eyes. When she returned, Nijinsky was already climbing to the sound of Chopin’s music. After a short pause, he took rolls of white and black velvet, rolled them out on the floor in the shape of a cross and said to the audience: “I will now dance for you the war with its suffering, devastation and death. You did not prevent this war and you are responsible for it.”
Then, his face twisted with fear and horror, he marched to the sound of the funeral march across the battlefield, stumbling over rotting corpses, walking through trenches full of blood, attacking the enemy, running from tanks, dodging grenades, being wounded, dying.
When he returned home with Romolo, he locked himself in his room and started writing in his diary. His diary, written in bad Russian, is a remarkable document. It was written over a period of 45 days between 19 January and 4 March 1919. In it, Nijinsky wanted to express, describe and justify everything he had been through. He wanted to say that what appeared to be his madness was only a mystical connection with God. “I am God in man. I am what Christ wants. I am Buddha, I am Buddhist and I am any God. I am going mad for my own reasons.”
In March 1919, Romola took him to Zurich to see a psychiatrist, Dr Bleurer, who told her that her husband was terminally mentally ill. Nijinsky then lived in a sanatorium from 1919 to 1923 and then several more times in the 1930s. Periods of lucidity alternated with periods of a clouded mind. He still sometimes danced for visitors to the sanatorium. But his stay there was stressful for him. At that time, little was known about mental illness, and Nijinsky was only able to talk to a Russian-speaking psychiatrist when he returned to the sanatorium for the third time.
In his bad moments, he refused food, masturbated in public, hurt himself, asked for poison and attacked the servers, so much so that he had to be tied to the bed. But in his bright moments, he screamed, “Why am I locked up? Why are all the windows closed? Why am I never alone?”
One day Diaghilev came to see him and told him that he needed him to dance with the Russian Ballet again. But Nijinsky bowed his head, saying, “I can’t, because I’m crazy.” Then Diaghilev was gone, having died of diabetes in 1929. The list of drugs that Nijinsky had to take all these years was extremely long; insulin, bromide, babiturates, morphine, scopolamine, opium and many more.
Romola was convinced that Nijinsky would be better off with her than in a sanatorium, so they moved to Budapest, where they were caught up in World War II. They survived the heavy Allied bombing in 1944 and 1945. One day, Romola came home to find Nijinsky standing quietly in a room with no ceiling, covered in a thick layer of dust.
After the war, they came back to Switzerland in 1946. Romola finally managed to obtain a British passport and a residence permit for Nijinsky. They rented a house near Windsor. A journalist who met him at the time described him as a complacent suburban shopkeeper. When Nijinsky watched some ballet rehearsals, he showed no interest in ballet, and only cheered up when tea was brought to him.
They moved to Sussex in 1950, but his health was deteriorating. On 8 April 1950, after a short illness, he died peacefully in Romola’s arms of kidney failure.
