“If there had been no music, I would have gone to the madhouse like Nijinsky,” Henry Miller wrote in the 1930s, speaking of the nonpareil Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, who was considered by leaps and bounds the greatest performer of his kind in the world. The Russian was laid low early in his life and career by schizophrenia, which some ignorant newspaper articles of the day said had been brought on by dancing or his practice of self-hypnosis. The illness made it impossible for him to perform for the last three decades of his life, as his steadfast wife, Romola, shepherded him from clinic to clinic in search of a cure, with none forthcoming.

Two Brooklyn Daily Eagle reports follow, one concerning a show of Nijinsky’s drawings (the second image above is one of the masks he drew), and the other about his death in London in 1950.

From February 7, 1932:

From April 9, 1950: