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 genius, which included such famous names as those of Mme. Karsarvina, Anna Pavlova, Mordkin, and Adolf Bolm. The scene was already crowded; but by his eighteenth year Nijinsky had successfully asserted his claim to a place beside these others in the very front rank of Russian dancers. And this rapidity of advancement was not due simply to the fact that Nijinsky could leap into the air a little higher than any of his fellow-students, nor yet that he was more proficient than all of them in the time-honoured tricks of entrechat and pirouette. From the first there had been evident in his dancing that promise of genius which no technical skill can simulate, but which through technical skill alone can blossom into its finest flower.

Now, in addition to the growing fame of Nijinsky, the first decade of the present century witnessed the rise of several novel