Vol. 18 No. 2 · 25 January 1996
pages 9-10 | 2797 words
God in the Body
Anne Hollander
- Cahiers: Le Sentiment by Nijinsky, translated into French by Christian Dumais-Lvorski and Galina Pogojeva
Actes Sud, 300 pp, FRS 140.00, January 1995, ISBN 2 7427 0314 4
This book is a cry of pure pain, immensely difficult to read without groaning and sometimes weeping and getting up to pace the floor. Its flavour is aptly illustrated by the shocking jacket photograph of Nijinsky undergoing a catatonic seizure at the age of 37, about eight years after he wrote this text. With his necktie neatly knotted, his face shaven and his hair combed, hands curled up, the greatest dancer of his epoch – some say of any epoch – stares into the lens with a horrifying sacrificial patience. He would not die until the age of 60, after more than three decades of being moved around from sanatorium to sanatorium in Switzerland and England.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 4 · 22 February 1996
From Alastair Macaulay
Anne Hollander’s piece on the Nijinsky Cahiers (LRB, 25 January) prompts several questions, especially about language. Hollander is reviewing a French translation of Nijinsky’s Russian manuscripts, sometimes giving us quotations in English. It should be remembered that Nijinsky’s first language was Polish. He received his education in Russian, but his biographer Richard Buckle writes that he was ‘slow in book-learning’. Most people who worked with him found him inarticulate. Therefore we must ask: do his writings, however moving, really bring him ‘closer than anything could to life’?
Hollander writes warmly of Nijinsky’s wife Romola and her understanding of him. But is this warmth merited? Everything about the Nijinskys’ marriage is odd. When Vaslav proposed to Romola in 1913, she spoke no Russian, and his French was rudimentary. Peter Ostwald’s 1991 psychobiographical study Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness produces evidence to show that part of what prompted Nijinsky to mania in 1917-19 was Romola’s infidelity with a hotel physician. By 1919, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. In 1920, she gave birth to a second daughter, Tamara. As Joan Acocella has said in the New Yorker, not only is it likely that Vaslav was not the father, but Romola herself later chose to say so.
Hollander discusses Nijinsky’s frequent assertion ‘that he is God.’ Nijinsky was hailed as ‘le dieu de la danse’ (an accolade revived for him by French critics from its several applications in the 18th century to the leading male dancers of that era). The label was first applied the morning after his debut in Paris in 1909; and his sister, in the thoughtful 1971 Afterword to her Early Memoirs, applies the phrase to him again. As I understand, Russian has no indefinite article. Is Nijinsky writing, ‘I am God in the body’ or ‘I am a god in the body’? He may simply have been repeatedly reflecting on the accolade he had so repeatedly received.
Alastair Macaulay
<em>Financial Times</em>,
Vol. 18 No. 6 · 21 March 1996
From Kyril FitzLyon
As the first translator and annotator of Nijinsky’s unexpurgated Notebooks (my draft English version, though unpublished, has been available to researchers since the Eighties), I would like to say how much I enjoyed Anne Hollander’s review of the Notebooks’ French translation (LRB, 25 January). Her review contains only one factual error and that through no fault of hers: she has been misled by the French publishers into thinking that the ‘text has been translated directly into French from the Russian manuscripts.’ It was not. It appears to have been translated from a typed transcript of the manuscript, which, like most transcripts, contains a number of errors, omissions and other deviations from the original. On occasion the transcriber, unable to decipher a passage from the manuscript, has, on his own admission, retranslated my draft English version back into Russian and incorporated it into the Russian text, to be duly translated (without acknowledgment) by the French translators. The same applies to my explanatory notes included in my draft English version. My correct final version will be published this year by Farrar, Straus.
Kyril FitzLyon
London W4
