My Life in Art

Konstantin Stanislavski, Jean Benedetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415436571
• eBook ISBN: 9781317832720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Konstantin Stanislavski was a Russian director who transformed theatre in the West with his contributions to the birth of Realist theatre and his unprecedented approach to teaching acting. He lived through extraordinary times and his unique contribution to the arts still endures in the twenty-first century. He established the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 with, among other plays, the premiere of Chekhov's The Seagull. He also survived revolutions, lost his fortune, found wide fame in America, and lived in internal exile under Stalin's Soviet Union.

Before writing his classic manual on acting, Stanislavski began writing an autobiography that he hoped would both chronicle his rich and tumultuous life and serve as a justification of his aesthetic philosophy. But when the project grew to 'impossible' lengths, his publisher (Little, Brown) insisted on many cuts and changes to keep it to its deadline and to a manageable length. The result was a version published in English in 1924, which Stanislavski hated and completely revised for a Soviet edition that came out in 1926.

Now, for the first time, translator Jean Benedetti brings us Stanislavski's complete unabridged autobiography as the author himself wanted it – from the re-edited 1926 version. The text, in clear and lively English, is supplemented by a wealth of photos and illustrations, many previously unpublished.

Artistic Youth

The Moscow Society of Art and Literature

It was then that Aleksandr Fedotov, famous in his day as a director, husband of Glikeria Fedotova,¹ and father of my friend Aleksandr of whom I have already spoken, arrived in Moscow. He was mounting a performance to remind Moscow of his existence. His son was to take part in it and through him he invited me. The play was Racine’s Les Plaideurs which Fedotov, who was also a dramatist, had translated. The lead was taken by Fyodor Sollogub, a famous amateur painter, nephew of the well-known writer Count Sollogub, who wrote Tarantas,² and friend of Vladimir Soloviov.³ I played the lead role in Gogol’s Gamblers which was the first play of the evening.⁴ It was my first encounter with a really gifted director like Fedotov. Contact with him during rehearsals was the best school I could have had. I evidently interested him and he tried to bring me closer to his family.

Fedotov’s production was a success. After that I could not go back to my amateur wanderings.

The people who had taken part in Fedotov’s production did not want to split up. We talked about setting up a large society which would bring together all the amateur and dramatic circles and everyone working in other theatres and arts in one single drama circle where there was to be no card-playing. I had long dreamed of doing this with my old friend Komissarzhevski. All I needed to do was bring him together with Fedotov and talk through the plans for this major enterprise.

When you want something badly enough, it all looks so simple. And it seemed to us that it would be easy to make our dreams a reality – raise the money we needed through subscriptions and special donations. Like an avalanche that storms down the mountainside, dragging down everything in its path with it, so our new idea as it grew expanded with more and more targets and sections. Fedotov was to represent the world of theatre and literature, Komissarzhevski the world of music and opera, and Count Sollogub, the fine arts. We were also joined by the publisher of a newly created arts magazine, The Artist, which subsequently enjoyed great success. The founders of the magazine used our new society to popularize their publication. As our ambitions grew, we decided to open a drama and an opera school. How could we not, when we had among us such great teachers as Fedotov and Komissarzhevski?

Everyone approved our plans, foresaw success and only Count Sollogub tried to curb my wilder flights of fancy and warned me not to be carried away.

Fedotova also invited me to her house often, out of friendship, and, in a motherly fashion, warned me of the dangers that threatened me. But, being stubborn by nature, when my heart is set on something, I do not hear the voice of reason. I attributed Fedotova’s pessimism to her disagreements with her husband and I simply did not trust in Sollogub’s practical experience because he was too much of an artist.

And then, to my ill or perhaps good fortune, I unexpectedly received a large sum of money, 25 or 35,000 roubles. Not being used to such sums, I thought I was a millionaire. I gave the new society an advance so that we could acquire suitable premises without which, as it seemed then, it could not exist. So, I gave the money. Then the premises had to be refurbished. Money was needed for that, too. And as there was no other source, they turned again to me. And I, carried away as I was, of course did not refuse their request.

Our Society of Art and Literature was ceremoniously opened at the end of 1888,⁵ at the middle of the winter season, in excellently appointed premises in the centre of which was a large theatre space (for dances, too). Around it were a number of rooms and a foyer and a large room for the artists. They had decorated the walls themselves and designed the furnishings. It was in this very original room that they made sketches which were then auctioned on family evenings to pay for their supper.

Actors from every theatre came and read or performed various little scenes, improvised, played charades, while others sang, still others danced, but what entertained everyone was the fact that straight actors appeared as dancers, and singers and dancers as actors.

The whole of the intelligentsia was present at our opening. They thanked the founders of the Society and me, in particular, for having brought them all under the same roof. They assured us that they had been waiting a long time for actors and artists, musicians and scholars to come together. The press was enthusiastic about our opening. A few days later the drama section of the Society gave its first performance. That has a story of its own which I am happy to tell.

