This book is a cry of pure pain, immensely difficult to read without groaning and sometimes weeping and getting up to pace the floor. Its flavour is aptly illustrated by the shocking jacket photograph of Nijinsky undergoing a catatonic seizure at the age of 37, about eight years after he wrote this text. With his necktie neatly knotted, his face shaven and his hair combed, hands curled up, the greatest dancer of his epoch - some say of any epoch - stares into the lens with a horrifying sacrificial patience. He would not die until the age of 60, after more than three decades of being moved around from sanatorium to sanatorium in Switzerland and England.

LRB 25 January 1996 | PDF Download