Rediscovering Stanislavsky by Maria Shevtsova (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Rediscovering Stanislavsky by Maria Shevtsova
• Alisa Ballard Lin

REDISCOVERING STANISLAVSKY. By Maria Shevtsova. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020; pp. 304.

English-language writings on the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky have been abundant ever since the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) toured the United States a century ago. But as we now recognize, for decades Stanislavsky was misunderstood as a result of poor translations, Soviet censorship, and distortions of his System by his US continuators. Landmarks in Stan-islavsky scholarship like Sharon Marie Carnicke’s Stanislavsky in Focus (1998; 2nd ed., 2009) have corrected entrenched misbeliefs about Stanislavsky’s work by offering more nuanced and accurate understandings of crucial terms for him such as perezhivanie (experiencing). Maria Shevtsova’s new book, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, is poised to become another such landmark in Stanislavsky scholarship.

As the book promises in its title, Shevtsova offers a thorough reinterpretation of Stanislavsky’s legacy, from his productions at the Society of Art and Literature prior to the MAT’s founding, through his housebound and bed-ridden work at the Opera-Dramatic Studio in the final years of his life. By consulting a range of primary and secondary sources, including archival materials, Shevtsova has uncovered numerous fresh insights into Stanislavsky’s System and its origins, as well as his directorial and pedagogical work, relationship to Soviet politics, and administration of the MAT studios. She portrays Stanislavsky as a sharp and original, highly spiritual thinker who knew how to succeed within his political and social reality.

Shevtsova brings to Stanislavsky the perspective of a scholar of contemporary theatre, and accordingly, she gives continual attention to those aspects of his work that have resonated with more recent directors and actors indebted to him. Overall, her book paints a rich and full picture of Stanislavsky’s wide-ranging career, synthesizing aspects of his life often kept separate or even ignored in scholarship into broadly conceived chapters on contexts, actor, studio, director, and legacy. Shevtsova’s choice to discuss Stanislavsky so comprehensively leads to a rewarding, though sometimes wandering, narrative that integrates Stanislavsky’s personal and professional lives with his cultural context. [End Page 126]

From the beginning, the book establishes Stan-islavsky as a “colossal” innovator (x), and Shevtsova adds much to traditional conceptions of just how Stanislavsky innovated. Particularly radical, she underscores in chapter 1, was his notion of ensemble theatre. Stanislavsky believed in creative collaboration based in shared values among all theatre artists involved in a production, including a deep connection among all the actors, who were accustomed to an egotistical star system that Stanislavsky rejected. His emphasis on the importance of ensemble and community echoes throughout the book. The chapter goes on to discuss some of Stanislavsky’s most formative contexts that shaped his concept of the ensemble. These include the utopian communities of late nineteenth-century Russia, such as the famed Abramtsevo artists’ colony, which Stanislavsky visited in the summers as he was growing up. He was also influenced by Symbolism and the turn-of-the-century metaphysics that sought entry to a realm of mysticism and spirituality. So much scholarship on Stanislavsky divorces him from his context within Russian thought and culture; Shevtsova’s novel account of influences on his understanding of ensemble enriches our knowledge of his practice.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on larger political and religious contexts for understanding Stanislavsky’s entire career. In chapter 2, Shevtsova argues, based on letters and other sources, that Stanislavsky was politically savvy rather than naive, as often assumed. She discusses the MAT’s efforts to find politically acceptable repertoire under Stalinist censorship, depicting Stanislavsky as courageous through the trauma and adversity of those difficult years. His letters attest to his accurate assessment of political motives, as he survived and protected his family in years of not only censorship and repression but material shortages and hardships. In the third chapter, Shevtsova argues for the fundamental importance of Russian Orthodox Christianity to the System, a topic that many scholars have gestured toward but have not explored in detail. She connects Stan-islavsky’s thought to the teachings of the Orthodox Christian prelate Feofan Zatvornik, who writes of the thinking, willing, and feeling sides of the soul...