The method, p.13
The Method, page 13
Out of these trials came a renewed patriotism on Stanislavski’s part. Russian culture was a thing of great beauty and value. Intermingling with Europe benefited everyone, but for Stanislavski, Russian culture must remain supreme within its borders. And, conveniently enough, had he not developed something purely Russian with the “system”? Was it not born of Shchepkin, of Pushkin, of Gogol, the three greatest artists to walk on Russian soil?
He made a speech to the Moscow Art Theatre along these lines in September 1914. At this point, the assembled company must have greeted it with some skepticism. Everything Stanislavski encountered—the war, personal triumphs and failures, perhaps even his lunch—led him to redouble his efforts to perfect the “system,” but those efforts had hurt his actual work as a theater artist, as even he acknowledged in My Life in Art. His use of the rehearsal hall as a laboratory dragged his process out for months, sometimes years, as he sought to refine the “system.” And as he prepared new roles as an actor, he wandered so far into the tall weeds that he occasionally became lost.
The First Studio responded to the outbreak of war with a production of Charles Dickens’s Cricket on the Hearth, directed by Boris Sushkevich. The production’s soul, of course, was Suler, who wanted a chance to test the power of theater to enlighten us all. The studytsi hoped the show’s warm humanism could inspire people to see the good in all, embrace pacifism, and end the war. Michael Chekhov, playing a toymaker, learned how to make his own toys and built all of his props himself. Vakhtangov, as the villain Tackleton, became the production’s breakout star. Vera Soloviova learned to use affective memory, calling forth the memory of her mother’s death in order to weep onstage night after night.
In 1913, the Studio had moved into new digs overlooking Skobelevskaya Square. The facilities were larger—the auditorium now had better technical capabilities and a stage raised a whole twelve inches off the ground—but the space still sat only fifty or so people, maintaining the intimacy their work depended on. Cricket became the First Studio’s biggest hit to date. As Stanislavski spent more and more time there, and critics began writing that the First Studio outpaced its parent company in artistry, Nemirovich tried to spin it off into an independent entity, hoping to force his erstwhile partner back into the fold. The effort failed. Not only did the First Studio remain part of the Moscow Art Theatre, but Stanislavski began wandering even farther afield, cooking up a scheme to launch an International Studio that would attract artists from all over the world to work on and study the “system.”
By now, everyone recognized that the First Studio was a theater in its own right. What had started as a laboratory hidden from the merciless realities of production was now regularly producing work at the highest level. Its company was the kind of permanent ensemble of which Stanislavski had always dreamed, a group united by their ceaseless commitment to theatrical excellence, training and challenging one another even as they found success. While the “system” continued to cause headaches for everyone at the home office, at the First Studio it created a flourishing artistic enterprise.
But for one member of the company, life was about to intervene, taking him away for nearly two years. Richard Boleslavsky created what would be his final new role at the Moscow Art Theatre in Nemirovich-Danchenko’s production of Autumn Violins in April 1915. In the fall of that year, he also began rehearsing The Deluge, a production at the First Studio directed by Vakhtangov. But he would never appear in the play. The tsar had promised Poland independence if Russia won World War I. The same Polish Lancers whose legends his mother had planted in his heart when he was a boy could now fight for a free and independent Poland. He decided to join them in December 1915. Fighting at the front, he would set in motion the chain of events that would eventually bring him, and the “system,” to the United States.
CHAPTER 7
Do You Know the Secrets of Art?
During the Great War, Russia suffered defeat after defeat. Tsar Nicholas, an inveterate micromanager, had decided to take personal charge of the war effort, leaving the business of state to his wife, Alexandra, and their religious guru, the mad con artist Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. Both of these decisions would prove disastrous. The tsar became directly responsible for a calamitous war in which at least 1.5 million Russians died, while the home front fell apart as a result of mismanagement. Despite ample harvests, food shortages abounded; the railroad system deteriorated to such a degree that grain rotted on the tracks. As every corner of society turned against the tsar, he refused to listen to his advisers’ entreaties that he take steps to win the Russian people back. “Isn’t it rather for my people to regain my confidence?” he asked. During a period of widespread strikes in February 1917, Nicholas’s military lost control of Petrograd. On March 2, he abdicated the throne, leaving it to his brother, Michael, whose reign as Michael II lasted a day before he, too, stepped down. The Russian monarchy was over.