First Season

A Surgical Operation

We had decided as early as the spring to stage Pushkin’s Miserly Knight and Molière’s Georges Dandin for our opening performance. It is hard to imagine anything more difficult for amateurs. And I wonder to this day what led us to select these works. Every line in Pushkin is a theme for a whole play, or at least for a whole act. Acting the few pages he has written into which he has concentrated his meaning is the same as acting several full-length plays. This tragedy about avarice says everything in a few short pages that has or ever will be said about this human vice.

I appeared in both plays. In the first I played the tragic lead, the Knight, in the second comic role of Sottenville. Classic roles must be cast in bronze. That is beyond the scope of amateurs who need an interesting plot, action, which will hold the audience’s attention. But in Pushkin the plot is simple and there is almost no action. All the action is internal.

‘Who can I take as a model? Who am I to copy? I had never seen anyone in this role and cannot imagine which of the actors I know could begin to play it and how,’ I said to myself. ‘There’s no way out,’ I thought further. ‘Unless Fedotov can save me. I am in his hands.’

‘Tonight I shall sleep or rather not sleep at your house,’ Fedotov said to me one day. ‘Arrange it so we can spend the night in the same room with beds facing each other.’

I did as he asked.

Fedotov was already quite old, with a mop of thick grey hair and a bristly clipped moustache which showed that it was used to feeling the razor, as befits an actor,⁶ an expressive mobile face and a number of tics. His eyes flickered here and there nervously. Asthma made him stoop a little but did not impede his superhuman energy. He chain-smoked perfumed ladies’ cigarettes, lighting one from the other.

Dressed in his nightshirt, with his thin, bare legs, he began with great enthusiasm and skill, which were considerable, to describe for me the sets and staging he had conceived for the tragedy. He said he had ‘conceived’ the production but in fact he had no idea what it would be like, but improvised it for me so as to fire himself and me with the need to create. I have done the same thing many times myself and know this old director’s trick. It does not matter if everything is different in performance. Very often you do not believe you can do the things you thought up in your head. But even these airy dreams can fire and stimulate your imagination. Sometimes, as he spoke, I interjected my own thoughts and ideas. Then we scrapped everything and started on something new, something different. But we ran into more obstacles and altered our plan completely. Finally all these ideas condensed or crystallized, as it were, into something that revealed the content better, and as concisely as Pushkin’s text. Fedotov would leap off the bed, carried away by our ideas and vividly demonstrate what he could see in his head. His bent, aged body, his skinny legs, twitchy face, his evident talent already gave a hint of an as yet shadowy character that I started to see. Here was a decrepit, nervy old man, who held me both by his outward and inward traits. But I felt closer to another sort of man, calmly glorifying in his vice, without a hint of nerves, but rather possessed of monumental confidence, convinced of his right to be who he was. As it turned out, Fedotov was looking for the same thing, but his edgy behaviour was the result of a long day’s hard work.

However, there was a difference. His character was older and more true to type than mine. It almost seemed taken from a picture by an old master. Do you remember those reddish candlelit faces bending over swords they are wiping clean of blood, or poring over a book? My character was a noble father or old man straight out of the opera, like Saint-Brie in Les Huguenots.⁷ I was already turning into one of those famous Italian baritones with good legs in black tights, wonderful shoes, wide breeches and a wonderfully tailored doublet with a sword. Especially the sword! Oh! For me it was the most attractive thing about the role. Thereafter there were two characters in my head which I could not reconcile and which fought each other like two bears in the same cage.

An agonizing split occurred. I could not decide which of the two models it would be better for me to copy, Fedotov or the baritone. In some places it was Fedotov. I could not deny that his ideas had flair and originality. But then, in other places, and these were much more plentiful, it was the baritone who took the upper hand. How could I say no to beautiful legs in tights, the high Spanish collar, just at the moment when I at last had been given a wonderful medieval role which I never had the opportunity to play when I was performing in opera as a singer? At the time I thought that speaking verse and singing were the same thing. My polluted taste seemed to bewilder Fedotov. Once he became aware of it, the fire went out, he fell silent and put out the candle.

Our second discussion concerning the role took place when we were shown the sketches for the sets and costumes Sollogub had made.

‘Awful!’ I said to myself when I looked at them.

Picture to yourself a very old man with fine aristocratic features in dirty, torn leather headgear, like a woman’s bonnet, with a long imperial that had long since not been trimmed and had almost turned into a full beard, a straggly moustache, baggy worn-out wrinkled tights covering skinny legs, long shoes that looked like bedroom slippers and which made his feet look long and thin, a worn, half-unbuttoned shirt, stuffed into his old, once fine, breeches, a jacket with wide sleeves like a monk’s. The powerful shape of an old man. The whole body, tall, thin, bent like a question mark, leaning over a chest, with gold coins running into it through its skeleton-like fingers.

‘What? A pitiful beggar instead of my handsome baritone? Never!’

I was so upset I could not hide my feelings and tearfully asked to be released from the role which had become hateful to me.

‘At all events,’ I concluded, ‘I just can’t play it.’

