The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky Author:Vaslav Nijinsky With an Introduction by Joan Acocella The astonishing diaries of the great dancer, at last available in their complete form. In December 1917, Vaslav Nijinsky, the most famous male dancer in the Western world, moved into a Swiss villa with his wife and three-year-old daughter and began to go mad. This diary, which he kept in four notebooks... more » over six weeks, is the only sustained, on-the-spot written account we have by a major artist of the experience of entering psychosis. A prodigy from his youth in Russia, Nijinsky came to international fame as a principal dancer in Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. After a falling-out between the two great men--who had lived openly as lovers for some time--Nijinsky struggled to build a career on his own. When psychosis struck, he began to imagine himself as married to God, indeed as God, signing his entries "God Nijinsky." Although he lived another thirty years, he never regained his sanity. Already a classic in its earlier, bowdlerized edition, the diary now appears uncut for the first time in English, together with its previously unavailable fourth notebook. It is Nijinsky's confession and his prophecy. At the same time, it reads like a novel, portraying the terror in the Nijinsky household as the dancer plunged into madness. In her Introduction, the noted dance writer Joan Acocella explains the context of the diary and its significance in the history of modernism.« less