by Simon Callow
This objection was first articulated by Stanislavsky’s co-director Nemirovich-Danchenko, whose primary loyalty was always to the writer, and it was a contributory element to the almost ceaseless strife which existed between the two men from a very early stage in their working relationship. Nemirovich, himself a playwright and director, was a man of the widest possible literary culture, an acute and sensitive judge of plays, far more so than Stanislavsky, as the latter freely admitted; it was he who, strongly opposed by Stanislavsky, passionately urged the qualities of The Seagull as a candidate for inclusion in the first season, even though it had been passed over for a prize in a competition in favour of a play of Nemirovich’s own. When in 1897 he and Stanislavsky had their historic first meeting at the Slaviansky Bazaar – a meeting which lasted fifteen hours – they had agreed that in their new theatre Stanislavsky would be responsible for Form, Nemirovich for Content, a tacit acknowledgement of Stanislavsky’s lack of judgement in these matters. In fact, as Nemirovich gleefully points out in his somewhat feline memoirs, My Life in the Russian Theatre (a characteristically less high-flown title than Stanislavsky’s), Stanislavsky was what we now call dyslexic, and had the greatest difficulty memorising lines or repeating them accurately. Small wonder that Stanislavsky’s System places such emphasis on the physical and emotional rather than the verbal and intellectual. Interestingly, as the years went by, Stanislavsky became increasingly concerned with language, to the extent that by the end of his life he was writing (in his notes to his assistant on his late production of Othello; by then he was housebound), ‘To achieve the objectives (something extremely important and something actors always forget) he needs words, thoughts, i.e. the author’s text. An actor above all must operate through words. On stage the only important thing is the active word.’ In his earlier, logophobic days, Stanislavsky was obsessively driven by the need to take the theatre and acting out of the cerebral, mechanical area and release it into organic life, and it was this obsession that led to the new dimension in the acting of the Moscow Art Theatre; his final reconciliation with language was the culmination of his long journey towards an acting which was expressive at every level.
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The stormy relationship with Nemirovich-Danchenko (they scarcely spoke for several years) is only lightly alluded to in My Life in Art, and Nemirovich is constantly praised in its pages. Despite the tensions and storms so common in theatrical partnerships (Welles and Houseman, mac Liammóir and Edwards), between them they sustained an extraordinary level of creativity and exploration over a period of some forty years, through three wars and three revolutions, encompassing the reigns of Nicholas II, Lenin and then Stalin, each of which brought its burdens. Nemirovich, with his elegant psychological acuity, is able to describe Stanislavsky with a vividness that Stanislavsky is unable to match, but there is in Nemirovich an absence of the generosity that is so characteristic of the other man. Thus Nemirovich’s account of meeting Stanislavsky for the first time: ‘Stanislavsky always presented a picturesque figure. Tall, distinguished in stature, he had an energetic bearing and his movements were plastic, though he did not give the impression of giving the slightest thought to this plasticity,’ he writes, affably. Then comes the stiletto: ‘As a matter of fact, this apparent beautiful casualness had cost him immense labour: according to his own words, he had spent hours and years in developing his gestures before the mirror.’ The more or less affectionately mocking tone is characteristic, and seems to have been a not uncommon response to Stanislavsky, with his passions and obsessions; he was known throughout the company, Nemirovich says elsewhere, as ‘big baby’. Another, altogether more savage, pen-portrait of him occurs in Bulgakov’s novel Black Snow, a naked act of revenge on Stanislavsky for the treatment that the author received at his hands during the rehearsals for his play Molière. In its pages Stanislavsky appears as Ivan Vasilievich, dippy, manipulative, stupid, and arrogant, and no doubt there is an element of truth in the picture. Ruled by his vision, he was not quite in the world, and thus not always capable of seeing people in their situations. Perhaps the most acute thing ever said of him was the remark of his colleague, the great actor Kachalov, that Stanislavsky always saw the artist in the person, but he didn’t always see the person in the artist. Few, however, ever accused Stanislavsky of insincerity in his quest for new and vibrant life on the stage. In My Life in Art he presents himself as baffled, slow, obstinate, vain, foolish, sometimes even despotic, but it is hard not to love him, despite or because of this. However selective his account of the 1911 Hamlet which he co-directed with Edward Gordon Craig, it is clear from it that Craig ran circles round him. Stanislavsky was unable to believe that a great artist could behave unlike a great man. The innocence of his world view is a constant thread in the book, but that innocence, allied to an iron determination to pursue his quest, becomes curiously touching.
