Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, Biography of Nemirovich-Danchenko. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, Biography of Nemirovich-Danchenko Background of the historical meeting of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich Danchenko
Russian director, writer, teacher, theater figure. Creator and director of the Moscow Art Theater (together with K.S. Stanislavsky).
Born December 11, 1858 in Ozurgeti (Georgia) in a Ukrainian noble family (Armenian by mother). He spent his childhood in Tiflis. In his youth, he successfully participated in amateur performances. Later, while studying at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University (1876–1879), he continued to be interested in theater.
From 1877 he published theatrical articles and reviews in the magazines "Alarm Clock", "Artist", the newspapers "Russian Courier", "News of the Day", etc. under the pseudonyms Vl., Vlad, Oboe, Nike and Kiks, etc. In 1881 he published the first story At the post station. Author of stories, novels (most famously On literary bread, 1891; Governor's revision, 1895), plays The Last Will (1888), New Business (1890), Gold (1895), The Price of Life (1896), In Dreams (1901). Dramas were staged at the Alexandrinsky and Maly theaters with the participation of Yermolova, Sadovskaya, Savina, Lensky, and others, and were widely broadcast in the provinces. He refused the Griboedov Prize awarded to him for the play "The Price of Life", believing that A.P. Chekhov's Seagull, written in the same year, should be fairly noted. Having become one of the leaders of the Art Theater, he only once decided to stage his play on its stage, which he bitterly repented of.
Like his relatives by wife, Yuzhin and Lensky, Nemirovich-Danchenko dreamed of renovating the theater, bringing the stage closer to new artistic directions and life reality. It was necessary to educate a new type of actors capable of conveying the style and thoughts of the new drama. In 1891-1901 he taught at the drama department of the Music and Drama School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society. Sensitive to new trends in the performing arts, Nemirovich-Danchenko paid special attention to the reform activities of Yuzhin at the Maly Theater and the experiments of KS Stanislavsky in the Society of Arts and Literature. He was one of the first to realize the prospects of theatrical directing with its task of constructing a performance as an artistic whole.
In the summer of 1897, on the initiative Nemirovich-Danchenko he met with Stanislavsky at the Slavyansky Bazaar restaurant. During the legendary 18-hour conversation, the tasks of the new theatrical business and the program for their implementation were formulated, the composition of the troupe, the backbone of which will be young intelligent actors, the modestly unobtrusive design of the hall, and duties were divided. The partners discussed the circle of authors (H.Ibsen, G.Hauptman, Chekhov) and the repertoire. It was decided that Nemirovich-Danchenko would take over the "literary part" and organizational issues, Stanislavsky would get the artistic part. However, in the very first months of rehearsals, the conditionality of such a division of duties was revealed. The rehearsals of Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich A.K. Tolstoy were started by Stanislavsky, who created the mise-en-scenes of the performance that shocked the audience of the premiere, but it was Nemirovich-Danchenko who insisted on choosing his student I.V. Moskvin for the role of Tsar Fyodor and, in individual lessons with the artist, helped him create a touching image of the “king-peasant”. The most important performances of the Art Theater - Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, Chekhov's Cherry Orchard - were staged jointly by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. Nemirovich-Danchenko himself insisted, first of all, on his contribution to the selection of the repertoire and the search for the authors of the theater, to unraveling the "diction" and "color" of the play.
One of the main tasks of the Art Theater Nemirovich-Danchenko considered the production of new modern drama - first of all, Chekhov, Ibsen, Hauptmann, M. Maeterlinck, later M. Gorky, L. Andreev. Independently staged Ivanov Chekhov (1904). Stanislavsky assured that Nemirovich-Danchenko found "a real manner of playing Gorky's plays" (they jointly staged At the Bottom, 1902, and Children of the Sun, 1905). Nemirovich-Danchenko introduced into the repertoire of the theater and staged the plays by Ibsen When we, the dead, awaken (1900), Pillars of Society (1903), Rosmersholm (1908), Hauptmann's play Lonely (1899, jointly with Stanislavsky).
The pedagogical talent of Nemirovich-Danchenko was generally recognized even before his work at the Art Theater. His students (Moskvin, Knipper, Meyerhold, Savitskaya, Roxanov, Germanova) who joined the troupe of the Moscow Art Theater were distinguished by their direct contact with literary material, a subtle sense of the historical style of the era. The actors who worked with him spoke about the director's ability to find secret keys to each individuality, to find a "cock" word for any actor, to disenchant him. Nemirovich-Danchenko was characterized by an inclination towards the "big line". Being next to Stanislavsky, gifted with a brilliant directorial fantasy, he managed to develop his own individual style and handwriting. Unlike Stanislavsky, he was sensitive to the tragic and disturbing notes of life, was fond of historical tragedy - Julius Caesar (1903) by W. Shakespeare became one of his greatest directorial victories.
