Nijinsky, by Lucy Moore – review

The first biography of Vaslav Nijinsky, which appeared in 1934, was written by his wife Romola with the help of two ghosts — the young Lincoln Kirstein and Little Blue Bird, an obliging spirit called up by a psychic medium to provide information from beyond the grave. Needless to say, the book wasn’t entirely accurate; and nor, two years later, was her edition of Nijinsky’s confessional diaries, a stream-of-consciousness record of his descent into madness, which she censored, restructured and cut by over a third. It took Richard Buckle’s now classic life of the dancer (published in l971 and amended after Romola’s death) to sort fact from fiction and recreate the phenomenal impact of Nijinsky and Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet.

From 1909 to l913 audiences in Paris and then London idolised this ‘soaring angel’, whose exotic beauty and tendril-like arms were offset by massive gnarled thighs and a virile technique. Classical ballet was then a dying art and the male dancer there only to support the ballerina, but in the androgynous roles created for him by Fokine — Les Sylphides, Schéhérazde and Le Spectre de la Rose — Nijinsky became the main object of admiration and desire.

As the feline, negro slave in Schéhérazade, clad in gold harem pants, his naked torso painted silver-grey with strings of pearls encircling his long neck, Nijinsky embodied the thrilling orientalism, glamour and decadence of the Saison Russe. And yet he was even more remarkable as the anti-hero Petrouchka, a piteously ugly sawdust puppet with ashen face, stooping gait, knock-knees and dangling feet. On stage, Nijinsky the star disappeared completely, and, for Sarah Bernhardt, he proved himself to be the finest actor in the world.

The plight of Petrouchka, enslaved by the merciless Showman, was seen at the time to be a parable for Nijinsky’s relationship with Diaghilev, who had moulded him as an artist and jealously kept him in thrall.