For the facts of Stanislavsky’s life, Benedetti’s 1988 biography is very useful, and there are whole shelves of memoirs by pupils and assistants. My Life in Art is not an autobiography, much less a detailed account of the Moscow Art Theatre. It is, if anything, a spiritual autobiography, an account of a seeker’s stumbling path towards the mysteries, and as such has much in common with, for example, Reshad Feild’s books of Sufic initiation, or the many books by the pupils of Gurdjieff. Stanislavsky’s view of the art of the theatre, and specifically the art of acting, is essentially esoteric: only true adepts will gain enlightenment and know one day the bliss of arriving at the centre of their own creativity. Despite their practical and detailed nature, Stanislavsky’s exercises are not unlike the exercises of certain spiritual disciplines: their purpose is refinement and concentration of the spirit, whereby the divine part of man can shine forth to the greater benefit of humankind. He is quite explicit about this: ‘there is another all-powerful Artist who acts in mysteries and ways unknown to us on our superconsciousness.’ It is in his later works that he attempts to describe the elements of his System; in My Life in Art he outlines his mission. The book is full of incidental felicities – the fine opening chapter evoking the Russia of his childhood; the brilliant descriptions of individuals, Rubinstein, Gorky, Maeterlinck, Chekhov; the detailed impressions of extraordinary performers; the gripping accounts of the creation of a great theatre company under every kind of duress. But it is above all an affirmation of the possibilities of the arts of theatre and acting and an inspiration to anyone who believes that these things really matter, and have the power seriously to influence human life.
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From a chronological point of view, My Life in Art ends somewhat indeterminately with the revolution of 1917 – the Third Revolution, as Stanislavsky calls it – and the temporary break-up of the company. Physically divided by the civil war, a third of the actors were stuck in Moscow, while the rest, including Knipper, Chekhov’s widow, and Kachalov (Craig’s Hamlet), toured Europe. It is perhaps worth sketching in the remaining twenty-one years of Stanislavsky’s life. Events both within the Moscow Art Theatre and in the outside world were unrelenting and traumatic. On a personal level, Stanislavsky was shattered by a public humiliation administered to him by Nemirovich-Danchenko. Alarmed at the amount of time taken for rehearsals of a revival of Dostoevsky’s The Village of Stepanichikovo (one of the company’s early successes), Nemirovich had, in February 1917, on the very brink of the Kerensky Revolution, taken over the play’s direction. Stanislavsky, who had been co-directing with the actor Moskvin, was floundering in the part of Rostanov. Dissatisfied with his original much-acclaimed interpretation, but unable to achieve the breakthrough into something better, he was attempting to reconceive the part in terms of his new theory of the through-line, the super-objective: what was Rostanov’s overall purpose? What was his goal in life? He found it hard to decide. Finally, at a dress rehearsal and in full view of the company, Nemirovich took the part away from him and handed it to another actor, telling him that he had ‘failed to bring the part to life’. Stanislavsky accepted this savage
treatment without demur, agreeing that it was the best decision both for the production and for the company, but he never again created a new role. The incident did nothing to improve relations between the company’s two directors. Even before the Stepanichikovo incident (Stanislavsky had intended to write about it in My Life in Art under the title The Village of Stepanichikovo: My Tragedy, but lacked the heart to do so), they had been at loggerheads. In April 1916, Nemirovich-Danchenko had been formally ratified as sole managing director of the company. Stanislavsky thenceforth proposed to separate himself from the main theatre and focus his efforts on his studio at home in Leontievski Lane. Increasingly he saw the future of his work in a studio context.