‘What is it you want?’ asked a bewildered director and a designer. I told them frankly what I had dreamed, what attracted me in the role. I tried to draw a picture of the way I saw it. I even showed them a photo of the baritone which I kept hidden in my pocket.

To this day, I still do not understand how the tastelessness of an opera singer and the refinements of French theatre and operetta which had helped me develop as a director, could coexist in the same body. Evidently, artistically I was still a tasteless copycat.

Fedotov and Sollogub then began an operation that I needed – an amputation, a disembowelling, a draining of the theatrical muck that still remained secretly hidden. They gave me a drubbing I will never forget as long as I live. They mocked me, showed me as clearly as two and two make four, how out of date, how inconsistent, how vulgar my taste was, so that at first I said nothing, then felt ashamed, and finally felt what a nonentity I was. It was as though I had been emptied out. The old was no good but there was nothing new. They had not yet persuaded me about the new but had dissuaded me from the old. A series of discussions, the study of pictures by masters old and new, brilliant conversations, valuable, instructive lessons began to sow the seeds of something new. I felt like a turkey being fattened up with nuts. I had to put the photo of the baritone away in my desk I was so embarrassed by having wanted to be like him. Was not that a success?!

But how far away I still was from what my new teachers wanted!

The next phase in my work on the role was to study how to convey an old man externally, physically.

‘It is easier for you to play a very old man than a middle-aged one,’ Fedotov explained. ‘In an old man the lines are much clearer.’

I was already somewhat prepared to play old men. When I was working with a mirror during the summer in the hall of our town house, which I have spoken about, I played everything. Including old men. Besides which I had observed and copied one of my acquaintances, a very old man. I felt physically that his normal state was like that of a young man who was very tired after a long walk. Legs, hands and back are stiff, as though rusted and needing oiling. Before you can stand up, you must get ready, lean forward to move the centre of gravity, find the fulcrum, use your hands to push yourself up since your legs are only half working. Once up, do not straighten immediately but unbend gradually. Walk with small steps until the legs begin to work, and only then step out, but you find it difficult to stop. This I understood not just theoretically but in practice, too. I could live the experiences of an old man by making it like the exhaustion of a youth. It seemed good to me. And the better it seemed, the more I tried to apply it to the character.

‘No, that’s no good. You’re overdoing it. That’s what children do,’ said Fedotov critically. ‘You don’t have to work so hard. Take it easier!’

I tried to cut down but it was still too much.

‘Do less, less!’ he commanded.

I cut down still more until finally I stopped straining and let an old man’s rhythm carry me along.

‘That’s it,’ Fedotov approved.

I just do not understand! When I tried to use the methods I had found to give an old man’s walk, I was told it was ‘no good at all’. When I stopped using these same methods that Fedotov had approved, they said, ‘Good’. Did that mean no methods were needed?! When I got rid of what I had found, and stopped acting, they shouted:

‘Speak up! Can’t hear you!’

However hard I tried, the secret eluded me.

Further work produced no results. In simple, quieter moments I managed to latch onto some feelings but these were only actor’s emotions and had nothing to do with the character. I experienced something externally, i.e. physically, but that only related to the physical characterization. I was also able to say the lines with some degree of simplicity. But not because of the baron’s inner nature, as written by Pushkin, but for the sake of saying them simply. Take the following combination: limp on one foot, tidy the room and sing a song at the same time. You can walk, do the moves, the business, declaim Pushkin’s lines as an old man in exactly the same way. That was as far as I could go at the time. I was heartily sick of the role because I could not get into its skin. I had put the role on, in a hurry like a coat, but had forgotten one sleeve. But what was really annoying was the fact that I was only just about able to use the technical tricks I had worked out earlier in the quieter passages. When I needed to be strong, I became tense and lost the little I had discovered in the part. In those moments I was visited once again by what we used to call inspiration. I would start forcing, so that my voice became strangled, husky, wheezy, my whole body went rigid and I spoke the lines like a provincial ham, with false actor’s emotion and an empty heart.

Rehearsals ended and I went to take the waters at Vichy and agonized over the role for the whole summer, hammering away at myself more and more. I could not think of anything else, it was uppermost in my mind, it became a pathological obsession. The pangs of creation are the worst of all human tortures. You feel there is something there that the part needs, it is very near inside yourself. You need to grasp it but when you stretch out your hand, it disappears back inside yourself. You approach the high points in the role with an empty heart and nothing in your mind. All you have to do is open up but it is as though there are buffers sticking out of your mind that block the way to strong feeling. It is like a man who cannot quite decide to plunge into icy water.

In my search for a way out, I found something new that seemed at the time a stroke of genius. A few miles from Vichy there is a medieval castle with a huge dungeon beneath it.

‘I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• A note on transliteration
• Translator’s note
• Publisher’s acknowledgements
• Introduction: Stanislavsky’s Double Life in Art
• Translator’s preface: Stanislavski’s Hidden Life in Art
• ARTISTIC CHILDHOOD
• ARTISTIC ADOLESCENCE
• ARTISTIC YOUTH
• ARTISTIC MATURITY
• APPENDICES: Variants and Articles
• Endnotes
• Chronology