Famed Dancer’s Diary Offers Glimpse into Psychosis

Called the “god of dance,” Vaslav Nijinsky was one of the most widely renowned dancers of the 20th century. He gained fame as a male ballet dancer and choreographer in the celebrated Parisian dance company, Ballets Russes. Unfortunately, his brilliant career was cut short by a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

He was institutionalized in 1919 and spent the last three decades of his life in and out of asylums. During a six-week period when he was gripped by psychosis, he kept a diary, which is now the subject of a new study into how mental illness can affect language. They wanted to find out if the linguistic pathologies of formal thought disorders (like schizophrenia) manifest in how topics are connected or in the words used to convey them.

To find out, they compared Nijinsky’s writing to a control text from his wife Romola: the forward she wrote when she published a heavily edited version of his diary in 1936. They chose her writing because the two texts were of similar length, from roughly the same period, and written about similar subjects. Most importantly, Romola had no history of psychiatric illness.

The team found Nijinsky often wrote in circles using the same words repetitively. This had the effect of demonstrating a kind of superficial coherence, when the work as a whole was generally incoherent. According to the team, this suggests that psychosis can affect language at different levels.

It’s possible that a person succumbing to acute mental illness can still communicate in a broad narrative structure while their vocabularies become increasingly limited by their disorder. Subscribe to our free newsletter. Lead Image: Karl Struss / J.

Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs / Wikimedia Commons