Poor Nijinsky. Poor sad, mad, vanished Nijinsky. His career was astonishingly brief, the trail that was left in his meteoric wake so persistent it is hard to believe he danced for little more than seven years.

He was born in 1889 or 1890, to Polish dancers working in Russia (Nijinsky thought of himself as Polish, but he spoke the language poorly, and spent his life in Russia before moving to France).

His astonishing talent was noted early in his student days at the Imperial Ballet School in St...