Vaslav Nijinsky, arguably the greatest ballet genius of all time, had the dubious luck of dying twice. For the art world, Nijinsky died after entering a psychiatric clinic, where he was destined to spend nearly twenty years in strange, but in his own way happy dreams.
The second time, in April 1950, he died truly, lucid, but very miserable. Nijinsky was considered dead for so long that the news of his real death was a shock to those who saw this great master on the stage and carefully, like a rare pearl, kept in themselves the memory of the masterpieces of his refined art.
For all these years, a lot has been written about Nijinsky: all the more surprising is the fact that many secrets of his life and work have remained unsolved. And as before, we know almost nothing about the mystical aspect of this outstanding talent.
In her book Teatralnaya Ulitsa, Tamara Karsavina recalls how, watching rehearsals in one of the halls of the Imperial Theater School in Warsaw, she drew attention to a strange boy who, with unnatural ease, soared much higher than his comrades. The amazed ballerina approached the teacher, Nikolai Legat, and asked the name of the unusual student. “Nijinsky,” he answered. - This imp never hits the beat: it does not have time to sink!"
Of course, the ability of some dancers to hang in the air longer than usual has been noticed before. "He would have remained soaring in the sky, if he had not been afraid to humiliate other students," - wrote about his famous son Augustus Vestris-father. “She could have walked through the air over a corn field without crushing a single stalk,” they said about the great Maria Taglioni. Likewise, Nizhinsky - if we leave aside the enthusiastic tone - definitely had a completely objective ability to rise up to a very great height and for some time almost motionlessly freeze at the highest point of his flight. The question that interests us in the first place can be formulated as follows: what is this gift - a rudimentary form of levitation (a phenomenon known to everyone who is more or less interested in parapsychology) or just an illusion?
Consider the testimony of Cyrell W. Beaumont. “Nijinsky possessed a fantastic gift of flying, which allowed him to land and bounce again with the liveliness of a tennis ball,” he writes in his memoirs. - That incredible leap with which he - an elf in "The Specter de la Rose" - flew onto the stage from the rose garden through the bay window and sank down beside the young girl who slept in an armchair, will forever remain in the memory of eyewitnesses. A flash of pinkish light - and now he already describes graceful parabolas: just like a grasshopper flying from one blade of grass to another. No tension on his face, no signs of excitement, not even the usual dull thuds of the foot on the floor: he really turned into a weightless rose petal, caught up in the night breeze and flying into the open window.
In "Sylphs" he left the stage with an even more unusual leap. The most striking thing here was the absence of even a hint of physical effort by the athlete: it seemed that the dancer simply decided to fly - he suddenly soared into the air and disappeared behind the scenes."
Beaumont recalls that "even lifting Pavlova with one hand, Nijinsky almost lifted himself off the floor: it seemed that for a moment, and he would soar to the ceiling." Pavlova herself, the author admits, did not possess the same ability to soar. This means that the question of "illusion" can be considered closed. Another thing is clear: the talent of "hovering", it seems, can be developed in the course of special training. However, let's listen to Diaghilev, he offers us his key to the solution:
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“I am sure that since the days of Vestris, the world has not seen such an energetic dancer. This young man jumps easily three feet. By the power of steel tendons and the elasticity of muscles that nature has endowed him with, Nijinsky can only be compared with a huge cat. A real lion of the ballet world, he is able to cross the stage diagonally in two leaps."
But all this so far concerns only the lifting height. About a much more mysterious ability - it is unnatural to stay in the air for a long time and descend much slower than the law of universal gravitation allows us to do - most authors prefer not to expand. Here is what Nikolai Legat writes, however, in his memoirs:
“With a sharp tension of the muscles of the thighs already in the air, he easily increased the height of even medium jumps. Before the flight, he took a very short breath, held his breath in the air and exhaled sharply at the moment of landing. After interviewing specialists, I found out that many people follow this method. Another curious detail was discovered: the torso during the flight - with the maximum tension of the leg muscles - should be completely relaxed. The power of the lungs, as they explained to me, has not the slightest relation to all this: it's all about the control of the muscles, including the muscles of the respiratory apparatus.
Breath control plays a very important role in the mystical rituals of the Hindus. It is believed that this kind of exercise can bring the body weight to almost zero. Apparently, some dancers, not even initiated into the subtleties of the esoteric sciences, manage to acquire the necessary skills unconsciously. They themselves cannot explain what is happening to them. I had a long conversation on this topic with Nijinsky's widow, Romola, whose friendship I value very much. She herself was a wonderful ballerina in the past, she knows everything there is to know about her husband. Here's what she told me:
“I often asked Vaclav how he manages to stay in flight for a long time. He couldn't understand why it surprises me: I jump up, they say, hold my breath - and fly! At the same time, he claimed that he felt in the air, as it were, outside physical support. It was she who allowed him to adjust the speed of descent: yes, that is so - he could descend more slowly or faster at his discretion.
Of course, his thigh muscles were phenomenal, and the volume of his lungs too - in any case, in friendly “matches” he easily beat Caruso and Erich Schmedes. But it's not that. For Nijinsky, dance was a religion. He believed that performing arts was his mission and that he received his gift from above in order to bring new ideas into the world through dance.
Before the performance, no one was allowed to enter his dressing room. No one was allowed to speak to him after he left there. Nijinsky did not answer questions. Even with close people, he behaved as if he was seeing everyone for the first time in his life.
Once I exclaimed in indescribable delight: "What a pity that you cannot see yourself from the outside!" He was surprised and answered quite seriously: “But I just see myself from the outside! I detach from the body and observe myself. I direct my dance from the outside."
