Vaslav Nijinsky

Vaslav Nijinsky (Polish: Waclaw Nizynski) was born on 12 March 1889 - some sources give 1890 - in Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine. His parents, Tomasz Nizynski and Eleonora Bereda, were Polish dancers touring the western territories of the empire, and he was born into a theatrical household in which dance was work, language and family life. Around the turn of the century he entered the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, whose disciplined academic training shaped a formidable technique; his family background and unusual dramatic responsiveness made him far more than a display virtuoso. Contemporaries repeatedly emphasized his elevation, musical precision and capacity to transform physically into sharply different characters - though no moving image of him dancing is known to survive.

After graduating, Nijinsky joined the Imperial Russian Ballet in 1907 and rose with exceptional speed. The decisive turn came in 1909, when the impresario Serge Diaghilev presented the first Paris season of the company soon known as the Ballets Russes, and Nijinsky became one of its immediate sensations. In works choreographed by Michel Fokine - Le Pavillon d'Armide, Les Sylphides, Scheherazade, Le Spectre de la rose and Petrushka - he could appear princely, sensual, weightless, uncanny or heartbreakingly puppet-like. These were collective achievements: Fokine supplied the choreography, designers such as Alexandre Benois and Leon Bakst shaped the visual worlds, and partners including Tamara Karsavina and Anna Pavlova were essential. His fame should illuminate that artistic network rather than erase it.

Nijinsky and Diaghilev were also lovers, an intimate relationship that existed alongside an unequal professional one in which Diaghilev was employer, advocate and gatekeeper. Under his direction Nijinsky expanded from star performer to choreographer. His first ballet, L'Apres-midi d'un faune (1912), set Debussy's music within a stage picture designed by Bakst, asking performers to move in profile through angular, flattened poses inspired by ancient art and resisting both classical turnout and the score's luxuriant flow. Its final gesture and erotic charge provoked controversy, but its deeper innovation was formal: it treated the body as a graphic element and let choreography converse independently with music and design.

In 1913 Nijinsky produced two still more radical works. Jeux, to another Debussy score, placed ambiguous social and erotic play inside a modern tennis game. Le Sacre du printemps joined Igor Stravinsky's music, Nicholas Roerich's scenario and designs, Diaghilev's production and Nijinsky's choreography in an imagined ritual community - its bent knees, turned-in legs, stamping weight and demanding counts contradicting the lifted ease associated with classical ballet. The premiere's audience disturbance has become a durable legend, but its scale and causes remain debated, with the score, choreography, subject and publicity all contributing; Marie Rambert helped communicate the complex counts to the dancers. Because the original choreography left the repertory, modern stagings are evidence-based reconstructions, not preserved footage of 1913.

During a 1913 South American tour without Diaghilev, Nijinsky married Romola de Pulszky in Buenos Aires, and Diaghilev dismissed him from the Ballets Russes soon afterward - a chronology best held with its full complexity rather than reduced to a jealous anecdote. An attempt to lead his own company in London struggled, and the First World War then trapped Nijinsky, Romola and their daughter Kyra in Austria-Hungary as Russian subjects. In 1916 he returned to the Ballets Russes for an American tour and choreographed his fourth and final ballet, Till Eulenspiegel, to music by Richard Strauss. His last professional public performance came in Montevideo in late September 1917, amid financial strain, wartime dislocation and worsening psychological distress.

The family settled near St Moritz in late 1917, where Nijinsky wrote the notebooks now known as his diary during the winter of 1918-19. On 19 January 1919 he gave a final public improvisation at the Suvretta House hotel; that March the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler diagnosed schizophrenia, and Nijinsky entered a long sequence of hospitals and treatments. His life should not be flattened into a romantic formula in which illness explains genius: the medical record belongs to its own moment, later clinicians have reassessed the diagnosis, and the interventions he underwent included ones now recognized as traumatic. He spent most of the next three decades in care across Switzerland, France, Hungary and England, died in London on 8 April 1950, and was reinterred at Montmartre Cemetery in Paris in 1953. His performing career lasted little more than a decade and his choreographic output is counted as four ballets - yet the compact scale of that work magnified rather than diminished its impact.