Vaslav Nijinsky

Vaslav Nijinsky — dancer with roots in the Russian Empire

He was born in Kiev in 1889 - some sources give 1890 - to Tomasz Nizynski and Eleonora Bereda, Polish dancers touring the Russian Empire. The family was Polish, the language at home was Polish, and he spent his career as a subject of the tsar, a distinction that would later cost him his freedom.

He entered the Imperial Ballet School in Saint Petersburg as a child and graduated in 1907 into the Mariinsky company, dancing the Petipa repertoire - Giselle, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty. He was short, physically unremarkable offstage, and capable of things no one had seen: leaps that appeared to pause at their height, and pointe work, then almost unknown among male dancers. Audiences had not had a male dancer of that order in twenty years, and his arrival reversed the second-class status male dancing had drifted into.

In 1909 he joined Sergei Diaghilev's first Paris season and became the company's defining figure. Michel Fokine made Le Spectre de la rose, Petrushka and Scheherazade around him. From 1912 he began choreographing, and did something quite different from dancing: L'Apres-midi d'un faune, Jeux, and in May 1913 Le Sacre du printemps to Stravinsky's score, with designs by Nicholas Roerich. The premiere at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees provoked a disturbance severe enough that police were called while the performance continued. His choreography stripped out virtuosity and turned the body into something angular and weighted, and it shifted the understanding of who authored a ballet.

In September 1913, touring South America, he married the Hungarian Romola de Pulszky, whom he had met three weeks earlier and with whom he shared no common language. Diaghilev, on learning of it, dismissed him from the company. His attempt to run his own company failed. During the First World War he was interned in Hungary as an enemy subject, and was released only after appeals that included Alfonso XIII of Spain, President Wilson and Diaghilev himself.

He performed for a paying audience for the last time at twenty-eight. In 1919 he withdrew from the stage and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He lived another thirty-one years, in and out of clinics in Switzerland, France, Hungary and finally England, with Romola alongside him throughout. In 1928 the two of them sat in Diaghilev's box in Paris and watched the Ballets Russes perform. He died in London in April 1950, aged sixty, and three years later was reinterred in Montmartre cemetery, beside Auguste Vestris - the teacher of the young Marius Petipa, a century before.

None of his four ballets survived intact. What remains is a set of photographs, his own diary written in 1919, and the reconstructions later made from notation and memory. His sister Bronislava Nijinska became a significant choreographer in her own right.

Tracing the roots — Kyiv

A Polish family, an imperial training, and a Russian passport that saw him interned as an enemy subject in Hungary during the First World War. He is buried in Montmartre beside Auguste Vestris, who had taught the young Marius Petipa.

Born in Kiev to the Polish dancers Tomasz Nizynski and Eleonora Bereda, who were touring the Russian Empire. Trained at the Imperial Ballet School in Saint Petersburg from childhood and graduated into the Mariinsky company in 1907.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Kyiv. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition