Stanislavsky: A Life In Letters ed. by Laurence Senelick (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stanislavsky: A Life In Letters ed. by Laurence Senelick Maria Ignatieva STANISLAVSKY: A LIFE IN LETTERS. Edited by Laurence Senelick. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013; pp. 672. Across Laurence Senelick’s scholarship, Russian theatre and culture have taken center stage in his internationally recognized books, such as Gordon Craig’s Moscow Hamlet: A Reconstruction (1982), Serf Actor: The Life and Art of Mikhail Schepkin (1984), and The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance (2000). In Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters, Senelick strives to give the fullest portrait of Stanislavsky’s life produced in English to date, presented in his letters and diary entries. The book of materials selected and translated by Senelick contains an introduction to each of the twelve chapters, with commentaries following the letters. Unlike a conventional biography, such an arrangement gives readers the possibility to create their own picture of “the multi-dimensional nature of Stanislavsky’s life” (xiii). For the first time, American readers can learn about Stanislavsky’s impressions of the Moscow Art Theatre tours in the United States, described in his own words. A legendary actor and director, the creator of the well-known Stanislavsky System of acting, Stanislavsky, as much as any other artist in the world, is the subject of a great many misconceptions and misinterpretations, not only in the United States but also in his native Russia. The reasons for them, however, are different: debates on the System in this country for over eighty years are not as dramatic as the ideological control over Stanislavsky’s heritage in the Soviet Union, where his writing was censored and “edited” in accordance with Soviet propaganda and the doctrine of socialist realism. The situation changed radically after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when a wealth of archival materials became available, resulting in hundreds of groundbreaking publications, including Olga Radishcheva’s three-volume Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko: The History of the Theatre Relationship (1997–99); the four-volume Chronicle of Stanislavsky’s Life and Creativity (2003) by Irina Vinogradskaya; and the nine-volume edition of Stanislavsky: The Complete Works (1988–99). Having collaborated with Russian scholars for over thirty years, Senelick is up-to-date on the research on Stanislavsky in Russia, which gives additional value to his book, although, with typical irony, he writes that when it comes to Stanislavsky, “the word ‘complete’ will always be relative” (xii). Although he allows the reader to hear Stanislavsky’s own voice through the letters, Senelick himself is far from neutral in his interpretation of the debates surrounding Stanislavsky. Even the titles of the chapters provide hints about the editor’s views; for example, chapter 5 is titled “Flirting with Symbolism,” which immediately informs the reader about Senelick’s stance on the temporary nature of Stanislavsky’s infatuation with the trend. In response to other topics, Senelick declares the impossibility for any group to claim having the “true and only” understanding of Stanislavsky’s working methods and the System itself: “Those of his disciples who had studied with him at the First Studio . . . were unaware of the interest in ‘physical action’ that dominated his later curriculum. The insistence on emotional memory in the earliest translations eclipsed Stanislavsky’s emphasis on the corporeal memory, the physical expression of the state of mind” (13). Senelick’s statement is in absolute agreement with the views of Sharon Carnicke, another leading Stanislavsky scholar whose Stanislavsky in Focus (2009) presents cutting-edge research on the System and the origins of its cultural and linguistic misinterpretations in the United States. All twelve chapters of Senelick’s book are insightful, but the last two will be a particular revelation for English readers because they address the intriguing question: How did it happen that Stanislavsky, who was a capitalist and whose relatives were arrested and some killed as enemies of the people, not only survived during the Stalinist era, but, as Senelick writes, became a living monument of the Soviet theatre? From the late 1920s Stalin supported the Moscow Art Theatre as a citadel of Soviet realistic art. During these years, Senelick characterizes Stanislavsky’s position as ambivalent, for although he was “constantly honoured with lip-service to his achievements...