The author, now in her ninetieth year, is a celebrated recipient of both Soviet and post-Soviet honors for her work on European cinema and especially on the Moscow Art Theatre. The theater studio established by Konstantin Stanislavsksii, Leopold Sulerzhitskii, and Evgenii Vakhtangov for experimental work on Stanislavskii's “system” of actor training was an adjunct of the Moscow Art Theatre. The so-called “First Studio” survived for ten years from 1913 to 1923, when it was re-christened the Second Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT2) under the leadership of Mikhail Chekhov, the playwright's nephew.

The book is divided into twenty-three sections, the first thirteen of which are devoted to the Studio, the final ten to MKhAT2. It is not aimed at the general reader, however, who might be better served by the recent mammoth publication, Mkhat Vtoroi. Opyt vosstanovleniia biografii (2010). The present study is a self-consciously “literary” work, seemingly aimed at an audience of fellow experts who need neither a bibliography (consigned to footnotes) nor illustrations, and who can be relied upon to interpret the subtleties and sub-textual inferences of the expositional narrative at an “in-house” level of mutual understanding.

Although ostensibly an account of the significance of productions staged between 1913 and 1928, it is Mikhail Chekhov who emerges as the most significant figure, eclipsing the likes of colleagues such as Sulerzhitskii, Vakhtangov, Richard Boleslavskii, Boris Sushkevich, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and even Stanislavskii himself who, although important, remain subsidiary figures throughout. Chekhov, whose puckish features dominate the book's front cover, was an actor and teacher of genius, as well as a theatrical theoretician of substance, who managed to combine the Tolstoian erdgeist of a Sulerzhitskii with the emotional sincerity of a Stanislavskii and the theatrical flair of a Vakhtangov. The productions in which he appeared at both the First Studio and his own theater, as described here, would seem to synthesize a central conflict of the era between spirit and matter, or religion and politics. In this sense, Chekhov's own anthroposophical beliefs appear crucial to an understanding of both the literal and metaphorical implications of his theater practice.

Key productions at the First Studio were those of Herman Heijermans' The Loss of the Good Ship “Hope” (Op Hoop van Zegen), Johan Henning Berger's The Inundation (Syndafloden), a dramatization of Charles Dickens' The Cricket on the Hearth, and August Strindberg's Erik XIV. Without overstating the case, Solov΄eva analyses the first three of these productions, and Chekhov's performances in them, against a background of war and revolution (1913–21) and sees analogies between a biblical sense of world catastrophe and the disintegration of universal order (conceived affirmatively, for example, by Vladimir Maiakovskii in his Misteriia-Buff of 1918). This is then amplified, theatrically, by a sense of psychological breakdown and social dissolution in the expressionist production of Erik XIV (1921), in which Chekhov played the central character, described here against a background of the Kronshtadt rising and the transition from war communism to the New Economic Policy.

An early stage appearance of Chekhov's in October 1912 had been in the Edward Gordon Craig/Stanislavskii Hamlet, in which Vakhtangov also acted. Adopting Vakhtangov's notes on Hamlet as a Christ-figure, Chekhov's interpretation of the role, in 1924, placed emphasis on the (holy) ghost of his father, the theme of forgiveness, and of final redemption. Earlier, his portrayal of Khlestakov in Revizor (1920) had revealed the reverse side of the same coin as Erik, refracted through a distorting mirror of the farcical/grotesque. This last element was also a feature of Chekhov's 1925 interpretation of the role of senator Ableukhov in fellow anthroposophist Andrei Belyi's adaptation of his own novel, Peterburg, a work in which anarchy and revolution are conceived as bedfellows and in which Chekhov's performance was described by a member of the cast as “exuding the chill of the grave” (530).

Irreconcilable differences within his theater over Chekhov's desire to stage work of his own choosing, plus external pressure to conform, left him with little alternative but to emigrate, a decision Solov΄eva considers inevitable, even life-saving. Chekhov quit the Soviet Union in September 1928 to work in Europe and America until his death in 1955. MKhAT2 was closed by official degree in 1936.

A brief review can only hint at the sheer scale of a study (almost certainly Solov΄eva's magnum opus), centered on the work and personality of a controversial and charismatic theater artist whose abiding theme was “the vulnerability of all forms of life” (545).