A few months later, in either late September or early October 1917, Richard Boleslavsky returned to Moscow as a veteran of the Great War, unsure of what the city meant to him. Moscow had been a beloved stepmother, a bohemian wonderland that, as he would later remember it, “caressed and soothed those who walked its streets,” as the studytsi had done late at night after rehearsal. But more than ever, Boley considered himself a Pole. Who was he in this Russian city? How did he fit in with its cosmopolitan workforce, where a wealthy man’s house might feature a “French cook, English butler, Russian wet-nurse, Italian valet, Caucasian body-guard, and Tatar janitor” all under one roof?
The end of Boleslavsky’s wartime service and his return to Moscow had been nearly as dangerous as his time at the front. In the months since the tsar’s abdication, Russia had become a servant of two masters: The Russian Provisional Government, run by the Duma, and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The provisional government, concerned that the tsar’s abdication would be exploited by its enemies in the Great War, issued an order requiring soldiers to return to duty and obey their officers. The Petrograd Soviet responded with Order Number One, which called for the democratization of units and demanded soldiers and sailors obey the Petrograd Soviet above all. Order Number One further commanded units to elect representatives to the Petrograd Soviet, form committees that would govern the units in place of their officers, and confiscate all weapons to guarantee their power.
To the Bolsheviks, Order Number One was the first fulfillment of the Revolution’s true potential. But Boleslavsky, an officer himself, viewed Order Number One as the entr’acte of a blood-soaked farce. Certainly, he would later write, “the intention of Order Number One was the same as the French Declaration of Human Rights. Mental freedom was good, political freedom splendid, peace was beautiful,” and so on. But the order’s immediate effect was “that soldiers shot and killed officers, military orders were ignored, the fighting army ceased to exist.” In the long term, “it destroyed the army, released personal vengeance, began the civil war.” Boleslavsky had fought in World War I for Poland. When asked his politics, he would answer “I have none … I am a Pole.” He felt his duty was to Mother Poland, not Stepmother Russia. Fighting for Russia had held little appeal; this second war between her proletariat and the ruling classes held even less.
After a few months suffering the indignity of Soviet control, the Polish Lancers hatched a plan. They would desert, meet up with the Polish units on both sides of the conflict, and fight for an independent Poland. This plan failed, stranding the Lancers near the Galician Front, where they exchanged fire with their former allies in the Russian army. The Lancers disbanded and Boleslavsky fled back to his stepmother, bribing a station agent to secure a patch of floor on a train packed sardine-tight. People urinated where they stood and fought to escape the train when it reached its stations.
Moscow was hardly a safe haven for Richard. He was “White,” meaning anticommunist, a former officer, and too proud to hide his beliefs. He survived mostly thanks to the theater, which gave him both a stage name different from his enlisted one and the fellowship of the studytsi. Even the most hardened Bolshevik—and there were a few—wouldn’t dare betray a fellow member.
The First Studio saw its own upheavals during the war. In 1916, Leopold “Suler” Sulerzhitsky, the Studio’s beloved leader, finally succumbed to the nephritis he had developed in Canada while resettling the Doukhobors. His death cleft Stanislavski’s heart in twain. Konstantin Sergeievich, who had visited Suler every day in the hospital, wept like a child at the graveside. He had lost not only a dear friend but the one person on earth who he felt truly understood him.
