Konstantin Stanislavsky’s first English-language biographers labored under various handicaps. David Magarshack (Stanislavsky: A Life, 1950) was a Latvian-born journalist and translator who had no practical experience of the theatre. Jean Benedetti (Stanislavski: His Life and Art: A Biography, 1988, rev. 1999) was a veteran English acting teacher, unfamiliar with Russian culture. Both had to rely on corrupted texts, censored and reshaped to Soviet ideology. Both copiously and uncriti-cally paraphrased Stanislavsky’s memoir, My Life in Art, which exists in two distinct versions, one (1924) intended for an unsophisticated American reader, one (1925) for a better informed but sequestered Soviet reader. Both biographers scanted the 20 years of Stanislavsky’s postrevolutionary life, despite its being a period of frantic activity. Both were focused chiefly on the foundation of the Moscow Art Theatre and the development of the System.
As its title states, Rediscovering Stanislavsky is an attempt to move these now outdated boundary markers to broader intellectual and theatrical horizons. Maria Shevtsova is the ideal person to carry out such a task. Not only is she firmly grounded in the Russian cultural context, but, as coeditor of New Theatre Quarterly, she has been viewing and reviewing the world theatre scene for decades. Conversant with five languages, she has been able to benefit from the new editions of Stanislavsky’s writings and documents that poured out of the Soviet Union just before and after its dissolution. The result is a provocative and original reassessment of a titan of modern theatre.
The book is not a formal biography, but an analysis of Stanislavsky’s thoughts and conceptions from the Art Theatre’s foundation in 1898 to the repercussions following his death in 1938. It begins with a chronological survey, but Shevtsova is sedulous in showing how in each era Stanislavsky’s ideas related to the ambient ideological climate. She shows how his notions of ensemble and community drew on the social and artistic ideals of the Abramtsevo Circle of self-made millionaire art patrons. (Until 1918 Stanislavsky was himself a millionaire industrialist.) Their connection to religious dissenters, the Old Believers, also informed his abiding concern for “the human spirit” and cleaving to “truth.” Their patronage of the Itinerant school of painting (Peredvizhniki) enforced his attraction to “realism.”
Shevtsova carries her inquiry into Stanislavsky’s spiritual background into the Bolshevik period, when such words as “soul” and “spirit” were condemned as bourgeois and even counterrevolutionary. She questions his knowledge of modern psychology in her discussion of the subconscious and the superconscious; along the way, she takes issue with many “authorities” on Stanislavsky whose pronouncements have been widely accepted.
For example, she criticizes at length Benedetti’s translations of Stanislavsky’s books on acting for suppressing religious terminology as rigorously as the Soviets might have, though for different reasons. To render dukh (spirit) as “mind” and dusha (soul or heart) as “personality” is to distort Stanislavsky’s concepts and precepts out of all proportion. Similarly, over the last 20 years much has been published about Stanislavsky’s interest in yoga; but Shevtsova demonstrates that notions he is supposed to have borrowed from Asian religious practice are in fact intrinsic to esoteric branches of Russian Orthodoxy. Despite the recurrence of certain key ideas throughout his lifetime, Stanislavsky was not a systematic thinker. When it came to borrowing from other disciplines, he might easily have declared with Molière, “Je prends mon bien où j’y trouve” (I take what I need wherever I find it).
Outside of Russia, the Art Theatre’s First Studio is the only one usually discussed because, of its students, Yevgeny Vakhtangov became an important director while others emigrated to the US to become acting teachers, spreading the gospel of Stanislavsky. Shevtsova carefully anat-omizes the development of all four of Stanislavsky’s studios, as well as those devoted to opera. She integrates his interest in music (he had trained as an opera singer) with his work as a director. Although she devotes space to familiar Anton Chekhov plays, she also probes his rehearsal work on two postrevolutionary productions: the flop Cain and the hit The Marriage of Figaro, which he directed in 1920 and 1927, respectively.
These various themes, which are interwoven throughout the book, culminate in a magnificent coda, an epilogue that relates Stanislavsky’s worldwide influence on directors over the past century, from Bashkirja to Berlin, returning to Russia to discuss Lev Dodin and Yury Butusov. Again, it is not specific techniques but Stanislavsky’s vision, his emphasis on the “human being,” that Shevstova sees most perpetuated in his “legacy.”
I spotted only two errors of fact. Shevtsova refers to Stanislavsky’s performance in the Alexandre Benois–directed The Doctor in Spite of Himself (159); but the Molière comedy in question was The Imaginary Invalid. She describes Karl Gutzkow’s Uriel Acosta as a tragedy “on the exclusion of Central European Jews from human rights, including their right to citizenship” (181). In fact, it is a romantic verse drama, set in 17th-century Amsterdam, about the excommunication of a freethinker from the Jewish community. The regrettable lack of illustrations should be attributed to the publishers.
These are, however, fly specks on a magisterial examination of a seminal figure in the history of the theatre. In fewer than 200 pages (not including the excellent bibliography and index), Shevtsova has packed a lifetime of knowledge and perception, in order to present a Stanislavsky less pedantic, less naïve, more intellectually complex, more aware of the world around him than the narrowly focused pedagogue of so many earlier studies.
