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My Life in Art. by Konstantin Stanislavski. Translated and Edited by Jean Benedetti

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My Life in Art. by Konstantin Stanislavski. Translated and Edited by Jean Benedetti Books My Life in Art. By Konstantin Stanislavski. Translated and edited by Jean Benedetti. London: Routledge, 2008; 452 pp.; illustrations. $39.95 cloth. An Actor’s Work. By Konstantin Stanislavski. Translated and edited by Jean Benedetti. London: Routledge, 2008; 693 pp. $35.00 cloth. There is no doubt that these volumes translated by Jean Benedetti will allow readers who cannot access Stanislavski in Russian to discover him at long last—not rediscover him, but actually come face to face with a practitioner whose reputation is marked by numerous misunderstandings.1 Stanislavski’s autobiography, My Life in Art, first appeared in the United States in 1924 in less-than-adequate English by J.J. Robbins. It was part of a publicity campaign for the Moscow Art Theatre’s US tour, and Stanislavski, who needed foreign currency to cure his tubercular son in Switzerland, went along with the deal, embarrassed by his struggles as a writer but doing his best to meet the publisher’s deadline. These and related circumstances are noted with humor in Laurence Senelick’s introduction to the Routledge publication. The original Russian text has long since disappeared, but Robbins’s translation was available in Methuen’s imprint as late as 1980, perpetuating the hastily constructed image of a figure who, by now, towered over the theatre of the 20th century, for better or for worse. On returning to the Soviet Union, Stanislavski wrote a completely revised and extended version that was published in 1926. As far as it is possible to gauge from the various Russian editions of this version, Benedetti’s editorial work stands up well to the challenge. The book is Stanislavski’s journey from childhood and adolescent devotion to amateur theatrics to the founding, with Vladimir Nemirovich- Danchenko, of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, its difficulties in the pursuit of a “new kind of art” (337), and its embattled position after 1917 when it was under attack from the revolutionary left, which had its own new art to offer. Stanislavski’s pages on his meeting with Nemirovich- Danchenko make for engrossing reading as they detail the current stage practices and substan- dard working conditions that the MAT intended to oppose; and they include the commercialism of the theatre, its reliance on star turns, actors’ stock-in-trade posturing and tricks, makeshift, unsanitary, and unheated dressing rooms with broken windows and gaping doors, and the lack 1. Although normally I would use the transliteration “Stanislavsky,” I am using the spelling as it appears in the book title, “Stanislavski.” Books 172 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 of respect shown to actors in society at large. The writing is immediate, passionate, and precise, focusing attention not simply because the MAT set its sights high against a prehistoric age, but because you find yourself thinking that that age has not yet vanished. There is much, still, to value in Stanislavski’s claims for the dignity and integrity of “art” (as distinct from what he called “convention”), actors, and the theatre profession. In many ways, these pages anticipate the chapter “Ethics and Discipline” that comes towards the end of An Actor’s Work and which is something of a credo on why doing theatre with principled seriousness could and should matter for self and others. Stanislavski’s focus throughout on the how and why of theatre—and his accounts of pro- ductions are finely observed—leaves little room for personal sentiment in his observations on various key figures: Edward Gordon Craig whose innovations he admired; Nemirovich- Danchenko, with whom he was no longer on speaking terms (although you would not know it from the book); Michael Chekhov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Yevgeny Vakhtangov, his brilliant pupils, whose criticism of the psychological realism he had pursued down different pathways for more than two decades must have hurt him to the core. He is similarly discreet about his close friend and collaborator Leopold Sulerzhitsky to whom he entrusted the First Studio, founded in 1912. The First Studio was set up to test and develop the “system,” as Stanislavski called it—in quotation marks to indicate its provisional nature. Meanwhile, the established MAT actors, as Stanislavsky tells it, described it as “Stanislavski’s mania,” angrily complaining that he had “turned rehearsals into an experimental laboratory and that actors were not guineapigs” (257). Here, too, Stanislavski keeps his feelings to himself. What is striking, above all else, is his ceaseless probing, exploration, and experimentation; and, indeed, Stanislavski’s laboratory approach set a precedent for the entire 20th century. It is little wonder that practitioners