Conclusion

Abstract

Why, then, a book on some dead Russian dancer today? Why an academic treatise on such a popular figure and one that does not discuss his choreographic œuvre? In part, it is my hope to bridge something of the distance between the rather uncritical hagiographic writing on Nijinsky outside academe and the theoretically dense but often equally hagiographic writing on him inside this specialist context. However, as Michel Foucault (1991, 33, 36) put it, the relevance of a work of history is only ever in the reader’s experience:

[I]t is evident that in order to have [… a transformative experience …] through a book like The History of Madness, it is necessary that what it asserts is somehow ‘true’, in terms of historically verifiable truth. But what is essential is not found in series of historically verifiable proofs; it lies rather in the experience which the book permits us to have. And an experience is neither true nor false: it is always a fiction, something constructed, which exists only after it has been made, not before; it isn’t something that is ‘true’, but it has been a reality.