Abstract
So much has been written about Vaslav Nijinsky (Vatslav Nizhinskii) but the mystery stubbornly persists. People said he was the greatest dancer of the twentieth century and maybe of all time, but it is impossible to know how he would be judged today, since only posed photos and written accounts survive. He was a choreographer so ahead of his time that audiences protested (L’Après-midi d’un faune), even rioted (Le Sacre du printemps). Although other radical ideas were circulating, he still invented from scratch a modernist aesthetic light years from the normal playing-to-the-audience gracefulness of ballet convention. However, only one of his works survive, the anti-ballet L’Après-midi d’un faune, a tabula rasa reinvention of dance, using simple walking steps to travel not with but through Debussy’s music. (Attempts to reconstruct the other ballets can only offer oblique impressions.) Then, to enhance the mystique, in 1919, aged just 30, Nijinsky was diagnosed as completely mad. He would be institutionalized, liable to patterns of aggression and seeming imbecility, locked in catatonic states and subjected to insulin shock treatment. It was an unspeakable tragedy that defeated the greatest psychiatrists of his day.
Who or what was to blame? His genes? (His older brother, Stanislas, ended up in an asylum, although as an infant he was thought to have been brain-damaged by a fall from a window.) Nijinsky’s impoverished early life, with a mostly absent father? His relationship with Diaghilev, arch-enabler but also arch-manipulator? Or his impulsive marriage to Romola de Pulszky? Peter Ostwald’s Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness (London, 1991), which gives a psychiatrist’s view, focuses mostly on the symptoms and proposes a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. To this, Lucy Moore’s Nijinsky, published in the centenary year of Sacre, adds the further possibility of some degree of autism.
In the apparent absence of fresh source material Moore’s book is a synthesis of existing literature, including Romola’s highly romanticized accounts. She does, though, contribute useful insights, colourful details and persuasive speculations. She is surely right to characterize Nijinsky as predominantly heterosexual, an immature teenager wanting both to advance his career and achieve financial security for his family through homosexual protectors. Half Diaghilev’s age, he was in thrall to Diaghilev’s intelligence, sophistication and domineering personality, but not physically attracted to him. Moore usefully elaborates on Joan Acocella’s edition of Nijinsky’s Diary (New York, 1999), written by Nijinsky between 19 January and 4 March 1919 and, in Acocella’s words, ‘the only sustained, on-the-spot (not retrospective) written account, by a major artist of the experience of entering psychosis’ (p. 205). Like Acocella she surmises that his astonishing creativity might have been rooted in his neurological profile. Untalkative and prone to sudden rages, he had long inhabited another world before being diagnosed. Stravinsky considered his personality had worrying gaps, but later came to understand them ‘as a kind of stigmata’ (p. 210).
At times startlingly observant, Nijinsky’s natural response to what he saw and understood was movement, not words. As well as possessing a jump that seemed to hover in the air, he had an otherworldly quality and became ‘exalted, vibrant, free and so ecstatic’ when he danced (p. 22). Moore might have explored in more depth his extraordinary ability to immerse himself completely in a role – tantalizingly glimpsed in photos – and become in body and mind an animal (Faune), a misshapen puppet (Petrushka) or a slave (Scheherazade). It is remarkable that a performer with such outstanding technical accomplishments should have been so willing to submit to the unflattering or non-virtuosic demands of an expressive role. Where earlier in answer to a question about the difficulty of jumping he had responded ‘No! No! Not difficult. You have just to go up and then pause a little up there’ (p. 58), later he would impatiently say ‘I am not a jumper, I am an artist’ (p. 122). In Fokine’s Spectre de la rose the two sides of his talent were in complete harmony. He was an ethereally genderless presence as the spirit of a rose, his floating art-nouveau continuum of infinitely graceful movement seeming, the critic Cyril Beaumont wrote, ‘too beautiful, too flawless, too intangible to be real’ (p. 86). Considering this solo’s stamina-sapping nine-minute duration, the exiting grand jeté leap was an extraordinary feat of strength and control, leaving spectators with the impression that he was never going to come down.
Where Richard Buckle’s Nijinsky (London, 1971) says the dancer needed a mask and felt less comfortable as a romantic hero such as Albrecht in Giselle, Moore writes that Nijinsky’s interpretation of Albrecht elevated what was ‘traditionally just an auxiliary part’ (!) to a major acting role (p. 78). Buckle was a leading dance critic and his study remains the most scholarly and reliable. Moore, who admits she is not a dance specialist, clearly has never seen Giselle or indeed Petrushka and abundantly sprinkles her text with real clangers. For instance, serf companies came well after, not before, the founding of the imperial ballet school and company in 1738 (p. 34); the sweeping statement that ‘there were no classically trained male dancers outside Russia’ at the turn of the century would have Albert Aveline and Léo Staats spinning in their graves (p. 58).
Accessibility seems a major aim and it was presumably to avoid off-puttingly academic superscripted numbers in the text that endnotes have been ordered by page number. However, by the final endnote synchrony has slipped disastrously to being six pages out from the actual text. Also frustrating is the index which is sometimes wrong and far from exhaustive.
This, though, only detracts a little from the unparalleled vividness of Moore’s writing, which is able to bring to life the backstage atmosphere of the Ballets Russes and communicate great empathy for Nijinsky. This is a book well suited to a broad readership.