When Boleslavsky returned to the First Studio—now run by Evgeny Vakhtangov—he walked into a heated meeting about its future. The group, which had been officially absorbed into the Moscow Art Theatre after Boleslavsky’s production of The Wreck of the Ship “Hope,” wanted its independence. Chafing under the dictates of their parent company, they wanted greater freedom over season planning, aesthetics, and their approach to the “system.” Stanislavski and Nemirovich were children of one era of epochal change—the emancipation of the serfs and the twenty years of incremental liberalization before the crackdown of the 1880s. The First Studio’s members were children of the failed 1905 revolution. They wanted autonomy, not gradual liberalization under a monarch, even a benevolent one like Stanislavski.
Although a White when it came to Russian politics, Boleslavsky was all for the Red principles of self-determination and collective labor when it came to the First Studio. He gave an impassioned speech in defense of its autonomy. Stanislavski responded, “Still fermenting … still fermenting, my boy,” but the greater freedom they sought was granted. “Only afterward” did Boley realize “that in the Theater I had taken part in something for which in the regiment the penalty was death.” The death of Suler and the independence of the First Studio drove a wedge between the holy temple of the “system” and its founder. As the years went by, Stanislavski would come to refer to the First Studio as a “long-standing sickness of my soul.”
During Boleslavsky’s war service, both Stanislavski and the “system” faced some of their greatest challenges. First, in 1915, while playing Salieri in Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri, he followed the “system” but found that although he experienced the role, “I was not able to realize in external form my sincere internal feeling.” This led him to a renewed focus on exterior technique so that an actor could incarnate the character, conveying their experiencing through external means. “In order to reflect subtle and often subconscious life,” he wrote, “it is necessary to possess exceptionally responsive and excellently developed vocal and bodily apparatus.” From this period, he developed the idea of the body and voice as the actor’s instrument, as well as the concept of muscle memory, which stores an actor’s physical and vocal habits.
Then, in January 1916, Stanislavski undertook the role of Colonel Rostanev in an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s short story The Village of Stepanchikovo. This production, jointly overseen by Nemirovich and Stanislavski, further inflamed their artistic squabbles. The fight had to do with the approach to text within the “system,” and whether the actor or the writer was to be the chief creative force at the Moscow Art Theatre. Plays have two main expressive elements: spoken text and stage imagery. One of the great discoveries of the “system” was how much of the actor’s job lay in filling in the gaps between these basic elements with their own inferences and invention. In prose fiction, the author does much of this work; necessarily, in the absence of other interpreters to bring the text to life. At the same time, prose has a much larger set of tools at its disposal for the creation of characters and their world.
In the original short story of Stepanchikovo, Dostoyevsky describes Colonel Rostanev’s psychology and backstory in great detail. “It would be difficult to imagine a man more benign and compliant,” he writes. “His generosity was such that on occasion he would have been ready to part with everything on the post, down to his last shirt, and hand it to any needy person he chanced to meet.” Stanislavski, who instructed actors to find the good in villains and the bad in heroes, could never accept such a simple characterization, and he began with himself, not the original story, as the raw material for the part, as his “system” required. To Nemirovich, ever the advocate for textual supremacy, Stanislavski’s approach was objectively wrong. Nemirovich knew who Rostanev was and how he should be interpreted, because Dostoyevsky had done them all the favor of describing him, and Nemirovich had co-written the stage adaptation.
Rehearsals dragged on and on as Stanislavski sought out ways to “feed the subconscious.” The cast fleshed out their characters’ childhoods and determined tasks for each bit, but they were no closer to getting the play ready for an audience. In August 1916, while Boleslavsky was seeing action at the front, Nemirovich wrote Stanislavski with an ultimatum. Stepanchikovo must go up in September or October. The Moscow Art Theatre’s repertory was second to none, but they needed regular premieres as well. In 1915, they had managed only one new show, a night of Pushkin one-acts; a year without a premiere could be fatal to their reputation. But Stepanchikovo was not finished in September, and Suler’s death put to rest any thought of premiering the play in 1916. On January 5, 1917, Nemirovich again wrote Stanislavski. Ten months and 156 rehearsals later, Stepanchikovo was no closer to being finished, and Stanislavski was no closer to figuring out Rostanev. The season was almost over without a premiere. Stanislavski felt that he was close, that the truth was barely out of reach. As he explained to Nemirovich, if only he were given a bit more time, if only he had a little more faith from his collaborator, he could birth a “son” of himself and Dostoyevsky that “will bear many resemblances to both mother and father.” But it was not to be. Concerned over the Moscow Art Theatre’s reputation, Nemirovich took over the show, Stanislavski’s feelings be damned.
