Stephen McWilliams
Dublin, Ireland

Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan tells the tale of a dancer in the New York City Ballet’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Key to the story is the ballerina’s descent into psychosis under immense pressure to compete for the leading part of the White Swan. The film, inspired in part by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella The Double, won five Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Film, and—for Natalie Portman—Best Actress.¹ The film is also reminiscent of the real experiences of the Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky.

For all its obvious challenges, there is also some evidence linking mental illness to creativity. An epidemiological study of 4.45 million people by MacCabe and colleagues in the British Journal of Psychiatry used the formal study of a “creative subject” at secondary school or university as a proxy for creativity and then determined whether it was associated with the later development of a psychiatric disorder.² More specifically, age, gender, highest educational level achieved, and the study of creative subjects (visual arts, music, dance, theater and drama, film, radio and TV production, fashion design or Art and Media) were cross-referenced with data for cases of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or unipolar depression requiring hospitalization from 1973 to 2009. Compared with the general population, people with an artistic education had a significantly greater likelihood of developing mental illness.

A similar study by Kyaga and colleagues, also in the British Journal of Psychiatry, examined some 300,000 people with severe mental illness and found an overrepresentation of creative professions among those with bipolar disorder and among the undiagnosed siblings of people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.³ So, why the correlation? Do mental illness and creativity share common themes—a heightened perception of stimuli, a speeding up of thought, or the tendency to “think outside the box”? Such divergent thinking might generate more plentiful ideas. Or does the grandiosity of mania confer both ambition and disinhibition, leading to a degree of fame where creativity also happens to exist?

This relationship is likely very complex. Indeed, a meta-analysis by Byron and colleagues suggests uncontrollable psychological stress and creativity may be negatively correlated.⁴ But when we think about severe mental illness, some very talented names still spring to mind. Vincent van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Schumann, Syd Barrett, and Nobel Laureate John Forbes Nash are but a few highly creative individuals who also contended with serious psychiatric problems. And then, of course, we have Vaslav Nijinsky.

He was born in Kiev on March 12, 1889 to Polish dancers Thomas and Eleonora, who made their peripatetic living in the opera houses, summer theaters, and circuses of Poland and Russia.⁵ Initially taught by his parents, Nijinsky made his acting debut at the tender age of seven in a circus in Vilno, playing a chimney sweep who rescues some animals from a conflagration.⁶ A year later, Thomas ran off with his mistress, leaving Eleanora alone to care for Vaslav, his older brother Stanislas, and younger sister Bronislava. Nijinsky joined the Imperial Theatrical School at the age of nine and, even in school productions, the newspapers recognized his remarkable talent. He was not academic by nature (Bronislava often did his homework for him), but when he was accepted by the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet in 1907 at the age of eighteen, he skipped the entry-level rank to become coryphée. Almost immediately, he took on starring roles.

Although Nijinsky’s diaries imply that he was heterosexual by nature, his impecuniosity meant he did what most Russian ballet dancers did at the time and accepted patronage with certain reciprocal expectations.⁷ His first such relationship was with Prince Pavel Lvov, who soon tired of him and introduced him to Sergei Diaghilev, then only thirty-five, but one of the most influential patrons of the arts in St. Petersburg. With the aim of bringing Western art to Russia and vice versa, Diaghilev established the Ballets Russes, a glamorous and influential theatrical enterprise based in Paris. In leading roles for the company, Nijinsky’s poise and athletic ability were considered phenomenal, as he was among only a small number of male dancers at the time who could perform en pointe. Add to this the element of scandal in his celebrity (in that he and Diaghilev continued their romantic affair quite openly) and Nijinsky became so famous that people would sneak into his dressing room during performances and steal his underwear.⁸

Despite his larger-than-life public persona, Nijinsky was naturally introverted and socially awkward.⁹ This became a challenge when he tried his hand at choreography. In his own shows, including L’après-midi d’un Faune (The Afternoon of a Faun, 1912), Jeux (1913), and Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913), he abandoned the traditional shapes of ballet and introduced a modernism that was initially unappreciated. Claude Debussy, who wrote the music for his first two ballets, was said to have disliked both. Some of the audience agreed. The Rite of Spring caused a riot in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, requiring that the police be summoned. According to Joan Acocella in her introduction to The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, the dancers could not hear the music during this opening night and “Nijinsky stood in the wings, sweat coursing down his face, screaming the musical counts to the performers—a terrible image.”¹⁰

Reeling from all this stress, Nijinsky did something nobody expected: he got married. In 1913, the Ballets Russes set off on a tour of South America and, while Diaghilev did not go, a confident, wealthy, and ambitious young Hungarian woman named Ramola de Pulszky did. Daughter of the famous actress Emilia Márkus, Ramola had seen Nijinsky dance in 1912 and had decided there and then she would marry him. She succeeded—in Buenos Aires barely a month after the two had left Europe. Learning the news, Diaghilev was incensed, and Nijinsky found himself out of a job.

