Vaslav Nijinsky

Vaslav Nijinsky: The Leap That Never Came Down

Audiences who saw Vaslav Nijinsky dance in Paris before the First World War swore he seemed to hang in the air a beat longer than gravity should allow. No film survives to settle the argument. What survives instead is a body of choreography so disruptive it provoked one of the most notorious riots in the history of the performing arts, a professional career that lasted barely nine years, and a private descent into mental illness so total that its final decades left almost nothing but drawings, diaries, and legend.

A Childhood Inside the Theater

Nijinsky was born around March 12, 1890, most likely in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, though sources disagree on the exact year, with some accounts placing his birth as early as 1888. Both of his parents, Thomas Nijinsky and Eleonora Bereda, were professional dancers, and the household's itinerant theatrical life meant young Vaslav grew up around technique rather than discovering it later. At age ten he entered the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, the training ground that had produced generations of Russia's finest dancers, and studied there under the noted teacher Nikolai Legat, who recognized something unusual in the boy despite his reported struggles with academic subjects outside geometry. He graduated with honors in 1907 and joined the Mariinsky Theatre that same year, entering Russia's most prestigious ballet company as one of its most promising young talents.

Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes

The defining relationship of Nijinsky's career began around this time, when he met Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario who would become both his artistic patron and his romantic partner. Diaghilev built the Ballets Russes into the most consequential dance company of the early twentieth century, and he built much of its early reputation around Nijinsky specifically, bringing him to Paris from 1909 onward for seasons that scandalized and electrified audiences in roughly equal measure. In 1911, a controversy over a costume Nijinsky wore for a Mariinsky performance — considered too revealing for the imperial stage — led to his dismissal from the company, a rupture that had the effect of tying him entirely to Diaghilev's touring troupe for the next several years, the period that would produce essentially everything he is remembered for.

The Dancer

As a performer, Nijinsky was celebrated above all for his elevation — the height and apparent weightlessness of his jump — and for an unusual gift for physical transformation between roles, disappearing into characters as different as the sorrowful puppet of "Petrushka," the sensuous rose-spirit of "Le Spectre de la Rose," and the exoticized golden slave of "Schéhérazade." Critics of the period described his technical vocabulary in the language of classical virtuosity, noting his command of demanding jumps such as entrechats executed with unusual height and precision, but it was the interpretive range — a puppet in one ballet, a faun in the next, a god of spring in a third — that set him apart from dancers who were merely technically accomplished.

The Choreographer Who Broke the Rules

Around 1912, Nijinsky began choreographing his own works, and here his impact outlasted his performing career by decades. "L'Après-midi d'un Faune" (1912) replaced classical ballet's vertical, turned-out vocabulary with flattened, frieze-like profile movements borrowed from ancient Greek vase painting, and closed with a gesture explicit enough to cause a public outcry. "Jeux" (1913) experimented with a modern, almost cubist arrangement of bodies on stage. And "Le Sacre du Printemps" — "The Rite of Spring" — premiered in Paris in May 1913 to a response that has become one of the most mythologized nights in performance history: stamping, deliberately anti-graceful movement set against Stravinsky's dissonant, rhythmically savage score triggered jeering, fighting, and general uproar in the audience, a reaction so severe that police were reportedly called to the theater. These works are now credited among dance historians as founding gestures of twentieth-century modernism in ballet, deliberately rejecting the fluid lines and narrative grace of classical technique in favor of angularity, primitivism, and rhythmic shock.

Marriage, Rupture, and Illness

In 1913, while the Ballets Russes toured South America without Diaghilev, who had stayed behind, Nijinsky married the Hungarian dancer Romola de Pulszky, who had pursued him with single-minded determination. Diaghilev, on learning of the marriage, dismissed Nijinsky from the company almost immediately, ending the professional and personal partnership that had defined the dancer's entire adult career to that point. The couple had two daughters, Kyra, born in 1914, and Tamara, born in 1920. The outbreak of the First World War trapped Nijinsky, an enemy national, in Austria-Hungary, where he was interned as a civilian prisoner from 1914 to 1916; a brief reunion with Diaghilev's company for an American tour in 1916 met only tepid success. Signs of what was later understood as schizophrenia had begun appearing as early as spring 1914, and they worsened steadily. His final public performance, a solo recital titled "Marriage with God," took place in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in January 1919 — an evening witnesses described as disturbing rather than triumphant, a preview of the illness that would consume the rest of his life. From 1918 onward he moved between Swiss psychiatric clinics, and though he continued to draw prolifically and even sketch out ideas for a dance notation system during periods of relative lucidity, he never performed publicly again. He died in London on April 8, 1950, and was buried in Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.

Why Vaslav Is Called a Genius

Nijinsky's genius operated on two levels that are worth separating. The first was purely physical: an elevation and interpretive range that contemporaries, critics, and later ballet historians alike have described in terms usually reserved for once-in-a-generation performers, the kind of natural instrument that cannot be taught, only trained. That claim is essentially uncontested and rests on eyewitness testimony rather than any objective record, since no film of his dancing survives — itself an unusual gap that has let his legend grow somewhat unchecked by comparison. The second, more defensible claim to genius is creative: as a choreographer working in barely three years, he produced a handful of works — "Faune," "Jeux," "Rite of Spring" — that dance historians now treat as a hinge point between nineteenth-century classical ballet and twentieth-century modernism, deliberately breaking the vocabulary he himself had mastered as a performer. That is a much stronger and more falsifiable case for genius: an artist inventing a new movement language, not merely executing an old one exceptionally well. The honest complication is that his choreographic career was so brief, and his later decades so consumed by illness, that the full shape of what he might have become was cut off before it could mature or be tested by more than a handful of works.

Legacy

Nijinsky's active career spanned less than a decade, yet "Rite of Spring" and "Afternoon of a Faun" remain touchstones cited whenever dance historians locate the birth of ballet modernism, and his name still functions as shorthand for a kind of physical genius dance has rarely produced twice. What he might have choreographed with another thirty years of health is one of the great unanswerable questions in the history of the art form.