NONFICTION - March 3, 1991

VASLAV NIJINSKY: A Leap Into Madness by Peter Ostwald (Lyle Stuart: $19.95; 358 pp.). In the late 1970s, psychobiography’s “science of personality” promised to demystify the great figures of history (and thus history itself) far more effectively than traditional “literary” biography. The latter remains the more popular genre, however, and “Nijinsky” suggests two reasons why: Psychiatrist Peter Oswald must engage in purely speculative ruminations, for he is trying to psychoanalyze a “patient” who has never sat on his couch, and he must settle with indeterminate conclusions because of the callowness of analytic theory. Oswald reasons that gifted children mature in similar environments, for example, but he is unable to pinpoint those similarities. His scientific tone sometimes seems ill-suited for his poetic subject (taking literally the expression “Nijinsky had feet like a bird,” he cites Nijinsky’s “human” X-ray records). But his book is often quite moving when it shows how Nijinsky, who clearly earned his reputation as “God of the Dance,” mirrored his life in his art.