You gu gu and I gu gu

Andrew O’Hagan

  • The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky edited by Joan Acocella, translated by Kyril Fitzylon
    Allen Lane, 312 pp, £20.00, August 1999, ISBN 0 7139 9354 5
  • Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins
    Macmillan, 396 pp, £12.00, May 2000, ISBN 0 333 76622 9

Nijinsky began to lose his mind in a Swiss village in 1919. He was only 29 years old, still dazzling, animal-like, an Aschenbach vision on the Lido, a young man who could jump and pause in the air: but he began to spend all night in his studio scribbling the same things over and over, the doodlings of the incrementally mad. The thing he drew was eyes. Sometimes, in his little exercise books, he might draw spiders, or the many faces of Diaghilev, but mainly it was the eyes, black eyes, red eyes, and sometimes he’d go over each one so much he’d tear right through the paper.

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Vol. 22 No. 14 · 20 July 2000 » Andrew O’Hagan » You gu gu and I gu gu (print version)
Pages 6-8 | 3724 words