His own financial circumstances had undergone a radical transformation with the revolution. The family business, which he had diligently maintained (he was a model and much-loved employer) was sequestrated by the authorities and turned into a cable factory. Despite the considerable hardship involved, he took it stoically. He only hung on to his apartment by the skin of his teeth, after the intervention of the cultural commissar Lunacharski. Meanwhile, he was as ever trying to secure the future of the theatre, not materially but spiritually. He maintained his lifelong vision of the theatre as one of the key custodians of the community’s soul, a distinctly un-Marxist position, but one unexpectedly supported by Lenin, who was instrumental in ensuring the theatre’s reopening with its traditional repertoire. Post-revolutionary cultural life had splintered into a hundred new tendencies during that glorious and short-lived epoch which threw up and actively encouraged the wildest and most stimulating of experiments. Stanislavsky’s students Boleslavsky and Vakhtangov, both among the most radical of theatrical explorers, worked in the Moscow Art’s Second and Third Studios. The results of their work were often to Stanislavsky’s intense displeasure, but they became highly influential. Stanislavsky himself tirelessly lectured on his System and the future of the theatre. His own work focused increasingly on the opera; ironically, since in My Life in Art whenever he wants to denounce dead acting, he describes it as operatic: ‘like a tenor’, ‘like a bass’ (although he would equally often cite his friend Chaliapin as the ideal actor, the perfect exemplar of everything that he taught). He found, like many another director from the so-called straight theatre, that the singers were more than willing to learn from him; unlike some of his fellow actors, they had no prejudice against his System, which was instantly applicable to their work. This sustained contact with music and its essentially rhythmic and lyrical qualities made him ever more aware of that lack in his work to which he refers on many occasions in the pages of My Life in Art: his vocal and physical limitations, and his failure to address directly the questions of the physical manifestation of the text, its incarnification, as his translator quaintly but memorably puts it. This became a central preoccupation over the succeeding years, as he continued his quest in ever more surprising directions, constantly seeking the ideal definition of his art.
During this immediately post-revolutionary period, the question of whether the Moscow Art Theatre could survive at all, and if so, in what form, was widely and publicly discussed; Stanislavsky’s isolation within the company and the split with Nemirovich were open secrets (particularly since Nemirovich had become a member of the Communist Party and head of all Moscow’s dramatic theatres). Stanislavsky had become A Problem, widely acknowledged, even by the fiercest of young Turks, to be a great artist, a genius, perhaps, but perceived to be fettered, shackled, as they saw it, by his colleagues. His ambitious, rather operatic, production of Byron’s Cain was something of a fiasco, but with his 1921 revival of The Government Inspector, he was again at the forefront of theatrical ferment. The Khlestakov of Michael Chekhov (Anton’s nephew, and one of the most extraordinary talents to have emerged from the First Studio) was a startling experiment in the grotesque which violently divided audiences, some thinking it wilfully and incomprehensibly ugly, others believing it to be everything that modern acting might be: improvisatory in feeling, fantastical, poetic, dangerous. Stanislavsky aided and abetted Chekhov in his approach, and the production itself, controversial, fresh and bold, shared in all these qualities. Stanislavsky had reinvented himself.
Under intense pressure from overwhelming financial difficulties, the Moscow Art Theatre itself was by now reeling from the impact of the New Economic Plan. After a three-year gap during which the Kachalov/Knipper group had toured Europe, the company was now reunited and Nemirovich drew up a plan for an international tour, on which the company embarked in September 1922; they did not return until August1924. The tour took in all the great European cities save only London, and entailed two separate visits to the United States, with six plays, to which were added two new productions on the road. It was as gruelling as these things invariably are, but, as we have seen, it immeasurably enhanced the already glowing reputation both of the Moscow Art Theatre and Stanislavsky himself; he was held to be the perfect paradigm of his own theories, or such of them as had filtered through to the West in publications by Stanislavsky’s colleagues Boleslavsky and Komisarjevsky. Both men had left Russia before the revolution, when the System was in its first form, in which the emphasis was strongly on emotion memory – an emphasis they duly passed on to their own students, of whom the most prominent was the young Lee Strasberg, who was in time to bring it to the Group Theatre and finally to serve it up in vulgarly simplified form at the Actors Studio as The Method.
