The ever-widening contexts of Konstantin Stanislavsky

ABSTRACT Adopting and adapting Giorgio Strehler’s notion of treating a great play as a series of nesting boxes, I intend to examine the contexts of Stanislavsky’s life and work as Matryoshka dolls, ever widening in significance. The first, most compact box is the biographical: the influence of family, education, theatrical experience, and cultural background on his artistic programme. It is set within the second: the historical, tracking his responses to the broader political and socio-economic events that bore in upon him. The third is the ideological: siting his ideas within the intellectual and aesthetic trends of his time. Finally, I hope to demonstrate how, become an institution in modern theatrical thought and practice, he has generated an all-encompassing context of his own.