When psychiatrists talk about the risk factors for schizophrenia, we often refer to the stress-vulnerabilitymodel. Where biological predisposing factors such as family history or head injury exist, the addition of precipitating psycho-social factors such as stress can herald the onset of psychotic symptoms. Nijinsky’s brother Stanislas had been hospitalized for psychiatric illness as a teenager, while their mother was prone to severe depression. According to Peter Ostwald, who wrote a psychiatric biography of Nijinsky in 1991, the dancer may have experienced brain damage as the result of a serious fall at the age of twelve.¹¹ Against this backdrop, Nijinsky experienced a series of stressors from 1913 onwards, including his newfound unemployment, his naïve inability to understand why Diaghilev had fired him, an expensive failed attempt to establish his own ballet company, and the birth of his first daughter, Kyra, in June 1914 just as World War I broke out and Europe descended into chaos.

As a Russian foreigner in Hungary at the time, Nijinsky was placed under house arrest at the home of his temperamental mother-in-law and was required to report weekly to the local police station. Ultimately, it was Diaghilev and his influential network who secured Nijinsky’s release in 1916 to allow him travel to New York for a season at the Metropolitan Opera House. Subsequently, Otto Khan, chairman of the New York Opera Board, hired the Ballet Russes for a second season followed by a fifty-two-city tour across America. Khan inexplicably chose Nijinsky rather than Diaghilev to direct the company over a season that was to prove chaotic, exhausting, and loss-making for all involved. Nijinsky’s forte did not lie in organization.

By now, he was also becoming increasingly eccentric in his beliefs, citing increasingly devout religiosity, strict vegetarianism, and a desire to forfeit dancing to return to Russia to plough the land.¹² As he toured Spain and South America with the Ballets Russes in 1917, evolving paranoia was not helped by several suspicious accidents that included his treading on a rusty nail and a pulley weight falling near him backstage. Finally, after a bizarre Red Cross benefit performance in Montevideo that was to prove his last, Nijinsky and his young family moved to St. Moritz.

In his new Swiss home, according to Kyra’s Swiss-English nanny Marta Grant, Nijinsky had nowhere but the balcony to dance and “looked like a caged animal at times.”¹³ By January 1919, Nijinsky was in the habit of retreating to his studio where he would speedily sketch drawing upon drawing of ominously staring eyes. He went into town with a large gold cross over his necktie and implored random strangers to go to church. Then, on January 19, he began writing what was to become a six-week diary, clearly illustrating his delusions of persecution, reference, and grandeur, along with his disordered thinking, hallucinations, manic symptoms, and proneness to agitation. On one occasion, he allegedly seized poor Marta Grant by the throat, precipitating her departure.¹⁴ “I want to weep,” Nijinsky wrote, “but God commands me to write.”¹⁵ He even signed the first book of his diary “God Nijinsky.”¹⁶

By now, the local doctor, Hans Curt Frenkel, had put Ramola in touch with Eugen Bleuler—the famous psychiatrist who had first coined the term “schizophrenia” in 1911. Assessing Nijinsky in his Zurich clinic, Bleuler diagnosed him thus: “a confused schizophrenic with mild manic excitement.”¹⁷ Nijinsky spent most of the next thirty years in and out of the nearby Bellevue Sanatorium and rarely danced in public again. He died in London on April 8, 1950.

Lord Byron once remarked, “We of the craft are all crazy; some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.”¹⁸ Perhaps he was right.

References

1. Beames, R. Interview: Darren Aronofsky on Black Swan, the Wrestler, the Fountain & More! WhatCulture. Published June 24, 2011. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://whatculture.com/film/interview-darren-aronofsky-on-black-swan-the-wrestler-the-fountain-more
2. MacCabe JH, Sariaslan A, Almqvist C, Lichtenstein P, Larsson H and Kyaga S. Artistic creativity and risk for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and unipolar depression: a Swedish population-based case-control study and sib-pair analysis. British Journal of Psychiatry 2018;212(6):370-6.
3. Kyaga S, Lichtenstein P, Boman M, Hultman C, Långström N, Landén M. Creativity and mental disorder: Family study of 300,000 people with severe mental disorder. British Journal of Psychiatry 2011;199(5):373-9.
4. Byron K, Khazanchi S, Nazarian D. The relationship between stressors and creativity: A meta-analysis examining competing theoretical models. Journal of Applied Psychology 2010;95(1):201-12.
5. Moore, L. Nijinsky. London: Profile Books, 2013. 8.
6. Acocella, J. Introduction in The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. London: Penguin, 1999. viii.
7. Acocella, J. xxxiii.
8. Acocella, J. xi.
9. Acocella, J. xiii.
10. Acocella, J xiii.
11. Acocella, J. xii.
12. Acocella, J. xvii.
13. Moore, L. Nijinsky. London: Profile Books, 2013. 199.
14. Acocella, J. xx.
15. Nijinsky V. The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. London: Penguin, 1999. 144.
16. Nijinsky, V. 146.
17. Acocella, J. xxi.
18. Letter to Thomas Moore, September 15, 1817.