On the 1923 tour, the great and the good, the intelligentsia and the artistic community, all flocked to see the work; practically without exception, they admired it. Stanislavsky himself was offered many opportunities to teach in America; he could have earned large sums of money, but, contrary to the dark suspicions of the artistic establishment in Russia, he never had any intention of leaving his native land, to which he was passionately devoted. He was a sincere if politically naïve supporter of the revolution, and remained so despite the increasing stranglehold exercised by the authorities after Lenin’s death. By 1924, when the company returned to Moscow, Stalin was Russia’s master. The new political circumstances called for new plays: the Central Repertory Committee, known in the fashion of the time as Glavrepertkom, was required to approve all such works. With great difficulty and over a long period of time, Stanislavsky managed to secure approval for a production of Bulgakov’s The White Guard, astonishing because of its sympathetic portrayal of the White Russian side in the Civil War. When it was finally performed, the play was a huge hit with the public, though violently denounced by all the critics. By one of the odder quirks of theatrical history, when some years later it was proposed to revive the production, Stalin himself demanded a private performance before agreeing to the revival. He loved it, subsequently returning to the theatre seventeen times; the reviews suddenly got better. Stanislavsky fought the official demand for politically simplistic plays with great personal courage, insisting that exposure to such work killed off the actors’ talent. He continued his work in opera, and at the Art Theatre had a particular triumph with Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro, seizing on the celerity and vigour of the play to put into practice his ever-evolving theory of physical action, establishing irresistible tempos for each section of the play, all the tempos integrated to provide an infectious sense of exhilaration. His production of Armoured Train 14–69 satisfied the Commissariat, though two subsequent ‘approved’ plays flopped.
These disappointments were swallowed up in the celebrations for the Moscow Art Theatre’s thirtieth anniversary: the worldwide impact that the company and Stanislavsky’s teachings had made is reflected in the roll-call of congratulatory telegrams: from Chaplin, Fairbanks and Swanson in the United States, Craig in England, Reinhardt in Berlin. The latter went one further, and gave Stanislavsky a car which had cost him 30,000 DM. However, at the Gala which was the theatre’s own celebration of itself, Stanislavsky, playing Vershinin in Act One of The Three Sisters, suffered a major heart attack. He managed to make it to the curtain call,
but that was the end of his career as an actor. He was sixty-five. Thereafter, for the remaining twelve years of his life, he existed in a curious, oblique relationship to the theatre with which his name was more or less synonymous. He planned productions (including a disastrous Othello) from his apartment, issuing detailed production plans and guidelines for his assistants, but he rarely visited the theatre or the rehearsal room; occasionally actors would come to his apartment. The results were predictably unsatisfactory. A great deal of his time was spent on the planned six volumes in which he would describe his System: the first was to be called A Pupil’s Diary at a Drama School. On the advice of his American friend and translator, Elisabeth Hapgood Reynolds, this was divided up into the two books now known as An Actor Prepares (originally, and more precisely known as An Actor’s Work on Himself Part One) and Building a Character (An Actor’s Work on Himself Part Two); they are very much part of the same text and should be seen as such. Their division has further confused an exposition of complex exercises already somewhat scuppered by the clumsy dialogue form in which Stanislavsky perhaps unwisely chose to write, though their influence has been enormous; almost all subsequent systems are a reaction to Stanislavsky’s, for or against.
His health became ever more precarious; his heart condition was complicated by emphysema. When he died, in 1938, at the age of seventy-five and surrounded by every conceivable honour, he was still trying to refine and clarify the latest developments in his System. He had had a rapprochement with his old pupil Meyerhold, from whose aesthetics he had vehemently distanced himself; it seems that near to the point of death he began to see him as a possible successor. There was no rapprochement with Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was not in Moscow when Stanislavsky finally gave up the ghost. He had been in Stanislavsky’s thoughts only days before, however, and made an emotional oration at the memorial service, all the more resonant for the prolonged hostilities that had prevailed between the two men. ‘Immortality begins here. Enamoured and sacrificial devotion was the pivot in the creative life of the deceased. And when I wondered what we should adopt as our guideline in art, I decided it was most of all his attitude to art. We may argue over the artistic issues that we argued over when Konstantin Sergeievich was alive. But this, his stupendous sacrificial attitude to art, is something incontestable. And what I would like for all my comrades of the Art Theatre present here is to make one vow beside the coffin: let us vow that we shall treat the theatre with the same profound and sacred devotion that Stanislavsky did. Let us adopt that as the great motto left us by him. Let us vow to behave as he behaved.’