There is this, for instance, about Igor Stravinsky, who composed The Rite of Spring: “Igor thinks that I am hostile to his aims. Yet scattered throughout these ravings are sharp comments about his wife, Romola, and various people he has known, much of it colored by his abiding bitterness over his firing from the Ballets Russes by its impresario and Nijinsky’s former lover, Serge Diaghilev (according to Acocella, this was one of a string of misfortunes that culminated in Nijinsky’s madness). But in fact, much of the diary is given over to ramblings growing out of his Tolstoyan pacifism and his belief that he was God or at least in direct communication with God.

The tragedy of the diary is in Nijinsky’s evident anxiety that his wife was about to commit him to an insane asylum and his frantic desire to prove himself sane. That is because during the six weeks when he kept this diary, in early 1919, the dancer who had captivated the world during his years with the Ballets Russes was tipping over into madness (in her excellent introduction, dance critic Acocella concurs with the diagnosis of “confused schizophrenia with mild manic excitement” made by the famed psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler). It gives no insight into his thinking while he was choreographing his radical ballets, The Rite of Spring and Afternoon of a Faun. Nijinsky’s is not the usual artist’s diary.

At last, the deletions made by the great dancer’s wife regarding his relationship with Serge Diaghilev have been restored to this tragic diary.

Mark Morris by Joan Acocella