More rubbish has been written about Vaslav Nijinsky than about any other dancer. Therefore it is sheer joy to read the biography by Peter Ostwald. He is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco and as such eminently able to analyze this severely troubled dancer. Nijinsky was born in 1890 and was enrolled as a child at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Peters burg. There he excelled in artistic subjects, but did badly in academic ones and behaved so badly that he was threatened with expulsion. As a person who was unaccustomed to sophisticated life he found it very difficult to adjust, furthermore he was by nature a rather shy and retiring young boy when he found himself patronized by people like Prince Pavel Lvov. Then followed his disastrous marriage to a Hungarian heiress and a series of unfortunate events like a fiasco in London, fracas during the first night of his ballet "Le sacre du printemps" and the outbreak of WW1. I! n those days there was not much the doctors could do for mental patients and when Nijinsky died in 1950 he had not been dancing for over thirty years. The tragic fate of this gifted dancer has been documented a number of times, but for the first time by a person who has insight in mental disorders. A handsome volume with interesting illustrations, two appendix of medical character, lavish notes and bibliograhy.

This is another book from the barrow on 14th Street. I've read all the other reviews and I have to agree with the reader who said what was the publisher thinking of.

Nijinsky was a wonderful dancer by all accounts. [Though, you know, if he came back tonight and danced Spectre de la Rose at Lincoln Centre we'd be rolling on the floor, screaming with laughter, and Isabella Fokine would be there, too, complaining that he hadn't done the right steps - but hey, don't get me started on her.] I digress.

I am not studying schizophrenia/dementia whatever, so it's all a bit lost on me. I love to read about Nijinsky dancing, and his extraordinary creativity both as a dancer and a choreographer, but his ramblings in this diary make me wonder if a mad person's ramblings worth the ink. Is he Nijinsky or a mad person? I'm sure there are people who read these ramblings and see it as a sign of Nijinsky's genius. I read it with increasing frustration. If someone came and sat next to me on the subway and babbled on like this, I'd move away. [And, believe me, I do.]

I am alone, I'm curious about this, in finding Nijinsky offstage just a tiny bit of a prig? I gained this impression, little by little, from reading his wife's [so bad it's a sin] book, Buckle's "Nijinsky" and, oddly enough, from Bronislava Nijinska's early memoirs.

this book is highly through in it's full translation of Nijinsky's diary, but best part of this book are the inclusion of the never before published "fourth book" which included poems and letters written by Nijinsky as well as an introduction which helps to clarify not only the historical background but also delves into the mental state Nijinsky was in as he wrote his diary.

Nijinsky, hombre posesionado por el genio, hace algun tiempo visiti en el museo de orsay, en Paris, la exposicion sobre él, de lo mejor al igual que su apasionada vida