The Polish prodigy who shattered ballet’s polite jump
Vaslav Nijinsky (born 1889 or 1890 in Kiev; died 1950) is still called the greatest male dancer of the early twentieth century. With Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes he choreographed L’après-midi d’un faune (1912) and the scandalous Le Sacre du Printemps (1913).
Christened in Warsaw as Wacław Niżyński to Polish touring dancers Tomasz and Eleanora, he grew up inside Russia and spoke Polish poorly yet insisted on a Polish identity. After his parents’ company collapsed and they separated around 1897, Eleanora settled the children in St Petersburg. In 1900 he entered the Imperial Ballet School under Sergei and Nikolai Legat and mime teacher Pavel Gerdt; a year later teachers confirmed him as a boarder despite academic trouble and teasing as “Japonczek” during the Russo-Japanese War.
Mikhail Oboukhov later gave him the highest mark he had ever awarded. At fourteen Marius Petipa cast him in a principal role for La Romance d’un Bouton de rose et d’un Papillon—never staged because of the war. On Bloody Sunday, 9 January 1905, cavalry drove him into a head wound on Nevsky Prospect near the Winter Palace. The 1905 student show’s Persian Market pas de deux, rewritten by Oboukhov, drew mid-performance applause for his first jump—proof that virtuosity could interrupt polite silence.
Offered a Mariinsky place a year early after dancing in Fokine’s Don Giovanni sequence (1906), he stayed to graduate. Diaghilev’s circle—Benois, Bakst, Roerich—drew him into Western tours that made Russian ballet a Paris sensation. Soloist work at the Mariinsky, including Mathilde Kschessinska’s 1910 revival of Le Talisman as the Wind God Vayou, cemented a reputation for psychological depth as well as elevation before illness ended his dancing life.
Source: Vaslav Nijinsky
