Journal Article

Whole New Worlds of Art

RICH, CHARLOTTE

2022

Overview

Judging by its absence in several studies of Lost Generation literature, the novel appears a lesser contribution-or no contribution at all-to the body of fiction about Americans in interwar Europe, especially the environment of Paris.2 Neglect of Save Me the Waltz, particularly alongside its roman a clef counterparts The Sun Also Rises and Tender Is the Night, affirms Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as the preeminent storytellers of American lives in post-World War I Europe, with the fiction of Djuna Barnes and Kay Boyle more recently recognized for this significance. [...]the relationship between Fitzgerald's experience with ballet and the novel is far richer and more historically significant. Besides being an epicenter of experimentation in literature, visual art, music, and fashion in the early twentieth century,3 Paris was also central to evolution in the world of dance, and the Ballets Russes was the most influential dance movement in the first half of the twentieth century. [...]recent scholarship asserting the connections between modernist studies and dance provides compelling reason to revisit this novel. According to Cline, Fitzgerald, who studied ballet in her formative years in Montgomery, began lessons with Lubov Egorova (also known as Princess Troubetskoy), a retired balle- rina of the Ballets Russes, in Paris in the fall of 1925 (178-79).

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Subject: 20th century / American literature / Balanchine, George (1904-1983) / Ballet / Culture / Dance / Dancers & choreographers / Fiction / Fitzgerald, F Scott (1896-1940) / Fitzgerald, Zelda (1900-1948) / Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961) / Modern art / Modernism / Novels / Storytelling / Visual artists