Nijinsky&#039;s Feeling Mind

Nicole Svobodny

doi:10.5771/9781793653543

Summary

Nijinsky's Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances is the first in-depth literary study of Vaslav Nijinsky's life-writing. Through close textual analysis combined with intellectual biography and literary theory, Nicole Svobodny puts the spotlight on Nijinsky as reader. She elucidates Nijinsky's riffs on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, equating these intertextual connections to "marking" a dance, whereby the dancer uses a reduction strategy situated between thinking and doing. By exploring the intersections of bodily movement with verbal language, this book addresses broader questions of how we sense and make sense of our worlds. Drawing on archival research, along with studies in psychology and philosophy, Svobodny emphasizes the modernist contexts from which the dancer-writer emerged at the end of World War I. Nijinsky began his life-writing—a book he titled Feeling—the day after the Paris Peace Conference opened, and the same day he performed his "last dance." Nijinsky's Feeling Mind begins with the dancer on stage and concludes as he invites readers into his private room. Illuminating the structure, plot, medium, and mode of Feeling, this study calls on readers to grapple with a paradox: the more the dancer insists on his writing as a live performance, the more he points to the material object that entombs it.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2023
ISBN-Print: 978-1-7936-5353-6
ISBN-Online: 978-1-7936-5354-3
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 374
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgments No access
3. Note on Transliteration No access
1. Literary Forms and the Russian Silver Age No access
2. More than Psychological Document or Dancer’s Memoir No access
3. A Multimodal Creative Project No access
4. Contributions No access
5. Overview No access
6. Notes No access
1. 1. The Wife No access
  2. The Bystander No access
  3. The Doctor No access
  4. The Performer: Overview No access
  5. Getting Ready to Perform: Digesting Dostoevsky No access
  6. Going There: A Riff on Tolstoy’s Opening Gambit No access
  7. The Performance: “Marriage to God” No access
  8. Tolstoy’s Infection and Nijinsky’s Third Eye No access
  9. Tolstoy’s Pliaska and Nijinsky’s Tanets No access
  10. Trance Dance-Writing No access
  11. Notes No access
2. 1. Writing Toward the Precipice No access
  2. Interlude: Tolstoy and Nijinsky as Walkers No access
  3. The Precipice: Falling No access
  4. First Walk: Go Home and Tell Your Wife You Are Out of Your Mind No access
  5. Second Walk: “Parole!” No access
  6. Third Walk: “Death!” No access
  7. A Poem about Walking and Talking No access
  8. “A Schizophrenic Out for a Walk” No access
  9. A Dancer-Philosopher Out for a Walk No access
  10. Tolstoy’s Wise Words in Motion No access
  11. Notes No access
3. 1. Rising Action: To Eat or Not to Eat No access
  2. Climax: Animal Sacrifice No access
  3. Dostoevsky Contra Diaghilev No access
  4. Falling Action: Escape and Capture No access
  5. Resolutions: Structuring His Book No access
  6. Showdown at the Dining Table No access
  7. Mother Earth No access
  8. The Guts Poured Out No access
  9. Interoception No access
  10. Becoming-Human, Becoming-Horse, Becoming-Dog No access
  11. Horses and Writers No access
  12. Writers and Readers: “My Doors Are Always Open” No access
  13. Notes No access
1. 1. 1. The Cover (January 25, 1919) No access
    2. Photograph of Lloyd George on Page 90 (January 25, 1919) No access
    3. Photograph of Wilson on Page 91 (January 25, 1919) No access
  2. War and Technology No access
  3. Heads and Feet: L’Illustration, February 20, 1909 No access
  4. God of the Dance: L’Illustration, May 22, 1909 (Cover) No access
  5. Don Quixote of the Russians: L’Illustration, May 22, 1909 No access
  6. Notes No access
2. 1. Diaghilev’s “Personality” No access
  2. “Not as Narcissus, But as God” No access
  3. Merezhkovsky’s “Nietzscheanized Christianity” No access
  4. Behold the Man No access
  5. Nijinsky and the Nietzsche Cult No access
  6. The Tightrope Dancer No access
  7. Till Eulenspiegel as Tightrope Dancer No access
  8. The Eye in the Public’s Brain No access
  9. Notes No access
1. The Dancer Writes, the Writer Dances No access
2. Alone in a Room, Alone in Public No access
3. “A Ballet About Um, Razum, and the Whole Life of People” No access
4. The Idiot and The Idiot No access
5. A Dancer’s Shoe and Tracks in the Snow No access
6. Notes No access
Selected Bibliography No access Pages 353 - 360
Index No access Pages 361 - 372
About the Author No access Pages 373 - 374