Vaslav Nijinksy, Dancing Queen

by Lorette C. Luzajic

Every good little girl wants to grow up to be a ballerina, and Vaslav Nijinsky was no exception. Born in the Ukraine in 1889 to two dancers, Vaslav was a child prodigy who grew into one of the greatest ballet dancers of all time. He was famed for his exquisite grace, his impossible flexibility, for his gravity-defying leaps, and for dancing en pointe like the ladies. But this genius of felinity and motion was stark raving mad.

Though Vaslav’s artistic talents were obvious from early childhood, his other communication skills were sorely lacking, and some wondered if he was mentally retarded. His colleagues noticed he was temperamental, to say the least. Sometimes he was prone to silence or strange verbal tangents. He was at turns paranoid and narcissistic. And his brilliant emotional intensity on stage and as a choreographer often scandalized the audiences of the early 1900s. During The Rites of Spring, now understood as a masterpiece, and predecessor of modern dance, his erratic, erotic choreography inspired riots complete with fistfights and hysterical women screeching. As Jeffrey Kottler writes in Divine Madness, “The audiences of Paris were dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century…that first performance is now regarded as one of the seminal events in the history of dance.”

Vaslav was still a young man when he began having nervous breakdowns, and four years after The Rites, his career was over. There is no doubt of the pressures and demands of ballet dancing. The sheer physicality is exhausting. And the kind of artistic intensity that drove Nijinsky is often associated with madness. But more than likely, both dance and insanity were Vaslav’s genetic fate.

Instability showed on both sides of his gene pool. His maternal grandmother committed suicide- by starving herself to death. Eleonora had already lost her father, a heavy gambler, to ‘heart failure’ that may have been suicide. And so, Eleonora was a tempestuous personality, frequently depressed, hostile, and controlling. Vaslav’s father was also intense. Wooing Vaslav’s mother to no avail, he solved the problem of unrequited courtship by putting a revolver to his head and threatening to blow his brains out if she refused to marry him.

Nijinsky began his studies at the top, at Russia’s Imperial Ballet School, still one of the best in the world. Other kids were jealous, and thought he acted like a girl, and they decided to put a stop to the Nijinksy legend before it began. One day, some boys poured soap on the floor after daring him to leap over a bar. Vaslav fell so hard that he suffered massive internal bleeding, and almost died. He was immobilized for months in hospital. The injury most certainly contributed to his schizophrenia later, but it did not stop him from getting back en pointe. He was more determined than ever to excel at his art and leave his classmates in the dust.

Like most other teenagers, Nijinksy had another obsession in addition. Sex. His memoirs show that he struggled to avoid masturbation, which he believed would be the “death of my dance.” He shared the lapses from self-celibacy with a boy at school, comparing notes. In his later teens, he entered the gay demimonde of Russian dance. It was common then (as perhaps now) for artists to offer special favours to those with connections and power. When the wealthy Russian Prince Pavel Lvov pursued Nijinksy, he entered into a kind of arranged love affair and began mingling with the rich and famous. The Prince decked him in fine clothes, but both parties were less than enchanted in the boudoir. They didn’t last a year, but it was Lvov who introduced Vaslav to Sergei Diaghilev, the most important ballet producer and promoter of the time.

“I hated him, but pretended, because I knew that my mother and I would die of hunger otherwise,” Vaslav wrote in his journals. He never did grow to enjoy sex with Diaghilev, who was nearly 40 to his 18. But he did love his mentor’s attention and devotion. Vaslav blamed Mom for what he had to do, but he soaked up the celebrity his lover helped him become. He loved the screaming fans, and the idea that he was among the creative geniuses of Russia, like his beloved Tolstoy.

So Nijinsky was a superstar, Diaghilev had his boy toy, and mama was well fed. But Nijinsky was depressed for being as depraved as his cheating father, to whom he had not spoken for years, not since he learned that Dad had another family on the side. Vaslav took after him, unfaithful to his lover, for the young man was secretly obsessed with visiting “tarts.” A nice lady wouldn’t do- he had a thing for prostitutes. He was so famous that he had to disguise himself in shoddy clothing when he went trolling. The secret was out when he came down with gonorrhea. When he returned to health, he decided to tour South America in 1913.

Enter Romola Pulszky, a high society belle, and a fan obsessed with converting and marrying the celebrity dancer. Hearing he was going abroad, she ordered a space on the ship. Nijinsky was once again enthralled by the attention of an important beauty, and saw the easy way out of his current arrangement. After a mere month, they married in Argentina. Though Romola quickly became pregnant, their sex life was terrible. He was simply not attracted to her, despite her beauty, and continued secretly whoring, occasionally with men. Romola was later to take her own lady lovers, including a man who thought he was a lady, but the pair remained married some 35 years.

