Throughout his life Stanislavsky sought to resolve two key questions in acting: how the actor can infuse a role with emotional or spiritual content, and how he or she can repeat a performance without it becoming tired and mechanical. In order to achieve this resolution he developed methodologies for training the actor. Crucial to his exploration was Stanislavsky’s view of the ‘machine’, that is, the external training of the actor’s voice and physicality, and the inner training of the mechanisms for generating emotion and communicating spiritual truths to an audience. The question of what Stanislavsky understood as ‘internal’ and ‘external’ over the course of his career is therefore important and the latter part of this chapter will examine his exploration of this in MLIA. The discussion is illuminated by two crises of confidence in Stanislavsky’s acting career, the first of which occurred when he was playing Stockmann in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in 1905/06 and the second when playing Salieri in Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri in 1915.
Stanislavsky experimented in his own acting, as well as in his training and directing work at the Moscow Art Theatre. He consulted scientific and artistic works, was influenced, of course, by contemporary ideas, and in the Soviet period he was guided by his editor as to how he should theorise about some aspects of acting. It is necessary, therefore, to delineate the ideological context for Stanislavsky’s work and some of its dominant themes. His lifespan, from 1863 to 1938, straddled two phases of Russian history – before and after the 1917 Revolution. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was an emblem of human progress at the beginning of Stanislavsky’s epoch and the start of Stalin’s purges towards its end was an emblem of inhumanity. The early period of Stanislavsky’s life was marked by civil unrest, with the influence of Karl Marx increasing (Das Kapital was translated into Russian in 1872), and the assassination of Tsar
Sometimes there was a disjunction between the received ideas of the early part of Stanislavsky’s lifespan and the ideas burgeoning in the revolutionary period, and at other times a continuity of thought. Stanislavsky inherited ideas from Russian artists of the nineteenth-century golden age of Russian literature, such as Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol, and also the ideas of such thinkers as Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, all of whom continued to be acclaimed after the revolution. Leo Tolstoy, one of Stanislavsky’s icons, was a leader in aesthetic thought at the beginning of Stanislavsky’s life and some of his views were embraced in socialist realism at the end. The silver age of Russia from the 1890s to the 1917 Revolution, was a period when Russian music, dance, literature, theatre and fine art were celebrated in Europe and America; the symbolist movement emerged, with which Stanislavsky engaged. Other avant-garde movements such as futurism and constructivism came to the fore but were later seen as suspect by the Soviet authorities.
Stanislavsky’s life spanned remarkable changes in scientific thought and his system, though he wished it to be rooted in nature, developed in a period of shifting views of natural science, human nature and behaviour. Significantly, the end of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of psychology as a science as it emerged from the work of philosophers with a psychological bent, such as Wilhelm Wundt and Gustav Fechner.
Before Marx, the idealist philosophy of first Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), then Georg Hegel (1770–1831), held sway in Germany. This philosophy, which studied ideas and saw consciousness as the foundation of reality, was very influential in Russia, as were other aspects of German culture. Romanticism, a predominantly cultural movement in other countries, also pervaded the fields of philosophy, science and medicine in Germany. The philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (1775–1854)
Notably, these views of nature, consciousness and spirit were also subject to influences ostensibly from the East, as in, for example, the emergence of theosophy and anthroposophy. The last part of the nineteenth century saw the development of occult movements in Russia along with
Hindu works were translated into many languages including Russian. Mikhail Chekhov famously became an anthroposophist and, most importantly, Stanislavsky had an interest in yoga, to which he was introduced by Leopold A. Sulerzhitsky, his close friend and assistant at the Moscow Art Theatre.the beginnings of analytical psychology, new interest in comparative religion and myth and the East. Growing out of romanticism’s interest in mythology and religion (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Friedrich Creuzer and others) this interest exploded in the second half of the nineteenth century in the works of Orientologists Friedrich Max Müller and Paul Deussen, the ethnologist Sir James Frazer and the Cambridge School, and in the work of Wilhelm Wundt, Gustav Fechner, Edouard von Hartmann, and Harald Hoffding on the philosophy and psychology of religion.
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Into the melting pot of ideas about nature and consciousness came those of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the German philosophers from whose work psychology emanated. In the modernist period, inspired by Nietzsche and, in particular, by The Birth of Tragedy (published in 1871), there was a utopian belief in Russia that the new man, the Übermensch, would be created in Russia. As psychology developed, Nietzsche proposed that there were hidden realities within human beings and ideas began to circulate about the subconscious and unconscious, which could be
Significantly, by the time Stanislavsky was forming his views on acting in the first decade of the twentieth century, associationist psychology had become established. One of the main subjects of psychological research was the unconscious. Through the influence in Russia of German philosopher Edouard von Hartmann, Stanislavsky inherited and appropriated pre-Freudian concepts of the unconscious. Although there is evidence of the Freudian paradigm in Russia, it came later and had a far lesser impact than in European countries. Emotion, and what were seen by some as its subconscious processes, was also being investigated by psychological theories of the time, such as those of Charles Darwin, William James, Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain, all of which concentrated on the physiological basis of emotion, as did the work of associationist Théodule Ribot, whose importance for Stanislavsky has been widely acknowledged though not sufficiently examined. The influence of William James, more indirect yet still significant, has not to date been acknowledged. The meaning of Stanislavsky’s slogan for the system, ‘the subconscious creativity of nature itself – through the artist’s conscious psycho-technique’, should be considered in the light of all these ideas.