On March 28, two weeks after Order Number One and fourteen months after work on Stepanchikovo began, the play finally had its first dress rehearsal. While building the role of Rostanev over those fourteen months, Stanislavski had also played the lead in six repertory shows, watched his best friend die, weathered a crisis in his factories, and founded a second Studio. As the dress rehearsal unfolded, it became apparent to everyone in the auditorium that Stanislavski did not know his lines, did not have a clear sense of his character, and did not know what to do. In his memoirs, Kachalov’s son Vadim describes Stanislavski’s visible panic, the “bewilderment, terror, fear there in the way he looked towards the prompter’s box.” During intermission, Kachalov approached Vadim. “Go home,” he said. “Something awful is happening to Konstantin Sergeievich.”
By the end of the night, Stanislavski stood in the wings, ashen and weeping. Nemirovich resigned himself to the inevitable and fired Stanislavski from the show. It was Stanislavski’s greatest failure, and the blame lay with his “system.” Stanislavski never publicly complained, but he also confined himself to his repertory roles for the rest of his life and vowed that he would “never act in a new play again.” That part of his career was over.
During the Revolution, Stanislavski found what solace he could in his theater’s new audiences. One of the provisional government’s first steps after taking power had been to safeguard Russia’s theaters, the jewels in the crown of its national culture. The Duma appointed Nikolai Lvov, a great lover of the stage, to take over and deimperialize the Imperial Theatres. A mere ten days after the tsar’s abdication, the newly renamed state theaters opened. With the establishment of the provisional government, the restrictions on what plays could be performed for whom were lifted. Stanislavski and Nemirovich’s dream of a theater that was open to all finally began to come true.
At first the Moscow Art Theatre’s new audience frustrated Stanislavski. The mass of tradesmen, soldiers, merchants, and workers trudging into the auditorium did not know how to respond to the theater, and they watched plays in a baffled silence. But as the company and the crowd learned from one another, Stanislavski felt a renewed commitment to his art. “What strength there is in it!” he wrote of this moment a decade later. In seeing his theater through the eyes of “this new, unspoiled, trusting, and unsophisticated spectator” he could sense the power of its collective endeavor, the way it was made “simultaneously by a group of actors, artists, stage directors, and musicians” and combined “many most diverse arts, music, drama, painting, declamation, dancing.”
No matter your politics—Red, White, or, in Stanislavski’s case, publicly indifferent—you could work at the Moscow Art Theatre through much of 1917 and barely notice the tumultuous arm-wrestling match between the provisional government and the Petrograd Soviet, or how the Soviets were laying the groundwork to take over. When Richard Boleslavsky returned to Moscow, he took his roles back over as if nothing had happened, and he began work on a new production of Twelfth Night at the Studio. But that time of relative calm came to an end on October 24, 1917. According to Boleslavsky’s memoir Lances Down, Colonel Modl, the chief of the Moscow police and a longtime audience member of the Moscow Art Theatre, ran backstage, demanding to use their telephone. The actors didn’t bother to hide their eavesdropping as he shouted into the phone, “Burn it … burn everything … Burn it at once!”
Modl turned to the actors. Petrograd, he told them, had fallen to the Communists. Trotsky’s Red Guard occupied the capital’s key institutions. Within hours, they had seized Petrograd’s railroads, telephone exchanges, telegraph stations, banks, and printing presses. The next morning, they would storm the Winter Palace and end the Russian Provisional Government for good. Modl was in his uniform. Could he perhaps borrow a costume of some kind from the theater so he could get home without being murdered?
