The Unique Genius

Abstract

This chapter revolves around three terms that were used to set Nijinsky apart from his colleagues: virtuoso, star and genius. The modalities of each of these terms varied and, for Nijinsky’s contemporaries, each signified different, often contradictory, characteristics. For example, ‘genius’ encompassed instinct and knowledge, intuition and intelligence, uniqueness and universalism, barbarism and taste, nature and refinement. Yet, despite the multivarence of ‘genius’, ‘star’ or ‘virtuoso’, there was surprisingly little confusion about what each term implied: a set of interrelated and historically defined meanings, all drawn into the logic whereby certain things and actions were taken to be indicative of them in certain people, but not in others. Notably, both stardom and virtuosity had, by the end of the nineteenth century, acquired negative connotations of anti-genius, without which defining genius, particularly in a performing art, was quite impossible. In the following, I explain how these three terms together functioned in the discourse of the Ballets Russes to create in Nijinsky a dancing genius.