A paradigm shift in science occurred, emblematic of which was the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859.4 The assertion of the theory that human beings evolved, as opposed to the widespread western belief in God’s creation, radicalised thinking in many domains, particularly natural science. Darwin’s impact in Russia was different from in the West.5 It was believed that scientific law was discoverable – and Stanislavsky’s
Darwin was revered by Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who achieved world fame for his scientific work, and it was because of Darwin’s theory that Pavlov and his contemporaries thought they could extrapolate findings about human beings from the study of animals. In 1872, significantly, in relation to the influence of science on acting theory, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was published. Darwin argued here, in a detailed study of animals and people that included photographs by Guillaume Duchenne,6 that our expressions of emotion are universal (that is innate, not learned) and the product of our evolution. Darwin discussed facial expressions, holding that gestures are socially learned, although other scientists were to include gestures as part of the supposed universal language. This idea was to be incompatible with later theories of behaviour, which stated that inheritance plays no part in explaining our social behaviour, but it was extremely influential in Russian thought in the early-twentieth century, particularly in acting, while theories of conditioned reflexes were developing.
After the revolution, pre-modernist intellectual culture was regarded as suspect, prevailing ideas centring on the materialism and determinism of Marxist philosophy. In his funeral oration on Marx, Frederick Engels asserted that Marx’s materialist conception of history was comparable with Darwin’s theory of evolution as a discovery, that is, it was a scientific discovery of a law.7 The Bolsheviks’ embrace of Marx’s historicism was such that, after the revolution, Marx’s dialectical materialism was the basis for Communist society and its particular utopianism. The new philosophy brought with it an expectation that human nature could be
The study of reflexes, à la Pavlov, became the focus of the study of movement and in it, it was believed, lay the key to understanding and controlling behaviour. It was, in fact, essential for the political leaders that Pavlov’s work was central to the developing ideology, although there was a conflict here between ideas of science and politics:There is no matter without movement any more than there is movement without matter. The study of movement is therefore the essential object of the science of nature.
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The work on physiology, by first Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov and, later by Pavlov, introduced the materialist notion of the human organism which led to the paradigm shift in thinking of human behaviour in terms of reflexes, particularly as a result of Pavlov’s work. Pavlov had received the Nobel Prize in 1904 and his theory of conditioned reflexes placed Russian science on the world stage from the beginning of the twentieth century. This was important for Stanislavsky as for other acting theoreticians. The idea that the individual’s behaviour is a constant series of interactions with the environment grew widespread within Stanislavsky’s lifetime.Yet very early, in the midst of the Civil War, the highest leaders went out of their way to persuade Ivan Pavlov that there was an exceptionally honored place for him in revolutionary Russia, in spite of his strongly expressed disapproval of Bolshevism.
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The 1917 Revolution ushered in a period of utopianism and science, but at the same time the new science of the twentieth century placed Bolshevik leaders under pressure:
Accepting and enshrining Pavlov’s work became the project of the Bolsheviks, leading later to the recognition of Pavlov’s ‘teaching’ as the only correct embodiment of Marxism-Leninism in psychology, and the suppression of other kinds of psychology. Richard Stites writes that Pavlov’s dogs salivating to ringing bells were a symbol of the scientific way to understand the mind by reducing it to associative functions of the nervous system.11 Pavlov’s bells rang across domains and continents as his ideas spread, and there was much cross-fertilisation of scientific ideas in the Soviet Union, America and Europe after the revolution, including the preoccupation with the machine and the concern with ‘the making of men’. Ideas on physical culture proliferated and so did ideas on scientific approaches to work.The Bolsheviks claimed that they and their culture were ‘scientific’, but those who were in the process of making the most important Russian contributions to science could not accept the materialist metaphysics of the nineteenth century, any more than the avant-garde artists who were drawn to the Revolution could easily come to terms with nineteenth-century realism as the basis for their art.
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In fact Stanislavsky attempted to incorporate reflex theory into his work, no doubt believing it had been proved, and this affiliation was one of the reasons why Stanislavsky’s system was recognised as authoritative in the thirties, because it was seen to corroborate current political and scientific thinking. Although Pavlov’s ideas had been of great importance for Meyerhold (though in a different way), his work, on the other hand, became increasingly incompatible with Soviet ideology.
The Bolshevik project did not discard the past entirely, which was significant for Stanislavsky:
Here is evidence for Foucault and Kuhn’s view that knowledge does not advance by accretion, but that progress can be made by consciously accepting or rejecting cultural ideas. Rather than proletarian culture evolving organically, however, this was a period of extensive state intervention in culture. Narkompros, the Peoples’ Commissariat of Enlightenment, was set up after the revolution under Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky,Lenin was a traditionalist in artistic taste and a political realist. He thought it was essential to ‘grasp all the culture which capitalism has left and build socialism from it.’ Proletarian culture…had to evolve organically out of the past and the present.
