Nijinsky's Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances

Nijinsky's Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances is the first in-depth literary study of Vaslav Nijinsky's life-writing, focusing on his riffs on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. It explores the intersections of bodily movement with verbal language and addresses broader questions of how we sense and make sense of our worlds.

Format: Hardback
Length: 386 pages
Publication date: 15 July 2023
Publisher: Lexington Books

Nijinsky's Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances is a groundbreaking literary exploration of Vaslav Nijinsky's life-writing. Conducted through a meticulous textual analysis, coupled with intellectual biography and literary theory, Nicole Svobodny sheds light on Nijinsky as a reader, unveiling his intricate riffs on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. These intertextual connections are likened to the markings of a dance, where the dancer employs a reduction strategy that straddles the realms of thinking and doing. By delving into the interplay between bodily movement and verbal language, this book addresses profound inquiries into how we perceive and interpret the world around us. Drawing upon extensive archival research, alongside studies in psychology and philosophy, Svobodny emphasizes the modernist contexts from which Nijinsky emerged at the close of World War I. On the day after the Paris Peace Conference commenced and the same day he performed his final dance, Nijinsky embarked on his life-writing journey, culminating in the publication of a book titled Feeling. Nijinsky's Feeling Mind takes readers on a journey from the stage to his private room, illuminating the structure, plot, medium, and mode of Feeling. This study challenges readers to confront a paradox: as the dancer assertively positions his writing as a live performance, he simultaneously draws attention to the material object that encases it.

Weight: 721g
Dimension: 238 x 157 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781793653536