The diary of Vaslav Nijinsky
By: translated from the Russian by Kyril FitzLyon ; edited by Joan Acocella.
Contributors: Acocella, Joan Ross.
Edition: Unexpurgated ed.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 311
Subjects: Nijinsky, Waslaw, 1890-1950 -- Diaries; Ballet dancers -- Diaries
Description: 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 started to go insane. This diary, which he kept in four notebooks over six weeks, is the only sustained, on-the-spot account we have by a major artist of the experience of entering psychosis.

Nijinsky's diary was first published in 1936, in a heavily bowdlerized version that omitted almost half of his text. The present edition, translated by Kyril FitzLyon, is the first complete version in English, and the first version in any language to include the fourth notebook, written at the very edge of psychosis. It contains Nijinsky's last lucid thoughts - on God, sex, war, and the nature of the universe, as well as on his own broken life.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 307-310).