My Life In Art (Soviet Arts) | Konstantin Stanislavsky

I Wanted to Write a book about the creative work done by the Moscow Art Theatre in the 25 years of its existence and about my own work there. However, I spent the past two years abroad, touring Europe and America with the greater part of our company, and it was there that I wrote this book at the request of an American firm which published it in Boston in English under the title My Life in Art. 1 This compelled me to make considerable changes in my original plans and prevented me from saying much that I had intended to share with my reader. Unfortunately, the present state of our book market has deprived me of the possibility of substantially supplementing the book, of increasing its volume, and I therefore have had to drop much that came back to me as I looked back on my life in art. I do not speak, for instance, of many people who worked with us in the Art Theatre some of them still very successful and popular and others no longer alive. I do not speak of the hard work put in by Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko as a stage director and in his other capacities, nor of the creative endeavour of my other colleagues, the actors of the Moscow Art Theatre, who have influenced my life too. I do not mention the administrative personnel and the stage hands, with whom we have lived in concord for many years and who love the theatre and, together with us, have made many sacrifices for it. I do not even name many of the friends of our theatre-all those whose attitude to our art has facilitated our work and created, so to speak, the atmosphere necessary for our activity.

Briefly, in its present form the book is in no way a story of the Art Theatre. It speaks only of my quests in art and serves as a sort of preface for my other book in which I shall describe the results of my quests-my methods of actor’s creation and how to approach it.

K. STANISLAVSKY

April 1925

Translated from the Russian by G. Ivanov-Mumjiev and designed by Y. Krasny.

The book was translated published in 1950s by Foreign Languages Publishing House.