Author: By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, February 14, 1999

Page: E1

Section: Books

The dancer began his program by sitting in a chair, staring at the audience for what seemed an eternity. Eventually, he unrolled strips of black and white velvet on the floor to form a cross. Standing in its center, he announced he was dancing out ``the war which you did not prevent,'' and launched into a violent improvisation.

While the description fits the dance world of the Vietnam era, the actual event came half a century earlier, on Jan. 19, 1919, when Vaslav Nijinsky, the most celebrated dancer in history, gave his final performance, in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

That same day, he began his famous diary, an intense, six-week outpouring that ended with a train trip to Zurich and institutionalization in a mental hospital.

Nijinsky's life with dance, including his days as a child prodigy, lasted two decades; his life with insanity, just over three. His legend is based almost as much on the latter as on the former, which is scantily documented. The primary way people have learned of his madness is through the diary, which his wife, Romola, published in 1936 -- along with a plea for contributions toward his medical care.

Romola did for Nijinsky's diary what Anne Frank's father did to hers, sanitizing it. In addition to removing references to bodily functions and sex, Romola red-penciled parts unflattering to herself, ``My wife is an untwinkling star'' among them. She also cut out much of Nijinsky's elaborate wordplay, poems, and puns, the illogical, the passages in which Nijinsky casts himself as God's own voice.

It's all been restored now, in the first unexpurgated version in English, and the first in any language to publish the so-called ``fourth notebook'' that Romola repressed, which consists of letters to friends, acquaintances, and, in one case, ``mankind.'' The original notebooks remained in Romola's possession until her death, in 1978, after which they were sold at Sotheby's, with Nijinsky's two daughters retaining the copyright. They released it only in 1995, when the complete diary was published in French.

The new English edition, in a translation by Kyril Fitzlyon, is edited by Joan Acocella, whose lengthy introduction is both fascinating and essential. Wade through the diary without it at your peril. Acocella, biographer of Mark Morris, is not only among the finest dance writers of the day but also uniquely equipped to take on Nijinsky: She coauthored the textbook ``Abnormal Psychology: Current Perspectives.''

She begins by pointing out that while plenty of other artists have gone mad, none that she knows of has left an on-the-spot written account of what it's like to do so. Nijinsky's diary does, and it makes for sad and scary reading, a saga of doom. Nijinsky was fully aware of what that train ride to Zurich meant. He wanted, instead, to go to Paris and see that his diary was published. He not only meant the world to read it; he also meant it to save the world -- and himself. ``I want my manuscript to be photographed,'' he wrote, ``because I feel that my manuscript is alive. I will transmit life to people if my manuscripts are photographed.''

He opened on a note of normalcy -- ``I have had a good lunch, for I ate two soft-boiled eggs and fried potatoes and beans'' -- but soon turned inward to a private universe. ``I have a dry maid because she does not feel,'' he wrote. In his idiosyncratic vocabulary, ``dry'' seems to mean having all the life wrung out of you, ``thinkers'' are literal and brutish, and ``feelers'' are sensitive, intuitive and, to Nijinsky, altogether superior.

His use of language, writes Acocella, shows schizophrenic traits including insistent repetition and ``clanging,'' connecting words on the basis of sound rather than sense. But, she adds, ``As for repetition, elision, and odd juxtapositions, these were the stock-in-trade of early modernist artists, of whom Nijinsky was one.'' The diary's stream-of-consciousness narrative, she notes, has been compared to ``Ulysses.'' And Nijinsky's page-long paragraphs and eccentric capitalization fit a modernist canon that created new rhythms, new hierarchies. It's not much of a stretch to see Nijinsky as precursor of such diverse artists as Martha Graham, John Cage, and Philip Glass.

Given that, it is tragic that he left so little for history to go on. ``Never,'' Acocella writes, ``was so much artistic fame based on so little artistic evidence: one 11-minute ballet, `Faun,' plus some photographs.'' Of the four ballets Nijinsky created, his 1912 ``Afternoon of a Faun'' is the sole survivor -- and still an astonishing work. Nijinsky threw out the rules of classicism, creating a flat frieze of movement with the dancers' legs in the parallel position they'd been trained out of since their first ballet class.

It's immensely frustrating that Nijinsky barely mentions his choreography in the diary. Nor does he write much about his dancing. But people familiar with his legend, and careful readers of Acocella's introduction, will connect the dancing career with the writing. The press proclaimed Nijinsky the ``God of the dance,'' and perhaps the adulation helped tip him into identifying with the deity -- he signed Book 1 of the diary ``God Nijinsky.'' ``I am the God who dies when he is not loved,'' wrote the dancer whose fans stole his underwear out of his dressing room.

In the diary he dwelled on his family, friends, enemies, doctors, servants; his diet; his sexuality, including his period of ``chasing tarts'' in Paris; his dialogue with God; his hatred of Diaghilev, the impresario who made him the most renowned dancer on earth -- after he had made him his lover. Nijinsky used the black smears that Diaghilev's hair dye left behind on the pillow as a graphic illustration of his disgust.

Disgust plays a big part in the diary. Nijinsky was revolted by red meat, believing it to cause excess lust. He railed against masturbation, which ``causes idiocy,'' he wrote. Some of his philosophy he picked up from Tolstoy, whom he revered. But his obsession with eating and elimination also go with being a dancer; it's an occupational hazard, as any observer of a contemporary dance scene blighted by anorexia and bulimia knows.

``I am both wife and husband,'' he wrote. His was a fluid persona, not only in matters sexual. The familiar photographs of Nijinsky demonstrate his power to become another character completely, even a nonhuman one. Looking at those images of Nijinsky as the spirit of a rose, you can almost smell the blossom's perfume.

In the midst of his sometimes impenetrable writing are perceptive gems, rarely to do with dance. Before charities were routinely criticized for being administrative-heavy, for instance, Nijinsky complained that ``Societies for the poor become rich and are unable to organize things.''

Believing that the circle was the perfect shape, he wrote that ``I do not like a theater with a square stage. I like a round theater.'' Glimpses of artistic vision suggest that when Nijinsky snapped, the world lost a choreographer who might have taken the great 20th-century revolutions in dance several steps further. While dying the death that finally claimed him in 1950, he wrote, ``I do not like past centuries, because I am alive.''