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Letter to a Man: Nijinsky by Mikhail Baryshnikov

In December 1917, Vaslav Nijinsky, at that time the most celebrated male dancer in the Western world, moved into a villa in St. Moritz with his wife, Romola, and their three-year-old daughter. His relations with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the company in which he had made his name, were now severed, and with a war on, it was impossible for him to seek other engagements. So he and Romola had decided to retreat to neutral Switzerland and wait for peace. By the time of the armistice, however, Nijinsky had begun to go insane. His famous diary, written in six and a half weeks, from January 19 to March 4, 1919, was the record of his thoughts as that was happening. To my knowledge, it is the only sustained, on-the-spot (not retrospective) written account, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis. Other important artists have gone mad—Hölderlin, Schumann, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Artaud—but none of them left us a record like this. The diary was first published in 1936, in a drastically expurgated English edition. For over sixty years now, this has been the only available English-language version. In February, at last, a complete English text will be published, in a new translation by Kyril FitzLyon.


Secrets of Nijinsky

Nijinsky was born in Kiev around 1889 to a pair of Polish dancers who worked on the touring circuit—opera houses, summer theaters, circuses—in Poland and Russia.

Nijinsky may have been unstable from his youth. His older brother, Stassik, was mentally unsound and had to be hospitalized as a teenager. If, as Bronislava Nijinska suggests, Stassik’s troubles began when he fell out of a window onto his head as a child, his condition would have had little to do with Nijinsky’s. But there were other circumstances. Peter Ostwald, in his 1991 psychiatric biography, Vaslav Nijinsky, speculates that the dancer may have had a genetic predisposition to depression, through his mother. (Her mother, upon being widowed, had starved herself to death.) Ostwald also raises the possibility that Nijinsky may have suffered brain damage as a result of a serious fall that he took at age twelve.

In any case, it is clear that at least by late adolescence Nijinsky was not like other boys. At eighteen, during his first season in the Imperial Ballet, he stopped dancing one night in the middle of the Act I pas de trois of Swan Lake and began taking his bows while the orchestra was still playing. If he was unbalanced at this point, the fame that now began gathering around his name may have unsettled him further. And if he was able to manage celebrity at that time, what was the effect on this quiet boy when, two years later, upon his debut with the Ballets Russes, the Parisians began referring to him as le dieu de la danse? Theater artists must always have some difficulty factoring into their minds the fantasies that they excite in the audience, but in Nijinsky’s case the fantasies were more elaborate and the mind more vulnerable. It is not impossible that his idea, endlessly reiterated in the diary, that he was God began with the experience of being called a god by the Parisian audiences.



















After the performance at the Suvretta House, says Romola, “I never felt the same again.” Apparently, she had already confided in a doctor, a friend of the family. She does not give his name, but Nijinsky’s diary does. He was Hans Curt Frenkel, a young physician attached to one of St. Moritz’s resort hotels. According to Ostwald, Frenkel’s specialty was sports injuries, but during his medical training in Zurich he had attended lectures by the renowned psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who in 1911 had invented the term “schizophrenia.” Frenkel was also familiar with Jungian theories of psychopathology. Thinking to help Nijinsky, he began visiting him almost every day. He tried to induce him to reveal his private thoughts; he warned him that his behavior was upsetting Romola. But Nijinsky only got worse. Day after day, he would retreat to his study to make drawings of staring eyes or to write in his diary, which he would not let Frenkel or Romola see. (In any case, it was in Russian, a language that neither of them could read.) Finally, Frenkel wrote to his old professor, Bleuler, asking if he would see Nijinsky. Bleuler agreed. Meanwhile, Romola had apparently summoned her mother and stepfather to come from Budapest and help her take Nijinsky to Zurich. They arrived, and the group—Nijinsky, Romola, Emilia Márkus, and her husband, Oscar Párdány—departed for Zurich. The diary ends on that day, March 4, 1919, as Nijinsky is waiting for the cab to take them to the train station.

In Zurich Romola first went to Bleuler alone. After listening to her account of Nijinsky’s behavior, he told her, “The symptoms you describe in the case of an artist and a Russian do not in themselves prove any mental disturbances.” But the next day, when he saw Nijinsky, he changed his mind. After what Romola says was an interview of ten minutes, Bleuler described Nijinsky in his notes as “a confused schizophrenic with mild manic excitement.” The doctor showed Nijinsky out of his office, asked Romola to come in, and told her that her husband was incurably insane. When she returned to the waiting room, the dancer looked up at her and uttered the words now famous in the Nijinsky legend: “Femmka [little wife], you are bringing me my death-warrant.”

