Review: Ostwald, Vaslav Nijinsky (1991)

[truepenny]

Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap Into Madness by Peter Ostwald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[my copy is signed "To Patricia" from Nijinsky's daughter Tamara]

This is an excellent biography of a very difficult subject, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who "went mad" at the age of 30 and spent the second half of his life essentially mute. Even before that, Nijinsky was notoriously bad at communicating except through dance, so most of what Ostwald has to work with is what other people said about him. This is particularly problematic in the case of Nijinsky's wife Romola, who set herself up as the authority on all things Nijinsky and wrote two books about him, but who was demonstrably untruthful. Ostwald does a marvelous job of combing through Nijinsky's incomplete medical records and other sources both to assess Romola's narrative and to piece together an alternative story.

Not that there's a great deal of story to be had. Nijinsky's inner life remains inaccessible. Once he ceased to dance, it seems likely that that inner life was cruelly impoverished. This is a very sad biography, the story of someone whose enormous talent went largely wasted, in no small part, as Ostwald points out, because of his inability to work with others. His dreadful communication skills and his perfectionism combined to make him a nightmare for other dancers trying to work with him on his own (radically innovative) choreography, while his "temperament"---his depressive apathies and manic temper tantrums, both signs of his underlying psychological problems---made him equally a nightmare for those trying to get him to work, to perform regularly and to schedule, necessary for anyone wanting a career as a dancer. There's no doubt that Nijinsky was a genius, equally no doubt that that genius was something Nijinsky's flawed and tragically fragile psyche could not maintain without the help of the people (like his sister Bronislava) whom he drove away.



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Comments

[anne]

Was there any mention or quotation of Nijinsky's diary? I remember some scandal about it when I was in ballet fandom...a new, unexpurgated edition, maybe. My mother read it and said it wasn't scandalous, just full of sex, which I wasn't interested in at that time. So I've been mildly curious ever since, but not enough to look it up.

And what was Diaghilev's part in Nijinsky's breakdown, in Ostwald's opinion? Some say it was all him, some say he was 100% not a factor...

[truepenny]

He thinks Diaghilev was a factor, certainly, but also part of a larger pattern. And, yes, he talks about the (unexpurgated) diary, but doesn't find it to hold deep or secret truths about Nijinsky's interior life. It certainly doesn't explain what happened to him.

[anne]

Thank you!