Svobodny offers the first in-depth English-language analysis of ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinskys original Russian writings. Her work is based on considerable archival research in libraries and collections in the US and Europe. The book is organized as a contrasting dialogue between Nijinskys experiences of and attempts to understand interior and exterior, private and public, physical and mental, and somatic and performative realities. Making strategic use of secondary sources, the author focuses on Nijinskys words and posits the influence of Russian literary masters such as Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy on his writings. Svobodny investigates catalyzing events that prompted Nijinskys writings and argues that he wished readers to experience both his writing process and the result. This interdisciplinary approach will be of interest to dance scholars, historians, and literary theorists. The text is supported by carefully selected English translations of selections from Nijinskys diaries, as well as relevant excerpts from the writings of others. Extensive notes and a lengthy bibliography extend the books substance and usefulness. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals. * Choice Reviews * With this daring dive into Nijinskys notebooks, Nicole Svobodny not only illuminates the interior life of a celebrated dancer and choreographer, she reveals how Nijinskys practice of dancing compelled him to critique and create in the realm of ideas. In Svobodny's thorough account, Nijinskys notebooks appear as one face of a multimodal art projectinvolving dancing, writing, and drawingwhose interlocking pieces break down easy dichotomies between interiority and exteriority, thought and feeling, writing and dancing, and in so doing, enact (both performing and representing) the creative process as a key to healing a world ravaged by war. Here, the sensory education dancing providesthe Feelingserves as both an engine of philosophical insight and the vital experience capable of helping audiences choose life over death and love over hate. By further considering Nijinskys multimodal project in relation to Russian literature and events of his time, Svobodny highlights Nijinskys ongoing relevance as a dance artist and thinker. -- Kimerer L. LaMothe, author of Nietzsches Dancers Many might agree that Nijinsky, famous for his deific leaps, was the greatest male ballet dancer of the early twentieth century. But what do we really know about him? A sleuth might learn that after 1919, Nijinsky never danced publicly again. Svobodny unveils the secrets of what transpired before Nijinsky, a diagnosed schizophrenic, imprisoned himself in a catatonic bastille of silence. In her brilliant book, Nijinskys Feeling Mind, Svobodny unearths Nijinskys writings to give readers access to his interior landscape. She releases Nijinskys voice, which navigates the space between the poetics of dance and the somatics of literature. Her lucky readers will live within the dancers psyche, and prance through his insights into writers, like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Readers will emerge with epiphanies that extinguish the boundary between dance and literature, and with visions of varied modes of art fusing into one. -- Amy D. Ronner, St. Thomas University It is an immense pleasure to follow the amazing and stimulating connections between Nijinsky's worlds which are at the same time dancerly and literal (verbal and notational). Nijinskys Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances allows these worlds to flower and, thus, allows the artist to live through the different aspects and volumes of his creativity, i.e., the panorama of his ethical, (e)motional, and physical awareness and attentiveness. -- Claudia Jeschke, Salzburg University Brimming with previously unknown archival detail, Nijinskys Feeling Mind opens a door not only onto Nijinsky and his milieu but onto Russian and European modernism. -- Anca Parvulescu, Washington University This book is a welcome addition to the anthology of critical Ballets Russes scholarship. Vaslav Nijinsky has transfixed the collective imagination more than any other dancer of the twentieth century. Born to Polish parents in Kyiv in 1889, Nijinsky rose to stardom as a member of Sergei Diaghilevs Ballets Russes troupe during the fabled final years of Belle Époque Paris. Svobodnys novel contribution to the fields of dance studies and Slavic studies provides a fresh perspective on an enigmatic and elusive figure who continues to fascinate over a century later. * The Russian Review *
