Vaslav Nijinsky
Date of Birth: 28 December, 1989
Date of Death: 8 April, 1950 (Aged: 61)
Height: 160 cm (5 ft 2)
Weight: 65 kg (143 pounds)
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: Hazel
For some people dancing is just the way to spend some free time at weekend and to relax. For the other people dancing means the whole life and Vaslav Nijinsky belonged to this group. His life was full of success and personal tragedies, he achieved enormous popularity, but at the same time he wrote in his diary, “I suffered more than Jesus Christ”.
He was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in the family of Polish dancers. Vaslav Nijinsky started dancing and touring at the age of 3, when together with his sister, Bronislava, he helped his parents during their performances. Vaslav also had a younger brother, who had a mental disorder, that’s why he didn’t appear on the stage with his siblings.
Probably, Vaslav Nijinsky had some mental health problems too, because he studied from bad to worse, he stayed during the lessons with an open mouth and couldn’t answer the simplest question. When the future ballet star got older, Vaslav was sent to Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, where soon he became one of the most successful students. His teachers described ten year old boy in this way, “He was not tall, just 160 cm of height and his core looked quite thick. But boy’s legs were unreally muscled and he danced so awesome, that the hearts of his spectators were captured once and forever”.
Vaslav Nijinsky
After graduating, Vaslav Nijinsky started to dance in the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg and he partnered the most famous ballerinas of that time. He looked like a real man on the stage, but in his personal life Vaslav was known as homosexual. It is hard to tell now, if he really was homosexual or these ideas in his imagination were developed by his mother, who noticed, that Russian Duke Lvoff looked at her young son with passion. The woman thought, he would help Vaslav to pursue his career, and Lvoff really helped, but that relationship was ruinous for Nijinsky health.
It was Lvoff, who introduced Nijinsky to Sergei Diaghilev, and the last one supported his young lover and helped him to dance the most remarkable parts in his life.
The last time, when Vaslav Nijinsky appeared on the stage, was his dance in 1919, when he tried to show war on the stage. He got married a dancer Romola, who gave a birth to their two daughters. Thus Vaslav put to an end his years of homosexual relationship and opened another page in his book of life, full of sorrow and schizophrenia. He died in 1953 from a kidney disease.
In Russia there’s a street, named after Nijinsky.
Vaslav Nijinsky
