Download The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky AudioBook Free
In his prime, Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950) was the most celebrated man in American ballet--a virtuoso and a remarkable dancer such as Western and American audiences acquired never seen before. After his triumphs in such works as The Specter of the Rose and Petrouchka, he set out to make ballets of his own, and along with his Afternoon of a Faun plus the Rite of Planting season, created within a year of every other, he became ballet's first modernist choreographer. Then, still in his twenties, he began to look mad. For six weeks in early 1919, as his link to certainty was supplying way, Nijinsky held a diary--the only sustained daily record we have, by a major artist, of the experience of coming into psychosis. In some entries he's filled with anticipation. He's God; he'll save the entire world. In other entries, he comes into a dark despair. He's dogged by sexual obsessions and grief over World Conflict I. Furthermore, he's afraid that he's going crazy. The diary was initially publicized in 1936, in a version intensely bowdlerized by Nijinsky's better half. The new release, translated by Kyril FitzLyon, is the first complete and appropriate English rendering of this searing doc. In her benefits, noted dance critic Joan Acocella says Nijinsky's tale and places it in the framework of early Western modernism.
