Nijinsky has danced ever since he was an infant. Both his mother and father were in the ballet at the Imperial theatre in Warsaw, where he sometimes danced with them. His first appearance was as a little Chinese with a pigtail, when he was yet only six years old. The serious study of his art began in 1898, when he entered the Imperial Ballet School at St Petersburg. He passed his final examinations in 1907, and danced at the Imperial theatres for a year and a half before he visited other countries. In 1909 he danced in the Russian Ballet at the Théâtre du Châtelet at Paris, and in the following year at the Opera. Subsequently he has appeared with the Diaghilew company in Berlin, Brussels, Rome, Monte Carlo and London. At Paris he caught typhoid, and when he was convalescent went to Venice, where he danced with Isadora Duncan. It is the place he loves best of all. Already, at the age of only twenty-one, he has received the enthusiastic applause of the most brilliant and exacting audiences of Europe; critics have minutely discussed and lavishly eulogised his dancing; artists have studied and reproduced his gestures; he has been the darling of society in half-a-dozen capitals--and yet the miracle is that he is untouched by conceit. He remains a modest, ingenuous youth, tireless in application, teachable, seeking continually to bring his art to a more precise perfection. In February 1911 the world of the theatre was astounded to hear that Nijinsky had been asked to withdraw from the Imperial Opera at St Petersburg. Various ungrounded stories have been afloat as to the cause of the rupture, but the truth is that it was merely an incident, perhaps an inevitable one, in the antagonism between the traditional and revolutionary schools of the ballet. For a moment the older school triumphed, and Nijinsky left Russia to undertake the enterprise of the conquest of Europe.