Svobodny offers the first in-depth English-language analysis of ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky’s 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 Nijinsky’s 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 Nijinsky’s words and posits the influence of Russian literary masters such as Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy on his writings. Svobodny investigates catalyzing events that prompted Nijinsky’s 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 Nijinsky’s diaries, as well as relevant excerpts from the writings of others. Extensive notes and a lengthy bibliography extend the book’s substance and usefulness. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Choice Reviews

With this daring dive into Nijinsky’s notebooks, Nicole Svobodny not only illuminates the interior life of a celebrated dancer and choreographer, she reveals how Nijinsky’s practice of dancing compelled him to critique and create in the realm of ideas. In Svobodny's thorough account, Nijinsky’s notebooks appear as one face of a multimodal art project—involving dancing, writing, and drawing—whose 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 provides—the Feeling—serves 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 Nijinsky’s multimodal project in relation to Russian literature and events of his time, Svobodny highlights Nijinsky’s ongoing relevance as a dance artist and thinker.

Kimerer L. LaMothe, author of Nietzsche's 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, Nijinsky’s Feeling Mind, Svobodny unearths Nijinsky’s writings to give readers access to his interior landscape. She releases Nijinsky’s voice, which navigates the space between ‘the poetics of dance’ and the ‘somatics of literature.’ Her lucky readers will live within the dancer’s 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). Nijinsky’s 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, Nijinsky’s 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 Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes troupe during the fabled final years of Belle Époque Paris. Svobodny’s 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