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MuzeFormatDesc: Audio Cassette
ISBN-10: 0787118311
ISBN-13: 9780787118310
Jan 1999
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Unabridged
Language: English |
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Synopsis
This diary of one of the greatest dancers and choreographers of the 20th century reveals as much (or more) about the mechanisms of madness as it does about dance. Nijinsky developed schizophrenia shortly after World War I, and in his diary he shows the symptoms of both his nearly total delusion and his unmistakable genius. Even as he is identifying himself with God, ruminating at length on bodily functions, and raving about sex, Nijinsky's writing slips in and out of poetry. This edition of the diary includes the sections that Nijinsky's wife removed from her earlier edition, and includes an introduction by The New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella. A New York Times Notable Book in 1999.
| Size | | Height: | 7.5 in | | Width: | 4.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.8 in | | Weight: | 9.6 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "I have had a good lunch, for I ate two soft-boiled eggs and fried potatoes and beans. I like beans, only they are dry. I do not like dry beans, because there is no life in them."
Industry Reviews
"It's written from the passion, the craving, and the simple desire to dance."
Vanity Fair - Amanda Plummer
"A strange light indeed shines from this diary.... It is deeply moving to read."
Saturday Review - Willaim Rose Benet
"We can also see the dancer in the writer, the man whose physical genius drove the likes of Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau and Paul Claudel to ecstatic utterance. Nijinsky's prose is persistently rhythmic, a spiraling, percussive dance; he seems as interested in how words sound as in what they mean. The diary even breaks at times into verse -- long, babbling chains of association that veer from the punning to the surreal."
New York Times - William Deresiewicz (02/28/1999)
"As a record of a great artist going insane, the diary is unprecedented. Though he is clearly descending into madness, Nijinsky is often lucid and able to sustain narrative flow....Not surprisingly, the diary can be frustrating....Much of it simply doesn't make sense. The value of the diary is those glimpses beyond the madness to the meanings, however fleeting, of a troubled genius who was surely one of the greatest choreographers of our century."
Bookforum - David Bowman
"Reading the unexpurgated text of [Nijinsky's] diary and letters is like being lashed to Moby-Dick....The diaries give us some sense that [his] creative sympathy may have cost him his sanity: 'I am an Egyptian. I am an Indian.' Here, he may be talking of the roles in his ballet repertory; but on he goes: 'I am a sea bird. I am a land bird. I am Tolstoy's tree. I am Tolstoy's roots. Tolstoy is mine. I am his.' The gift of identification has become part of his undoing, and it is a gift that must harrow any reader. You feel that you are becoming Nijinsky at the very moment Nijinsky becomes something you could not bear to be."
Times Literary Supplement - Alastair Macaulay (10/08/1999)
One of this century's finest male dancers, Nijinsky might have become known as the greatest ballet choreographer of the modern era had his career not ended so early. Nijinsky danced professionally for only 10 years (1907-1917), and his reputation as a choreographer was established by only three ballets, all choreographed for the Ballets Russes between 1912 and 1913. Scandal surrounded his career: under Sergei Diaghilev, his lover and the impresario behind the Ballets Russes, Nijinsky choreographed The Afternoon of a Faun, which contained movements suggestive of masturbation; the premiere of his Rite of Spring, choreographed to Stravinsky's dissonant score, caused audiences to riot and storm out of the theater. After severing ties with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes at age 29, Nijinsky slid into insanity, and these diaries chronicle six weeks (January 19-March 4, 1919) of this period. The publication of this new translation (initially published in bowdlerized form in 1936), which for the first time includes a fourth journal of letters and poems, gives readers a chance to read an autobiography of a great artist during his psychological decline. This does not always make for easy reading: Nijinsky's thoughts are circuitous; he records his experience moment by moment and often breaks his train of thought to describe an incident in the next room. Although he is sometimes lucid, he often writes in contradictions and non sequiturs. Fitzlyon's excellent translation, which provides helpful and nonintrusive footnotes to explain Nijinsky's many linguistic idiosyncrasies, is complemented by Acocella's (Mark Morris) illuminating introduction. (Feb.)FYI: Acocella has just been named as the dance critic of the New Yorker.
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