Diaghilev fired the dancer upon his return. Naively, Nijinsky had not anticipated that his mentor would dare go on without his star of dance. He created his own dance company, but he was too temperamental, unorganized, and spaced out. The stress of his poor project management skills led to fights with stagehands and dancers, and though he had some engagements, with the King of Spain, for example, he could not focus for long with his wild mood swings.

His new family moved to Budapest, where Nijinksy swung wildly between catatonic periods of depression and manic hallucinations of whole ballets in his head. His weird habits and scribblings convinced the authorities, strangely, that he was a Russian spy. No one could read his manic scrawls and believed them to be in military code. Ridiculously, mathematicians and strategists were called upon to decipher the spy’s notations, but it was only markings describing the ideas literally dancing in Nijinsky’s head. It was the First World War, and Vaslav couldn’t return to Russia for fear of being drafted, but this peculiar episode helped plant paranoia and spy tales in his fragile mind, recurring themes for the rest of his life.

Diaghilev, hearing of this strange state of affairs and still in love with the dancer, decided to bring him back to work. He foolishly put Nijinsky in charge, alone, of a tour to America. But Nijinsky had become increasingly enraged and was often incoherent as schizophrenia began to manifest strongly, following its usual pattern of building intensity after age 20. Though Nijinksy was the most innovative choreographer in the world, he could not keep it together, and members of the troupe quit. Nijinsky took to his bed. The dancers were left to their own devices, and made things up as they went along on opening night. Nijinksy limped into his own role, improvised with abandon, and no one could tell it was a disaster. The Americans had not yet seen such soaring leaps or the stunning grace of ballet, and they marveled at the performance. No one- except, oddly, comedian Charlie Chaplin- could tell that Nijinsky was headed to a massive nervous breakdown.

His madness began to go in and out of full swing. The schizophrenia adhered to all the telltale markers- fast flowing unhinged word associations and tangents that give way to complete incoherence, the inability to discern appropriateness of actions, full blown psychotic episodes mixed with catatonia, and, the idea that one is God, or is receiving special signals from Him.

Nijinsky wrote memoirs at exactly the time of the breaking of all reason, leaving an unusual legacy of a written descent into complete madness. His tangents in this book show paragraphs that are several pages long and jolt from topic to topic by association alone, a hallmark of the way the schizophrenic (and to a lesser degree, the bipolar and the ADD) mind loses focus. For example, he writes, “I ate…fried potatoes and beans. I like beans, only they are dry. I do not like dry beans, because there is no life in them. Switzerland is sick because it is full of mountains. In Switzerland people are dry because there is no life in them. I have a dry maid because she does not feel. I do not like Zurich because it is a dry town…I do not like dry people, and therefore I do not like business people.”

Sadly, not even morphine or barbiturates could calm his psychoses. He saw dozens of doctors to no avail. He was tortured with insulin shock therapy. Romola even consulted with Freud, but the good doctor felt analysis could be of no help. By 1930, he was dangerous to be around. One doctor found Nijinksy raving and smearing feces on the walls, breaking out spontaneously into dance.

There is no happy ending to this story. The last days were no pretty picture. Here was the most sensuous, effete, beautiful, weightless, elegant dancer of all time reduced by schizophrenia to raving lunacy, now a fat man playing with his poop, and frequently whipping it out and wanking during dinner while cackling loudly. He even tried to kill Romola with a knife. Paranoid, muttering, and in poor health, he died of heart disease and kidney failure in 1950.

But his rambling memoir also revealed the softness behind the rage and the compulsions Nijinsky could not control. “I am not an evil man. I love everyone. I do not want war…there must be no quarrels. I am love. I am a man with love…I am a human being and all people are human beings. I do not want horrors. I want heaven on earth,” he wrote. “I am infinity. I am everything. I am life in infinity. I am mind, and mind is infinite. I will never die.”

* * *

Lorette C. Luzajic is a Toronto writer and artist, the girl behind thegirlcanwrite.net. A journalism grad, she has published hundreds of poems, and her reviews, profiles, columns, and features have appeared everywhere from Adbusters to Dog Fancy. Her favourite thing in the world is getting to know interesting people, so she started a project called Fascinating People: gossip for smart people at www.fascinatingpeople.wordpress.com. She writes Fascinating Writers for Bookslut.com. She is also The Spice Girl at Gremolata.com, a foodie’s paradise. Lorette’s first book was The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Her second, Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life, is also available, and her third, Dendrite Pandemonium will be released later this year. Lorette lives in her library with her cats.

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