I was very interested in this revelation. It seems that we are talking about a state close to trance. There is a strange personal dissociation: was it, by the way, the cause of the subsequent mental collapse? Moreover, Nijinsky, as it turns out, also practiced "psychic" games.
“In Saint Moritz, we had a governess who spent a lot of time in India,” recalls Romola. “This woman told us about hatha yoga, and my husband was very interested in all this. He studied a huge amount of relevant literature and entered into correspondence on this topic with Maeterlinck.
One day on the anniversary of my father's death, he tried to experiment with the tablet. Under his fingers, she immediately ran actively from letter to letter and, on behalf of the spirits, answered many of our questions. This is how we learned, for example, that the war would end on June 29, 1919, that Hungary would become a "kingdom without a king," and that Prime Minister Tisch would be killed.
We didn't take it too seriously, but for fun, we continued our experiments. Someone told her husband to practice automatic writing - you know, when a hand with a pencil writes unconsciously. His success exceeded all expectations.
Especially for me, Václav staged a performance, proposing, like a yogi, “to separate from the body”, to leave the physical shell and “dissolve with all my soul in the dance”. I succeeded - in any case, I danced in a state of deep trance for several hours.
Having regained consciousness, waking up from congratulations, I felt very embarrassed, because I did not remember anything: it seemed to me that everyone was laughing at me. We continued to experiment for a few more months, but then it turned out that the "mystical" dance drains the soul, takes away a huge amount of vitality.
As for the subsequent mental disorder, I do not think that occult exercises could cause this. He just inherited the mind, which was very easy to break the delicate balance of. He was constantly required to be protected, protected from any shocks.
The beginning of the war found us in Hungary. If you only knew how much effort it took me to keep him from internment. It was this time that played a fatal role in the development of his illness. The husband would have coped with the illness, if not for the cruelty of the people around him. They did not understand him, considered him insane, and in the end reported him to the authorities. When the military came for Nijinsky, he was so shocked by the arrest that for some time he really lost his mind.
And yet, the clue to the legendary "flights" of Nijinsky should, apparently, be sought from the Indians. Among the exercises they practice there are those through which a person can induce something in himself that is capable, apparently, to counteract the force of universal gravity. They say that whoever manages to awaken the Anahata chakra - the receptacle of prana located in the region of the heart - wakes up the ability to literally “walk through the air”.
This is exactly what the followers of the Tibetan teaching lung-gom-pa do in their free time, famous for their ability to make very long pedestrian crossings in a fantastically short time. Alexandra David-Neil, a French woman, a renowned anthropologist, claims to have seen such a "group of tourists" in northern Tibet with her own eyes. “The man did not run, but effortlessly lifted off the ground, moving forward in leaps,” she writes. - It seemed that his body acquired the elasticity of a light ball: it was rapidly bouncing off the ground at the very moment when his foot touched the surface. He measured out his giant steps with the monotony of a pendulum."
They say that in order to become lung-gom-pa, it takes three years and three months in complete darkness and the strictest isolation to do some strange exercises. After this very severe preparation, the human body becomes unusually light, he almost loses weight: the locals claim that lung-gom-pa can sit on a stalk of barley without bending it under him, or stand on a pile of grain without disturbing a grain. Maybe Maria Taglioni and her followers were trained in Tibet?
However, jokes aside: the mental state of the dancing Nijinsky and the strange activity of lung-gom-pa are clearly related phenomena. David-Neal claims that the Tibetan walkers are in a deep trance during their mysterious travels. Each of them is mentally engaged in a kind of chant, monotonously pronouncing a mystical formula-spell, with which the process of inhalation-exhalation enters into a kind of rhythm. The lung-gom-pa steps are synchronized with both the breath and the silent mantra.
The walker is unable to speak or look around. He fixes his gaze on some distant object - most often, a star - and nothing can capture his attention anymore.
Eyewitnesses say that after some time the legs of lung-gom-pa cease to touch the ground, and he begins to float through the air with incredible speed. Some of them are said to even be tied with chains - otherwise, they may take off and not return! Well, Nijinsky would envy such masters of oriental "ballet"!
The fact that respiratory processes are somehow mysteriously related to body weight was convincingly proven in the extraordinary experiments of the late Dr. Heward Carrington.
The essence of the experience is as follows. Four subjects lift the fifth, sitting on a chair, into the air, and they act only with their fingers. At first, they all lean forward sharply and simultaneously, making a series of inhalations and exhalations. In unison with them, the person sitting on the chair inhales and exhales.
On the count of five, all participants hold their breath. Four quickly pry the fingers of the fifth under the arms and knees and he is in the air. A person sitting on a chair seems to lose weight dramatically!
Carrington conducted an experiment by placing subjects on a large mechanical balance.
“On the first climb,” he writes, “the needle dropped to 660 pounds, while the pre-measured total weight of the participants was 712 pounds. 52 pounds, thus, "evaporated" without a trace! On the second attempt, losses were 52 pounds, on the third, fourth and fifth - 60 pounds. Curiously, if the subject was in the air long enough, the arrow of the scales began to slowly rise and eventually reached 712.
Carrington, who presented a detailed account of his discovery in the book "History of Psychic Science", was unable to explain what was happening on his own. I know nothing about whether anyone tried to continue his experiments.
One thing is clear: again we are dealing with a phenomenon that is directly related to the secret of Nijinsky.
From the book: "Between Two Worlds". Author: Fodor Nandor