Romola de Pulszky

Romola de Pulszky married Vaslav Nijinsky on a sea voyage after learning barely enough ballet to join the company, and spent the next sixty-five years as his wife, nurse, biographer and censor. She was the daughter of a Hungarian actress and a museum director, saw Nijinsky dance in Budapest in 1912, and set out deliberately to reach him - taking lessons, attaching herself to the Ballets Russes as a supernumerary, and travelling on the 1913 South American tour that Diaghilev, who was afraid of the sea, did not join. They married in Buenos Aires having barely a language in common; Diaghilev dismissed him by telegram, and the career ended. She was with him through internment in Hungary, the diagnosis of schizophrenia in 1919, and thirty years of asylums, clinics and insulin therapy, in poverty for much of it. Her 1934 biography made and shaped his legend. Her 1936 edition of his diary was the version the world read for sixty years, and it is heavily cut: passages about her, about his sexuality and about Diaghilev were removed, entries were reordered, and the unexpurgated text appeared only in 1995. She travelled and had relationships with women, left him in others' care for long stretches, and outlived him by twenty-eight years. She collaborated on a later book with the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald s sources and gave interviews for decades. Her daughter Kyra danced and quarrelled with her permanently. She died in Paris in 1978 at eighty-seven. She had converted to Catholicism and arranged for Nijinsky to be reburied in the Montmartre cemetery in 1953.

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