Nijinsky, Vaslav 1890-1950
Russian dancer and choreographer

Nijinsky was born in Kiev into a family of dancers who had their own dance company. Considered to be the greatest male dancer of the 20th century, he was, like his sister Bronislava Nijinska, trained at the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, and first appeared in ballet at the Maryinski Theatre. As the leading dancer in Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, which performed in Paris in 1909, he became enormously popular, and in 1911 he appeared as Petrushka in the first perfomance of Igor Stravinsky's ballet. His choreographic repertoire was small but had two exceptional high points, in Claude Debussy's L'Apr�s-midi d'un Faune (1912, 'Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun') and in Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps (1913, 'The Rite of Spring').

He married in 1913 and was interned in Hungary during the early part of World War I. He rejoined Diaghilev for a world tour, but was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic in 1917. Even before his death Nijinsky had become a legendary figure.

Bibliography: Nijinsky's Diary was published in English in 1968. See also biographies by his wife Romola Nijinsky: Nijinsky (1933) and The Last Years of Nijinsky (1952).