Story of a Dancer

Shut away in a Swiss sanatorium is the man the world once knew as the greatest of dancers. For months at a time he speaks no word. He still hears the echo of War guns. His dead, dumb eyes see soldiers dying around him. Sixteen years have passed since Vaslav Nijinsky danced in the U. S. But this winter the re-enact- ment of many of Nijinsky's great roles by the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe has aroused fresh talk of his genius (TIME, Jan. i). Next week will be published the story of Nijinsky's life, written by his wife.* Romola de Pulszky was a 17-year-old Hungarian schoolgirl when she first saw Vaslav Nijinsky dance. Sergei Diaghilev had taken the Russian Ballet to Budapest. Karsavina was with the company. So was Kshessinskaya, the Tsar's favorite who had an imperial retinue of her own, wore diamonds and emeralds the size of wal nuts. But it was Nijinsky who made the Hungarian girl decide against the dramatic career her actress mother had planned for her. She saw him in Sylphides and said a prayer: "Thank you, my God, that I have lived in this century to have seen Nijinsky dance." Her ambition was to know him, but Diaghilev, who ruled his life, kept Nijinsky away from women. According to Russian tradition Romola de Pulszky was too old ever to become a good dancer. Besides, she was a foreigner. But she pulled so many wires through her influential friends in Budapest and Vienna that Diaghilev finally permitted her to accompany the troupe on its tours as a ballet student. Nijinsky, then 22, had started dancing at three. His parents were extremely talented but because they were born on Polish territory they were never eligible for the Imperial Ballet. They toured the provinces, taking their three children with them. Sometimes they slept in peasant huts, sometimes in filthy hostelries, some-times in shabby theatres. Stanislav, the oldest son, fell from a third-story window, cracked his skull, stunted his intelligence. Father Nijinsky ran off with a dark-eyed dancer. To support the three children Vaslav's mother opened a boarding house in St. Petersburg. Vaslav was her only hope. At nine he was admitted to the Imperial Ballet School. Miracle of Nijinsky's dancing was the ease with which he accomplished the most difficult technical feats, the way he leaped into the air, paused and descended more slowly than he had risen, do ten entrechats so casually that they never interfered with his dramatic impersonation.* When he graduated from the Imperial School, he was hurried into the Mariinsky Theatre where Anna Pavlova, who never ceased being jealous of him, was prima ballerina. Diaghilev, son of a wealthy Russian general and distillery owner, had made a name for himself by assembling Russian painters, exhibiting their work expensively in St. Petersburg and Paris. He took the Russian Opera and Chaliapin to Paris before he took the Ballet. But the dancers established his reputation with the world. He had Fokine create ballets that had true dramatic context. He used settings by Bakst, Derain, later Picasso. He commissioned composers like Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel to write him music. Expense was no item to Sergei Diaghilev. The Russian Ballet was the rage of Europe. Men like Baron Dmitri Gunsburg, Sir Basil Zaharoff and Aga Khan were proud to support it. Diaghilev is the villain of Romola Nijinsky's story, although she freely grants him his tremendous enterprise, his genius for discovering new talent. Once, she says, a doctor warned Nijinsky that he had a curious glandular arrangement but she slides over this point in her effort to set up Diaghilev as the cause of Nijinsky's madness. Diaghilev was so jealous that he refused to let the dancer have any friends outside his own inner circle. Wlu'le others were paid prodigious salaries, Nijinsky was given only enough to take care of his mother in St. Petersburg. When the Ballet started for Rio de Janeiro, Diaghilev's fear of the sea kept him in Europe. Nijinsky had never seemed to notice the Hungarian girl who had attached herself to the troupe, but one day on shipboard he sent an emissary to her who said: "Romola Carlovna, as Nijinsky cannot speak to you himself, he has requested me to ask you in marriage." The ceremony at Buenos Aires was pronounced in Latin and Spanish. Neither bride nor groom understood a word of it. When Diaghilev heard the news he dismissed Nijinsky from the Ballet. A baby was on the way. The couple, who were just learning to converse in pidgin-French and Russian, went to Austria. There the War caught them and the authorities refused to let them leave. They were imprisoned, not in an army camp as other accounts have stated, but on the top floor of Romola's mother's house. She proved a stern jailer. Nijinsky was a hated Russian. His status as a dancer was forgotten. He had no space to practice, spent his time working on a system for annotating the dance. The authorities heard about his queer hieroglyphics, suspected him of spying. Banker Otto Hermann Kahn was responsible for the Nijinskys' release. He wanted the Diaghilev Ballet to come to New York and he wanted Nijinsky. But Diaghilev never forgot his grudge and Nijinsky's wife blames him for the long chain of misfortunes which so unnerved the dancer that he was completely taken in by the mystical doctrines preached to him constantly (his wife says) by two of Diaghilev's henchmen.* Nijinsky's insanity showed itself when he took his family to Switzerland to rest in 1918. He became increasingly moody and irresponsible, took to drawing strange circular designs spotted with eyes, fanciful butterflies with faces like his own, spiders which suggested Diaghilev. He was found one day walking the streets with a great cross on his chest, exhorting the villagers to seek God. His last dance was for a society function. He made a cross on the floor, danced with such fury that the audience sat frozen with fright. Diaghilev visited him once after that, wept and said: "It is my fault, what shall I do?" Madame Nijinskaya ends her book with the prayer she said when she first saw Nijinsky dance. There follows a list of people who have stood by him through his illness. There are only five names: the late Paul Dupuy, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt Sr., Harpist Carlos Salzedo, Robert Alfred Shaw and Tamara Karsavina.

*NIJINSKY, by Romola Nijinsky--Simon & Schuster ($3). *An entrechat consists of flicking the heels together in the air. With the exception of Nijinsky, his wife says, no modern dancer has been able to do more than eight. *Diaghilev can never prove his innocence. He died five years ago.

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