In this gem of a book, Alisa Ballard Lin launches a wide-ranging exploration of the early twentieth-century Russian theater directors’ and scholars’ views on the psychology of performance. Central to this study is the humanist strand in the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet performance theory, which, as Ballard Lin convincingly argues, elevated the concepts of the mind and individual agency at a time when rivaling modernist trends promoted mechanicism, reductionism, automation, depersonalization, and collectivism. In focusing on consciousness—that is, the part of the inner life that is accessible to self-observation—the protagonists of Ballard Lin’s study theorized the stage as a space of imagination, epiphany, catharsis, and spiritual growth. As Ballard Lin demonstrates, despite adhering to diverse stylistic movements and intellectual platforms, the stage directors Nikolai Evreinov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Konstantin Stanislavskii, the playwright Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, the psychologist Lev Vygotskii, and the philosopher Gustav Shpet were united in their commitment to scrutinizing the subjective experience afforded by the theater. Whether they considered the psychological work of the actor, or the interpretative and emotional investments of the spectator, the book’s theorists put emphasis on a special state of consciousness brought about by theatrical playacting. For them, the essence of theater as an art form lay in its power to structure a unique experience, where creativity and heightened perception served the purpose of discovery, learning, and transformation. In prizing consciousness, mindfulness, and self-observation, these authors did not shy away from addressing the topics that challenged the Cartesian understanding of human rationality, namely the topics that were at the forefront of fin-de-siècle artistic sensibility: the role of the subconscious, mankind’s spiritual earnings, a holistic unity of body and mind, and the relationship between the individual’s personality and the fictional world of the stage play. In the Coda of the book, Ballard Lin shows that these topics were expunged or absorbed in a hollowed-out form into the Stalinist discourse on theater in the late 1930s.

Moving nimbly and confidently between various theorists’ points of view, Ballard Lin’s erudite, well-researched study delves into the rich cultural context, which enabled triangulating exchanges between theater, psychology, and philosophy before the Stalinist crackdown. A flourishing research center promoting this interdisciplinary crossover in the 1920s was the Theater Section of the State Academy of the Artistic Sciences (GAKhN, Gosudarstvennaia Akademiia Khudozhestvennykh Nauk). Ballard Lin discusses various research initiatives under the umbrella of this institution, such as the questionnaires polling famous actors on their psychological experience, which were administered by Liubovʹ Gurevich, a GAKhN member and editor of Stanislavskii’s publications. She also devotes a chapter of her book to the philosopher Gustav Shpet, GAKhN’s vice president and translator of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological treatises, who articulated an original theory of the actor’s embodiment of a character as a sensuous experience of “motor-sympathetic forms” (64). Ballard Lin also points out that GAKhN’s Theater Section collaborated with the psychologist Lev Vygotskii, known for his breakthrough cultural-historical approach to personality development. The book draws attention to Vygotskii’s early career as a literary scholar and theater critic, demonstrating the far-reaching consequences of his theses in various performance reviews for his subsequent views on the role of the cultural and material context for shaping personality development. In terms of her contribution to theater history, Ballard Lin pairs the giants of the twentieth-century stage, Stanislavskii and Meyerhold, with undeservedly lesser known Evreinov and Krzhizhanovskii, offering the reader an accessible introduction into the latter two authors’ original works along with their vivid portraits and concise biographies. Even in the case of the canonical directors, Ballard Lin finds a novel angle from which to address their legacy by focusing on little-known aspects of their creative biographies: Meyerhold’s collaboration with Shpet in the ill-fated staging of The Lady of the Camellias (1934) and the proximity of Stanislavskii’s notion of experiencing to Vygotskii’s analysis of the ways in which a character grows out of the performer’s interpretation and interaction with a given symbolic and material context of the stage role. One of the most interesting chapters of the book delves into Krzhizhanovskii’s 1923 adaptation of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday for Aleksander Tairov’s Kamerny Theater, using this production to illustrate Krzhizhanovskii’s and Tairov’s theoretical exploration of the actor’s craft in polemics with Meyerhold and Stanislavski.

A lucid gateway into early twentieth-century Russian performance theory, this book presents a tightly knit argument connecting multiple major and lesser-known figures of the period’s theater world. The implications of Ballard Lin’s archival research and thought-provoking presentation of the performance theorists’ ideas will undoubtedly generate new pathways in the field for years to come.