Vaslav Nijinsky was the greatest male dancer of his era, famed for leaps that seemed to pause in midair, yet his final public performance in 1919 was a frantic, improvised dance about the horrors of war. This deep dive traces his troubled childhood, his brother’s institutionalization, a four-day coma after a fall at school, and his rise at the Imperial Ballet.

We examine his controlling relationship with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, the scandals of The Afternoon of a Faun and the riot at The Rite of Spring, his sudden marriage to Romola de Pulszky, his firing, wartime house arrest, and diagnosis of schizophrenia. We also look at how Romola censored his diaries and his brief return to dance in 1945.

• The childhood traumas that shaped Nijinsky’s fragile mind
• Why his dancing on pointe challenged ballet’s gender norms
• What caused the audience riot at the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring
• How marriage cut him off from Diaghilev and his artistic infrastructure
• The censorship of his 1919 diaries and the full version published in 1995