Konstantin Stanislavsky

Konstantin Stanislavsky (born January 5 [January 17, New Style], 1863, Moscow, Russia—died August 7, 1938, Moscow) was a Russian actor, director, and producer, founder of the Moscow Art Theatre (opened 1898). He is best known for developing the system or theory of acting called the Stanislavsky system, or Stanislavsky method.

(Read Lee Strasberg’s 1959 Britannica essay on Stanislavsky.)

Stanislavsky’s father was a manufacturer, and his mother was the daughter of a French actress. Stanislavsky first appeared on his parents’ amateur stage at age 14 and subsequently joined the dramatic group that was organized by his family and called the Alekseyev Circle. Although initially an awkward performer, Stanislavsky obsessively worked on his shortcomings of voice, diction, and body movement. His thoroughness and his preoccupation with all aspects of a production came to distinguish him from other members of the Alekseyev Circle, and he gradually became its central figure. Stanislavsky also performed in other groups as theater came to absorb his life. He adopted the pseudonym Stanislavsky in 1885, and in 1888 he married Maria Perevoshchikova, a schoolteacher, who became his devoted disciple and lifelong companion, as well as an outstanding actress under the name Lilina.

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Stanislavsky regarded the theater as an art of social significance. Theater was a powerful influence on people, he believed, and the actor must serve as the people’s educator. Stanislavsky concluded that only a permanent theatrical company could ensure a high level of acting skill. In 1888 he and others established the Society of Art and Literature with a permanent amateur company. Endowed with great talent, musicality, a striking appearance, a vivid imagination, and a subtle intuition, Stanislavsky began to develop the plasticity of his body and a greater range of voice. Praise came from famous foreign actors, and great Russian actresses invited him to perform with them. Thus encouraged, Stanislavsky staged his first independent production, Leo Tolstoy’s The Fruits of Enlightenment, in 1891, a major Moscow theatrical event. Most significantly, it impressed a promising writer and director, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858–1943), whose later association with Stanislavsky was to have a paramount influence on the er.

Nemirovich-Danchenko followed Stanislavsky’s activities until their historic meeting in 1897, when they outlined a plan for a people’s theater. It was to consist of the most talented amateurs of Stanislavsky’s society and of the students of the Philharmonic Music and Drama School, which Nemirovich-Danchenko directed. As the Moscow Art Theatre, it became the arena for Stanislavsky’s reforms. Nemirovich-Danchenko undertook responsibility for literary and administrative matters, while Stanislavsky was responsible for staging and production.

The Moscow Art Theatre opened on October 14 (October 26, New Style), 1898, with a performance of Aleksey K. Tolstoy’s Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich. But Stanislavsky was disappointed in the acting that night. He found it to be merely imitative of the gestures, intonations, and conceptions of the director. To project important thoughts and to affect the spectators, he reflected, there must be living characters on stage, and the mere external behaviour of the actors is insufficient to create a character’s unique inner world. To seek knowledge about human behaviour, Stanislavsky turned to science. He began experimenting in developing the first elements of what became known as the Stanislavsky method. He turned sharply from the purely external approach to the purely psychological. A play was discussed around the table for months. He became strict and uncompromising in educating actors. He insisted on the integrity and authenticity of performance on stage, repeating for hours during rehearsal his dreaded criticism, “I do not believe you.”

Stanislavsky’s successful experience with Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull confirmed his developing convictions about the theatre. With difficulty Stanislavsky had obtained Chekhov’s permission to restage The Seagull after its original production in St. Petersburg in 1896 had been a failure. Directed by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1898, The Seagull became a triumph, heralding the birth of the Moscow Art Theatre as a new force in world theater. Chekhov, who had resolved never to write another play after his initial failure, was acclaimed a great playwright, and he later wrote The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1903) specially for the Moscow Art Theatre.

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Staging Chekhov’s play, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko discovered a new manner of performing: they emphasized the ensemble and the subordination of each individual actor to the whole, and they subordinated the director’s and actors’ interpretations to the dramatist’s intent. Actors, Stanislavsky felt, had to have a common training and be capable of an intense inner identification with the characters that they played, while still remaining independent of the role in order to subordinate it to the needs of the play as a whole. Fighting against the artificial and highly stylized theatrical conventions of the late 19th century, Stanislavsky sought instead the reproduction of authentic emotions at every performance.

In 1902 Stanislavsky successfully staged both Maxim Gorky’s The Petty Bourgeois and The Lower Depths, codirecting the latter with Nemirovich-Danchenko. Among the numerous powerful roles performed by Stanislavsky were Astrov in Uncle Vanya in 1899 and Gayev in The Cherry Orchard in 1904, by Chekhov; Doctor Stockman in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in 1900; and Satin in The Lower Depths. Both as an actor and as a director, Stanislavsky demonstrated a remarkable subtlety in rendering psychological patterns and an exceptional talent for satirical characterization. Commanding respect from followers and adversaries alike, he became a dominant influence on the Russian intellectuals of the time. He formed the First Studio in 1912, where his innovations were adopted by many young actors. In 1918 he undertook the guidance of the Bolshoi Opera Studio, which was later named for him. There he staged Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in 1922, which was acclaimed as a major reform in opera.

In 1922–24 the Moscow Art Theatre toured Europe and the United States with Stanislavsky as its administrator, director, and leading actor. A great interest was stirred in his system. During this period he wrote his autobiography, My Life in Art. Ever preoccupied in it with content and form, Stanislavsky acknowledged that the “theater of representation,” which he had disparaged, nonetheless produced brilliant actors. Recognizing that theater was at its best when deep content harmonized with vivid theatrical form, Stanislavsky supervised the First Studio’s production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in 1917 and Nikolay Gogol’s The Government Inspector in 1921, encouraging the actor Michael Chekhov in a brilliantly grotesque characterization. His staging of Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s An Ardent Heart (1926) and of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro (1927) demonstrated increasingly bold attempts at theatricality. His monumental Armoured Train 14–69, V.V. Ivanov’s play about the Russian Revolution, was a milestone in Soviet theater in 1927, and his Dead Souls was a brilliant incarnation of Gogol’s masterpiece.

While acting in The Three Sisters during the Moscow Art Theatre’s 30th anniversary presentation on October 29, 1928, Stanislavsky suffered a heart attack. Abandoning acting, he concentrated for the rest of his life on directing and educating actors and directors.

The Stanislavsky method, or system, developed over 40 long years. He tried various experiments, focusing much of the time on what he considered the most important attribute of an actor’s work—bringing an actor’s own past emotions into play in a role. But he was frequently disappointed and dissatisfied with the results of his experiments. He continued nonetheless his search for “conscious means to the subconscious”—i.e., the search for the actor’s emotions. In 1935 he was taken by the modern scientific conception of the interaction of brain and body and started developing a final technique that he called the “method of physical actions.” It taught emotional creativity; it encouraged actors to feel physically and psychologically the emotions of the characters that they portrayed at any given moment. The method also aimed at influencing the playwright’s construction of plays.