Karsavina speaking of Nijinsky

He [Nijinsky] was very musical and we felt. . . I should say we were tuned together, knowing each other, never bothering, sometimes even slightly improvising the movement.  But off-stage he was uncommunicative, and not very articulate.  I remember we had once a misunderstanding and that was in Giselle when we revived it on the stage of the Paris Opéra, where it hadn't been given for a very long time, and Diaghilev attached very great importance to it.  I remember he came to fetch me in my dressing room and, as Russians do, made the sign of the cross on me and led me from my dressing room on to the stage, and said, 'Let's go and re-create Giselle in the Paris Opéra.'   At rehearsals I did it as others did it before me, taking the style in which the gestures were not quite conventional but the old kind of pantomime.  and when we rehearsed, Nijinsky just stood and did nothing and it was very disconcerting, it put me off.  So I talked to Diaghilev about it and he said to me, 'Now leave him, he will get it right, you will come to understand each other.  He doesn't talk much, but he writes reams and reams of paper just on that part.  He thinks it.  He was just thinking the part in his head.' And finally at the performance it did come together very well, in harmony.

Speaking of Diaghilev by John Drummond.  1997.  Pages 93-4.