'Mouki' in the Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky

• In Event: The Sense of Suffering in Literature, Poetry, and Performance

Abstract

On March 6, 1919 the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky was diagnosed as "a confused schizophrenic" and declared "incurably insane." The so-called "Diary" that he had been keeping for three months prior to that, while used subsequently as evidence of the validity of that diagnosis, has ultimately come to complicate it. In that work, Nijinsky does indeed say that he is incurably mentally ill (or "sick in soul"), but only because he has taken to heart the Tolstoyan critique of modern civilization (something even sicker) and has attempted to confront it in his life and art. This paper uses a sentence from the diary as an entryway to explain Nijinsky's treatment of suffering in the poetic letters included in the "Diary." In the middle of one glossolalic sentence written in a letter to an old friend, Nijinsky writes in broken French: "mouki, mouki, mouki, mouki (en russe mouki ça veux dire souffrense)." The word "mouki," unlike more neutral words like "bol'" and "stradanie," is associated with a semantic group that includes martyrdom, witnessing, and the torments of hell. It indicates the provenance of the "suffering" that Nijinsky wants to convey, bearing witness to a Tolstoyan "life for the sake of the soul.”

Author

• Peter Orte, Williams College