Nijinsky's Feeling Mind is a fascinating literary study on the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, who was arguably the most important dancer in Sergei Diaghilev's star-studded Ballets Russes. Nijinsky began to write when mental illness curtailed his ability to perform publicly. He wrote fluidly, much as he danced, without crossing out or editing anything. Thus, his writing captures the flow of his thoughts as they occurred without self-censorship. Rather than reading his diaries for symptoms of his illness as others have done, Nicole Svobodny approaches them as serious literature. She argues that, as his illness grew, Nijinsky engaged in a “multimodal project” (24) that brought three types of artistic activity together in conversation with each other: choreography, drawing, and writing. Within this project, his diaries constitute a literary performance, as rich in metaphor and allusion as his modernist choreography and as abstract in style as his drawings. By reading his diaries through this multimodal lens, Svobodny “aims to navigate a space between and across the ‘poetics of dance’ and the ‘somatics of literature,’” (25) hence her subtitle The Dancer Writes, the Writer Dances.
The book begins with a descriptive analysis of Nijinsky's last public performance in 1919 at the Suvretta House Hotel in Switzerland, where he amazed, puzzled, and even frightened members of his audience with improvisatory dances that expressed his feelings about war, pain, and the human condition. Svobodny then turns her attention to his diaries, which treat the same existential themes. In the following four chapters she painstakingly uncovers the literary, political, and philosophical works that influenced Nijinsky, among them classics by Aleksandr Pushkin, Lev Tolstoi, Fedor Dostoevskii, Nikolai Gogol΄, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others. She examines in forensic detail not only the sources behind Nijinsky's allusive writing, but also how he interpreted them through the prism of his own experience as a dancer. In fact, one of the joys in reading this book was the opportunity to revisit literature that I had encountered in graduate school through a new lens.
Over the course of the book a number of major ideas weave in and out of Svobodny's analysis. Two of them stand out as particularly contributory to Svobodny's overarching thesis. The first presents Nijinsky's diaries paradoxically. On the one hand, his “reason for not revising his manuscript” exposes his desire “for the reader to experience [his] writing process” (27). In this way, his book is “alive” (27). On the other hand, Nijinsky “points to the ink traces left on the page,” (27) as evidence that, once written, a book becomes an unchanging and thus dead object. In short, Svobodny writes, “the making of the book is thus its own un-making, . . . both a one-time live performance and the artifact that entombs it” (27).
The second stand-out idea addresses a consistent binary that echoes throughout Nijinsky's diaries, as for example, when he describes his wife as someone who thinks but lacks feeling and himself as feeling without thought. Svobodny translates this binary into one that contrasts um (usually translated as mind) with razum, which is most commonly translated as reason, but which she renders as feeling mind. As she explains:
For Nijinsky, the word “thinking” (dumat΄) is related to the word um (intellect), whereas “feeling” in Nijinsky's lexicon is related to the word razum (feeling mind). Razum is the experience of the wholeness—body and mind—where um is incomplete: the mind cut off from the body (281).
While I question her creative translation of razum, as a former dancer I find her larger insight persuasive. Dancers do think holistically through the body and Nijinsky activates this kind of sensory perception as he writes. In fact, this insight is so central to Svobodny's thesis that she uses her rendering of razum as her book's title.
In conclusion, I am happy to recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Russian dance, culture, and literature. Svobodny's deep and yet wide-ranging analysis of Russian classics along with her insight into Nijinsky's visceral approach to writing makes this book an extraordinary achievement.
