At last, the deletions made by the great dancer’s wife regarding his relationship with Serge Diaghilev have been restored to this tragic diary. Nijinsky’s is not the usual artist’s diary. It gives no insight into his thinking while he was choreographing his radical ballets, The Rite of Spring and Afternoon of a Faun. That is because during the six weeks when he kept this diary, in early 1919, the dancer who had captivated the world during his years with the Ballets Russes was tipping over into madness (in her excellent introduction, dance critic Acocella concurs with the diagnosis of “confused schizophrenia with mild manic excitement” made by the famed psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler). The tragedy of the diary is in Nijinsky’s evident anxiety that his wife was about to commit him to an insane asylum and his frantic desire to prove himself sane. But in fact, much of the diary is given over to ramblings growing out of his Tolstoyan pacifism and his belief that he was God or at least in direct communication with God. Yet scattered throughout these ravings are sharp comments about his wife, Romola, and various people he has known, much of it colored by his abiding bitterness over his firing from the Ballets Russes by its impresario and Nijinsky’s former lover, Serge Diaghilev (according to Acocella, this was one of a string of misfortunes that culminated in Nijinsky’s madness). There is this, for instance, about Igor Stravinsky, who composed The Rite of Spring: “Igor thinks that I am hostile to his aims. He seeks riches and fame.” But most of his bile is reserved for Diaghilev, claiming that he submitted to Diaghilev’s sexual demands only because the impresario held total power of Nijinsky’s career. The diary also interestingly reinforces Nijinsky’s image of sexual ambiguity, for he claims that throughout his relationship with Diaghilev, he sought out female prostitutes for his own satisfaction. For anyone who has been seduced by Nijinsky’s legend, a sad but indispensable document.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-13921-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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IN THE NEWS
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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