He also mocked Diaghilev, who by then had adopted Leonide Massine as his new lover, star dancer and choreographer. "Diaghilev dyes his hair not to look old," Nijinsky wrote. "Diaghilev's hair is white. He buys black paste and rubs it on his hair. I would see it on his pillow, which would be stained black."

Nijinsky made only occasional references to his career, although he started his diary just hours before he was to perform for charity at the Hotel Suvretta in St. Moritz. "I am not going to dance while my stomach is full," he wrote. "I will dance when everything is calm."

After the performance, he said he danced nervously on purpose. "The public doesn't understand artists who are not nervous," he explained. "I was nervous because God wanted to excite the public. People came to amuse themselves. They thought I was dancing to amuse them, I danced terrible things. They were afraid of me because they thought I wanted to kill them."

In her own memoirs, Romola Nijinsky recalled that he danced as if consumed by the war that had just ended. "He brought to life before our eyes all of human suffering," she wrote. "He created the impression of floating over a mass of dead bodies. The horrified public seemed stunned with amazement." Nijinsky himself wrote that he knew how the public would react to the dance he had created. "The public wants to be shocked," he said. "I know how to shock the public, which is why I am certain of success." Yet just as he caused an uproar in Paris in 1913 with his revolutionary choreography to Stravinsky's "Sacre du Printemps," St. Moritz seemed unprepared for him that night six years later.

Even then, he expected to continue dancing. "They won't put me away in an asylum because I dance very well and I make lots of money for those who want it," he wrote. "People like eccentrics, which is why they leave me alone, saying I am a crazy clown."

Only once in the notebooks did he return to the subject of dance, recalling how he was given just three weeks to compose the choreography for "Till Eulenspiegel" in New York in 1916. But he was happy with the result. "The reviews were good and at times intelligent," he wrote. "I felt like God and the Devil at the same time."

But by the time he was preparing to leave for Zurich, he appeared to know his life would change. He wrote that his wife had told him to tell his daughter Kyra, who was 4, that he would never return. And, on the final page, he wrote: "I will go now . . . I am waiting . . . I don't want to."