Had it been a death warrant, it might have been more merciful. The couple returned to their hotel, and that night Nijinsky locked himself in his room, refusing to come out. After twenty-four hours, the police were called, and they forced open the door. Nijinsky was taken to the Burghölzli University Psychiatric Hospital, where Bleuler was the director. He went without protest. Three days later he was sent to nearby Kreuzlingen, to the Bellevue Sanatorium, a luxurious and humane establishment directed at that time by Ludwig Binswanger, one of the founders of existential therapy. After three months at Bellevue, Nijinsky was hallucinating, tearing his hair out, attacking his attendants, declaring that his limbs belonged to someone else, not him.


It is impossible to know whether this decline was part of the natural course of Nijinsky’s illness or whether it was the result of hospitalization. The hospitalization was clearly traumatic. In his lucid periods, according to the Bellevue records, he would cry out, “Why am I locked up? Why are the windows closed, why am I never left alone?” Romola later claimed that Nijinsky’s deterioration was brought on by the episode of the police breaking open his hotel room door and taking him to Burghölzli. She said that her mother had engineered this behind her back. But Nijinsky records at the end of the diary that when they were about to leave for Zurich, Romola came to him and asked him to tell Kyra that he would not be coming back. If that is true, then hospitalizing Nijinsky was part of Romola’s plan for the trip. Nijinsky does not seem to have understood this fully. He took his diary with him on the journey, for, as he says, he intended to find a publisher for it in Zurich. Instead, it was turned over to the doctors of Burghölzli, who copied out passages of it into their records to support their diagnosis.

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“Letter to a Man” is not about Nijinsky the artist, but about Nijinsky the schizophrenic of his later years, from whose diaries the text, by Christian Dumais-Lvowski, is drawn. The script is a collage of confused thoughts that revolve around various themes: his hatred of his mother-in-law; his delusions of grandeur; his guilty thoughts about sex; his tortured past with the impresario Serge Diaghilev, who made him an international sensation with the Ballets Russes. The title comes from a letter Nijinsky addressed to Diaghilev with those words.

We see Diaghilev only as a two-dimensional puppet gliding by at the back of the stage, as Mr. Baryshnikov is the sole performer here, although the body of a soldier from World War I — Nijinsky’s pacifism is a theme in the diaries — is splayed across the stage at one point.

The text is almost all heard in voice-over. We hear Mr. Baryshnikov, speaking in Russian and English, but also Mr. Wilson and Lucinda Childs, who collaborated on the movement as well. (Is she meant to be Nijinsky’s wife, Romola, who edited the first published version of the diaries, heavily expurgated?) Supertitles appear above and on the sides of the stage, although they are generally not necessary, since the Russian and the English seem mostly to be the same repeated phrases.

Mr. Baryshnikov is a captivating presence. We first glimpse him as Nijinsky in a silvery box of light, straitjacketed in a chair, but he is soon at loose across the stage, engaging in fleet-footed movement, or enacting a ghostly pas de deux with a chair (meaning what, exactly?), or merely doffing one of his black jackets with a spellbinding intricacy that holds the attention fast.

Source: NYT

Review: Baryshnikov Explores the Troubled Mind of a Dance Genius

Espace Pierre Cardin Paris

Deux monstres sacrés à nouveau réunis, cette fois-ci avec le légendaire Journal de Nijinski.

Virtuose prodigieux, Nijinski renouvela l’art de la danse au sein des Ballets russes que dirigeait Serge Diaghilev dans les premières années du XXe siècle. Nijinski est aussi l’auteur d’un journal secret, tenu pendant six mois dans lequel il note ses préoccupations au sujet de l’art, de la religion et de ses relations avec ses proches. Ce texte fébrile rédigé par un homme troublé à la raison vacillante fascine depuis longtemps Mikhail Baryshnikov. À l’invitation de Robert Wilson, il interprète aujourd’hui ce témoignage bouleversant d’un artiste en train de sombrer dans la folie. Le titre du spectacle, Letter to a Man, renvoie à Diaghilev dont Nijinski fut l’amant avant de le quitter pour épouser Romola de Pulszky. Leur séparation fut sans doute le point de départ de sa maladie.

Hugues Le Tanneur


Vaslav Nijinsky

Vaslav Nijinsky (also Vatslav) 12 March 1889/1890– 8 April 1950 was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer of Polish descent, cited as the greatest male dancer of the early 20th century. He was celebrated for his virtuosity and for the depth and intensity of his characterizations. He could dance en pointe, a rare skill among male dancers at the time and was admired for his seemingly gravity-defying leaps.



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