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Within this ferment of ideas there were contradictions: ideas of organic, beneficent nature and natural law, including the truths of behaviour about to be discovered, were juxtaposed with the view that the state or scientists or even individuals could intervene and shape human nature. There was the assumption that humanity was in the care of nature, and simultaneously it was thought that human beings could be engineered or trained. And as time went on there was an insistence, for political reasons, on distinguishing the aspects of natural science that wereideologically correct from those that were not. The socialist realist precept that the function of art is to further the aims of Socialism gained currency during Stalin’s rise to power, affecting all artists and, of course, Stanislavsky.
Stanislavsky claimed human nature was the subject of his study, writing that his books ‘have no pretensions to science. Their aim is exclusively practical. They attempt to convey what long experience of being an actor, director and teacher has taught me’ (AWHE, p. 41). This may well be Stanislavsky’s disclaimer after the revolution when ideas had changed and the definition of what was ‘scientific’ had become more circumscribed. For his approach, within the parameters of the time, is scientific. In fact, as Moore points out, he made a study of human behaviour over a period of forty years.13 His methodology, like that of the associationist philosophers, was based on introspection and observation. He extrapolated from the results of his examination of his own experiences in acting and from his experiments in directing and training other actors, though after
Stanislavsky emphasised that his terminology arose from his practical work: ‘Do not look for scientific roots in it…it is true that we also use scientific words, for example, ‘subconscious,’ ‘intuition’ but they are used by us not in the philosophical, but in the most simple everyday meaning’ (AWHE, p. 42). Despite his disclaimers he read and drew from scientific works, including texts on experimental psychology. He complained that stage creativity had been neglected by science in that it had not been researched (AWHE, p. 42), and elsewhere, discussing what he calls the ‘logic and consistency of feelings’, he again complained that these complex psychological questions were still little researched by science, which had given the actor neither practical instruction, nor foundation. He states he had no option, therefore, but to take a purely practical rather than a scientific path relying on ‘our human nature, life experience, instinct, feeling, logic, consistency and the subconscious itself’ (AWHE, p.262).
The practical, introspective methodology could be claimed as scientific then but it was difficult for Stanislavsky to continue to claim this later, as the approach was based on pre-revolutionary science. An important reference work for him was Tikhon Faddeev’s Psychology, published in 1913, from which he made brief but significant excerpts. Faddeev asserts experiment as the most complete scientific method in science and industry, but notes that experimental research cannot be conducted fully on consciousness, though some aspects, such as perception, association and memory, can be researched experimentally to some extent. Selfobservation, he says, is the basis of psychological research. As ‘everyone constantly studies his own soul…everyone is to a certain extent a psychologist’.14 From separate observations, the psychologist must pick out constant manifestations and formulate them as laws, creating a system. The criteria for trustworthiness of the conclusions are ‘logical feeling’ or ‘healthy sense’ and indirect experience, that is, practical conclusions verified by experience, where plans lead to a desired end. As well as self-observation we draw our observations from others. We cannot observe their inner life directly but can make judgements about it from observation of their words and behaviour. This is clearly the process
Faddeev goes on to state that it is important to study psychic manifestations from a physiological point of view. His first rule is that psychology is the science that studies the laws of the life of the human soul; it does not attempt to define what a soul is in essence. His second rule is that the life of the human spirit appears in the constant changing of states of consciousness: feelings, images, voluntary manifestations and the indefinite states of consciousness and psychic overtones that accompany them.15 Faddeev also writes that feelings and images, which are linked, and psychic states, such as desire or volitional effort, lead to action. The manifestation of spiritual life is reducible to the alternation of images, feelings and voluntary manifestations in the stream of consciousness, which is James’s phrase.16 Faddeev’s psychology was empirical in the way that Ribot’s and William James’s was, and this was exactly what Stanislavsky took as the theoretical base of his system.
Moreover, for Stanislavsky, psychology is a natural science, a study of laws established by nature. Stanislavsky read and marked a pamphlet by Evgeny Bezpiatov, the proprietor of the A. S. Suvorin Theatre School in St Petersburg, where Michael Chekhov trained. Elements of Scientific Psychology in the Theatrical Art in connection with general questions of Theatre, published in 1912, makes the case for empirical as opposed to rational psychology as the science on which acting should be based:
Bezpiatov refers to a correspondence between psychical and physical manifestations, an inextricable link between the inner and spiritual and the outer mechanical expression of the actor, the workings of which can be uncovered by psychology. This was similar to Stanislavsky’s view of the inner and outer aspects of acting.Psychology, according to James (and Ladd)’s best definition, is a natural science, concerning the description and interpretation of states of consciousness… Empirical psychology as a positive science studies the external manifestations of spiritual activity of a person. At its basis is a law, ‘to each psychic manifestation corresponds a nervous-mechanical manifestation, which is inextricably linked with it.’ Since the actor on stage produces in fact the external manifestations of spiritual (hidden) work, then in fact empirical psychology is also the science that is necessary for the actor.
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