as diverse as Grotowski, Barba, Vasilyev, and Dodin, who diverge as much from each other as Stanislavski’s pupils did, are indebted to him, as are numer- ous small-scale laboratory theatres barely aware of his pioneering endeavor. Benedetti’s translation is very readable, although it does not quite fully convey the emo- tional principle embedded in Stanislavski’s research. Thus, too frequently, he uses “mind” for Stanislavski’s dusha (meaning both “heart” and “soul”) as well as for dukh (“spirit”). “Mental,” then, covers the adjectives dushevnoe and dukhovnoe from the corresponding two nouns. Bene- detti’s choices might be tidy, but they suggest that Stanislavski envisaged the actor as more rationally driven and in-the-head in his/her practice than is implied by his continual emphasis on the actor as a constantly developing emotional and spiritual being. These nuances are vital when it comes to An Actor’s Work, his lifelong elaboration of the “system” written in the style of Socratic dialogue to indicate that the actor’s search is ongoing and organic; and the search is for the embodiment, also in the heart, of skills and techniques commensurate with the actor’s tasks in specific playing contexts. Fundamental to this organicity is perezhivanie, which Benedetti systematically translates as “experience,” unlike his predecessor Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood who employed a wider range of terms. His solution is convenient, but “experience” needs the qualifying “emotional” to convey Stanislavski’s meaning fully. Sometimes this adjective is sorely needed to capture the idea of going through an emotion and coming through it in control of the action that, for Stanislavski, is theatre. It is essential here to point out that action (deistvie) rather than play (igra), which, in Stanislavski’s conceptual framework, connotes playacting and pretence or artifice, is the cornerstone of his “system” as a whole: this is especially so because deistvie also homes in on the notion of “taking action,” which is there in the verb deistvovat. In other words, deistvie is not about imitating anything, but creating it, here and now. Zadacha, another one of those words that has caused confusion, is appropriately translated as “task” (contra Hapgood’s erroneous preference for “objective”). The problems of translation are many, not all to be blamed on Stanislavski’s circumlocutions, neologisms, repetitions, and frequently obsessive preoccupation with terminology—for the sake, Books 173 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2010.54.1.172 by guest on 25 September 2021 it must be said, of sense and meaning. The opus was in two interconnected parts whose pub- lished Russian titles are An Actor’s Work on Himself in the Creative Process of Emotional Experience, Part I (‘emotional’ here added because of the comments above) and An Actor’s Work on Himself in the Creative Process of Embodiment, Part II (‘himself’ because the noun for ‘actor’ in Russian is masculine). Benedetti has put them together in one volume for the continuity Stanislvaski is said to have wanted. His shortened title may have been presumed to be more attractive to readers, but it calls for some explanation in the foreword to the book. Hapgood, by comparison, opts for An Actor Prepares and Building a Character whose difference from the Russian titles is evident. Once again, as in the case of My Life in Art, there are two versions of Part I, a North Amer- ican and a Russian one. Hapgood’s translation came out in 1935, while Stanislavski’s unabridged text appeared in 1938. However, he failed to complete Part II before his death in the same year. Hapgood was to publish it (Building a Character) 12 years later from material provided by his son. Thus, in the English-speaking world, An Actor Prepares was taken as a stand-alone for long enough to do damage, not least to “embodiment” in its central importance, in Stanislavski’s eyes, in the creative process. Furthermore, An Actor Prepares is not only approximately less than half of its homologue in Russian, but it also loses the latter’s engaging dialogical structure. Discus- sion, some of it polemical, is replaced by the rather pompous or simply insubstantial dictates of a teacher-tyrant. Benedetti refers to the knot of difficulties involved in these variations in his foreword, as he has done elsewhere (1990); Sharon Carnicke has also teased it out in her book, keeping its Russian side well in view (1998:71–91). The idea of “process” is vital to Stanislavski’s idea of theatre as work in which intuition and inspiration become knowable, tangible elements. An Actor’s Work set out to be a manual, possibly one of the most ambitious for the theatre ever written. But, in fact, it was always a philosophy of creativity and of its rigor, as well as of its imagination. —Maria Shevtsova References Benedetti, Jean. 1990. “A History of Stanislavski in Translation.” New Theatre Quarterly 6, 23:266–78. Carnicke, Sharon.
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