Konstantin Stanislavski
Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski[b] (Russian: Константин Сергеевич Станиславский, IPA: [kənstɐnʲˈtʲin sʲɪrˈɡʲejɪvʲɪtɕ stənʲɪˈslafskʲɪj]; né Alekseyev;[c] 17 January [O.S. 5 January] 1863 – 7 August 1938) was a seminal Soviet Russian theatre practitioner. He was widely recognized as an outstanding character actor, and the many productions that he directed garnered him a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation.[3] His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his "system" of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal technique.[4]
In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Sergeievich and the family name is Stanislavski.
Konstantin Stanislavski
Константин Станиславский
Константин Станиславский
Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev
17 January [O.S. 5 January] 1863[a]
Moscow, Russian Empire
7 August 1938 (aged 75)
Moscow, Russian SFSR,
Soviet Union
Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow
Actor
Theatre director
Theatre theorist
Founder of the MAT
Stanislavski's system
An Actor's Work
An Actor's Work on a Role
My Life in Art
Maria Petrovna Perevostchikova
(stage name: Maria Lilina)
Stanislavski (his stage name) performed and directed as an amateur until the age of 33, when he co-founded the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) company with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, following a legendary 18-hour discussion.[5] Its influential tours of Europe (1906) and the US (1923–24), and its landmark productions of The Seagull (1898) and Hamlet (1911–12), established his reputation and opened new possibilities for the art of the theatre.[6] By means of the MAT, Stanislavski was instrumental in promoting the new Russian drama of his day—principally the work of Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Bulgakov—to audiences in Moscow and around the world; he also staged acclaimed productions of a wide range of classical Russian and European plays.[7]
He collaborated with the director and designer Edward Gordon Craig and was formative in the development of several other major practitioners, including Vsevolod Meyerhold (whom Stanislavski considered his "sole heir in the theatre"), Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Michael Chekhov.[8] At the MAT's 30-year anniversary celebrations in 1928, a massive heart attack on-stage put an end to his acting career (though he waited until the curtain fell before seeking medical assistance).[9] He continued to direct, teach, and write about acting until his death a few weeks before the publication of the first volume of his life's great work, the acting manual An Actor's Work (1938).[10] He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of Lenin and was the first to be granted the title of People's Artist of the USSR.[11]
Stanislavski wrote that "there is nothing more tedious than an actor's biography" and that "actors should be banned from talking about themselves".[12] At the request of a US publisher, however, he reluctantly agreed to write his autobiography, My Life in Art (first published in English in 1924 and in a revised, Russian-language edition in 1926), though its account of his artistic development is not always accurate.[13] Three English-language biographies have been published: David Magarshack's Stanislavsky: A Life (1950) ; Jean Benedetti's Stanislavski: His Life and Art (1988, revised and expanded 1999).[14] and Nikolai M Gorchakov's "Stanislavsky Directs" (1954).[d] An out-of-print English translation of Elena Poliakova's 1977 Russian biography of Stanislavski was also published in 1982.
European tour and artistic crisis
The MAT's first European tour began on 23 February [O.S. 10 February] 1906 in Berlin, where they played to an audience that included Max Reinhardt, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Eleonora Duse.[117] "It's as though we were the revelation", Stanislavski wrote of the rapturous acclaim they received.[118] The success of the tour provided financial security for the company, garnered an international reputation for their work, and made a significant impact on European theatre.[119] The tour also provoked a major artistic crisis for Stanislavski that had a significant impact on his future direction.[120] From his attempts to resolve this crisis, his system would eventually emerge.[121]
Sometime in March 1906—Jean Benedetti suggests that it was during An Enemy of the People—Stanislavski became aware that he was acting without a flow of inner impulses and feelings and that as a consequence his performance had become mechanical.[122] He spent June and July in Finland on holiday, where he studied, wrote, and reflected.[123] With his notebooks on his own experience from 1889 onwards, he attempted to analyze "the foundation stones of our art" and the actor's creative process in particular.[124] He began to formulate a psychological approach to controlling the actor's process in a Manual on Dramatic Art.[125]
A manual for actors
While on holiday in August 1926, Stanislavski began to develop what would become An Actor's Work, his manual for actors written in the form of a fictional student's diary.[236] Ideally, Stanislavski felt, it would consist of two volumes: the first would detail the actor's inner experiencing and outer, physical embodiment; the second would address rehearsal processes.[237] Since the Soviet publishers used a format that would have made the first volume unwieldy, however, in practice this became three volumes—inner experiencing, outer characterisation, and rehearsal—each of which would be published separately, as it became ready.[238]
The danger that such an arrangement would obscure the mutual interdependence of these parts in the system as a whole would be avoided, Stanislavski hoped, by means of an initial overview that would stress their integration in his psycho-physical approach; as it turned out, however, he never wrote the overview and many English-language readers came to confuse the first volume on psychological processes—published in a heavily abridged version in the US as An Actor Prepares (1936)—with the system as a whole.[239]
The two editors—Hapgood with the American edition and Gurevich with the Russian—made conflicting demands on Stanislavski.[240] Gurevich became increasingly concerned that splitting An Actor's Work into two books would not only encourage misunderstandings of the unity and mutual implication of the psychological and physical aspects of the system, but would also give its Soviet critics grounds on which to attack it: "to accuse you of dualism, spiritualism, idealism, etc."[241] Frustrated with Stanislavski's tendency to tinker with details in preference to addressing more important missing sections, in May 1932 she terminated her involvement.[242] Hapgood echoed Gurevich's frustration.[243]
In 1933, Stanislavski worked on the second half of An Actor's Work.[244] By 1935, a version of the first volume was ready for publication in America, to which the publishers made significant abridgements.[245] A significantly different and far more complete Russian edition, An Actor's Work on Himself, Part I, was not published until 1938, just after Stanislavski's death.[246] The second part of An Actor's Work on Himself was published in the Soviet Union in 1948; an English-language variant, Building a Character, was published a year later.[247] The third volume, An Actor's Work on a Role, was published in the Soviet Union in 1957; its nearest English-language equivalent, Creating a Role, was published in 1961.[247] The differences between the Russian and English-language editions of volumes two and three were even greater than those of the first volume.[248] In 2008, an English-language translation of the complete Russian edition of An Actor's Work was published, with one of An Actor's Work on a Role following in 2010.[249]
Political fortunes under Stalin
Following his heart attack in 1928, for the last decade of his life Stanislavski conducted most of his work writing, directing rehearsals, and teaching in his home on Leontievski Lane.[265] In line with Joseph Stalin's policy of "isolation and preservation" towards certain internationally famous cultural figures, Stanislavski lived in a state of internal exile in Moscow.[266] This protected him from the worst excesses of Stalin's "Great Terror".[267]
A number of articles critical of the terminology of Stanislavski's system appeared in the run-up to a RAPP conference in early 1931, at which the attacks continued.[268] The system stood accused of philosophical idealism, of a-historicism, of disguising social and political problems under ethical and moral terms, and of "biological psychologism" (or "the suggestion of fixed qualities in nature").[268] In the wake of the first congress of the USSR Union of Writers (chaired by Maxim Gorky in August 1934), however, Socialist realism was established as the official party line in aesthetic matters.[269] While the new policy would have disastrous consequences for the Soviet avant-garde, the MAT and Stanislavski's system were enthroned as exemplary models.[270]
