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When Nijinsky was five years old, his father, a dancer, abandoned him along with his mother, his older brother, and his younger sister. Shortly thereafter his brother was left mentally incapacitated after falling out of a window; thus Nijinsky became "the man of the house" at the height of his oedipal period. A year or two later his father, who returned from time to time, threw Nijinsky into the Neva in an attempt to teach him to swim; he had to be rescued by other swimmers. These events helped form his passive, fearful personality. Three months after his graduation, at age eighteen, from the Imperial School of Ballet, Nijinsky met and became the lover of Diaghilev, the impressario under whom he achieved international fame. At the age of twenty-three, while on a tour of South America, Nijinsky married Romola, a beautiful Hungarian girl who had talked her way into the company. Diaghilev was furious and soon found an excuse to dismiss Nijinsky, whereupon the latter's career and mental stability began to falter. He never danced again after giving a concert he called "Marriage with God" at the age of twenty-nine; this was a psychotic performance and he was soon thereafter declared incurably insane by Bleuler. Wangh explores homosexual