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  • Dancing Genius: The Stardom of Vaslav Nijinsky by Hanna Järvinen
  • Carrie Gaiser Casey
Dancing Genius: The Stardom of Vaslav Nijinsky
by Hanna Järvinen, 2014. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 325pp., notes, bibliography, index. $95.00 cloth.

Legend has become history in the life of Ballets Russes star Vaslav Nijinsky, writes Hanna Järvinen in her book Dancing Genius: The Stardom of Vaslav Nijinsky. Gazing out at us from sepia-toned photographs of his iconic roles in Schéhérazade (1910), Petrouchka (1911), or Le Spectre de la Rose (1911), Nijinsky seems inseparable from the personas he donned: “He was a golden slave, a harlequin, a specter, a blue god, the embodiment of the violence and beauty of nature itself” (Coe 1985, 22). His later institutionalization for schizophrenia only perpetuated the Romantic image of him as a wild, preternatural talent, driven by his genius to aesthetic extremes. As Järvinen writes, this image of Nijinsky persists through “nijinskymania”—those sometimes kitschy, sometimes gorgeous cultural products familiar to us from Nijinsky-themed exhibition catalogues, picture books, paper dolls, and movies. Dancing Genius deconstructs the enduring depiction of Nijinsky as a mad, mute, seemingly natural prodigy, whose famous (and visually undocumented) leap offstage in Le Spectre de la Rose catapulted him into superstar territory. By analyzing the cultural formations framing Western and Russian [End Page 116] critics’ reception of the company and its male star in the prewar period, roughly from 1909 to 1912, Järvinen updates the literature on the Ballets Russes. Applying the Foucauldian premise that power operations undergird the process of canonization, Järvinen offers not so much an alternate history of the Ballets Russes as a corrective to its received myths.

Citing Foucault, Järvinen states that her approach is both “meta-historical” and “genealogical” (2): she tracks the discursive construction of the Nijinsky legend in order to “move, destabilize, and disturb contemporary discourses” that have uncritically absorbed and reflected this legend (4). The work of Lincoln Kirstein, Richard Buckle, and Millicent Hodson come under examination in this regard. Järvinen argues that these authors relied on questionable sources, including Nijinsky’s diary, as well as the memoir/histories by Nijinsky’s wife Romola Nijinsky and those by his contemporaries Michel Fokine, Serge Grigoriev, Alexandre Benois, Mikhail Larionov, Cyril W. Beaumont, Jean Cocteau, and Igor Stravinsky, among others. However, her book is not intended as a detailed deconstruction of the truth claims of these sources. Rather, Järvinen’s method is to read contemporary reviews and commentary on the early years of the Ballets Russes alongside her analysis of framings of corporeality, gender, and race—the underpinnings of “historically and culturally specific representations and assumptions about what dance should be” (17). The book thus is intended to accomplish a “critical ontology” of dance, with Järvinen consciously positioning her work in line with that of scholars such as Ramsay Burt, Mark Franko, and Susan Foster (8).

Järvinen begins by introducing the cultural expectations of Nijinsky’s Western (non-Russian, primarily French and English) audience, and then analyzes how notions of race in the contemporary discourse perpetuated an Orientalist view of the Ballets Russes and its star dancer. Diaghilev cultivated the image of his company as a high-art enterprise, separate from the ballet of the French variety shows, by building an audience he flattered as artistic connoisseurs. In this he also took advantage of nostalgia for fin-de-siècle symbolism, which is how Järvinen characterizes the style of the prewar Fokine-dominated period. Here she makes the point that the early Ballets Russes (before Nijinsky’s choreographies) was not nearly as modernist or avant-garde as we have been led to believe. It’s an interesting point, but in making it she passes over the heterogeneity of Fokine’s work in this period, stating that these ballets had a “relatively uniform aesthetic style” (64). This claim is hard to accept—consider Les Sylphides (1909) next to Firebird (1910) next to Petrouchka (1911), all with very different movement vocabularies and themes. With such a strong focus on critical reception and publicity campaigns in these chapters, particularly when reviews of the time rarely discussed choreography...

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