After the events of 1905, the death of Chekhov and the break with Gorky, Nemirovich-Danchenko turned to Russian classics. He staged Griboedov's Woe from Wit (1906) and N.V. Gogol's Inspector General (1908, both performances jointly with Stanislavsky), A.S. Pushkin's Boris Godunov (1907), A.N. 1912), Death of Pazukhin M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1914), Pushkin's Stone Guest (1915). He himself was fond of and knew how to captivate the performers with the spirit of the bygone life of the Famusov lordly house, the epic peace of Ostrovsky, the monumental satire of Saltykov-Shchedrin, the sound of the steps of fate and retribution - the steps of the Stone Guest.
The absence of a modern “combat play” threatened the theater with a loss of hearing for modernity, a loss of connection with the public, and the director showed a persistent interest in expressionist playwrights (Anatema, 1909, Ekaterina Ivanovna, 1912, Thought, 1914, Andreeva; Yushkevich’s Miserere, 1910). Nemirovich-Danchenko was looking for a playwright capable of linking the "socio-political line" and the search for "new art". In search of Russian tragedy, Nemirovich-Danchenko turns to a dramatization of F.M. Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov (1910). For the first time, a two-evening performance appeared, consisting of chapters of various durations (from 7 minutes to 1 hour and 20 minutes), a figure of a reader appeared. In 1913, Dostoevsky's Possessed was staged (under the title Nikolai Stavrogin, 1913). His appearance on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater provoked an angry protest from Gorky.
With the First World War of 1914–1918 and the October Revolution of 1917, a crisis emerged in the Moscow Art Theater, aggravated by the fact that a significant part of the troupe headed by V.I. Extreme measures were needed to start the 1919-1920 season in the absence of Kachalov, Knipper, Germanova - the main performers of the main pieces of the repertoire. Nemirovich-Danchenko created the Musical Studio (Comic Opera) and, with its actors, staged Ango Lecoq's Daughter and Offenbach's Pericola on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater, which was decided as a "melodrama buff". When in the summer of 1922 the main troupe went on long tours abroad, Nemirovich-Danchenko stayed with the Comic Opera (staged by Aristophanes Lysistrata, 1923; Carmensita and the Soldier, 1924) and other studios in Russia. In the production of Lysistrata, the task was to combine heroism and fun, monumentality and dynamism, required by the genre of "pathetic comedy".
Before the return of the "senior" troupe, both founders of the Art Theater had to decide in what composition and with what creative tasks the theater would work further. In the spring of 1924, Nemirovich-Danchenko sent an official paper with plans for the upcoming season to the State Academic Council: “It is necessary to exclude from the old repertoire of the Moscow Art Theater: a) works of literature that are unacceptable for our modernity (for example: the entire Chekhov repertoire, at least in the interpretation in which these plays have been performed at the Art Theater so far); b) performances, although quite acceptable as literary works, but having lost interest in their outdated stage form (example: Enough simplicity for every wise man). It was proposed to resume the Drama of Life, The Brothers Karamazov, to stage the play by the French writer from the Unanimist group J. Romain Old Kromdeir (its translation was made by O.E. Mandelstam and appeared later with the poet's preface; the artist was to be R.R. Falk). None of these intentions were realized. After long hesitation, the 1st and 3rd Studios of the Art Theater became independent theaters in 1924, the studios of the 2nd Studio of A.K. Tarasov, O.N. Androvskaya, K.N. Elanskaya, A.P. Zueva, V.D. N. Kedrov, B. N. Livanov, V. Ya. Stanitsyn, M. I. Prudkin, A. N. Gribov, M. M. Yanshin, V. A. Orlov, I. Ya.
The reorganization of the theater, which continued to bear the name of the Artistic Theater, assumed the appearance of new authors, and before his departure with the Comic Opera on tour abroad, Nemirovich-Danchenko staged Pugachevshchina by K.A. Treneva (1925). From October 1925 to January 1928, he remained abroad, worked for some time in Hollywood (one of the reasons for his delay was the negative attitude of the “old people” of the Moscow Art Theater towards the Comic Opera, which later worked separately as the Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater). The return to Moscow coincided with dramatic political changes in the USSR. Since the autumn of 1928, due to heart disease, Stanislavsky stopped not only acting performances, but also the activities of the director, concentrating on completing his work on the "system". Full responsibility for the preservation of the Moscow Art Theater fell on Nemirovich-Danchenko. He staged revolutionary plays by modern authors - Vs. Ivanov's Siege (1929), Lyubov Yarovaya Treneva (1936), continued his experiments in staging classical novel prose - in 1930 he staged Resurrection according to Tolstoy, for the first time inviting V.V. Hamlet's decision).
The method of socialist realism was established in the art of those years, and the Moscow Art Theater provided its stage models. In 1934, Nemirovich-Danchenko staged Yegor Bulychev and others, in 1935, together with M.N. Kedrov, Gorky's Enemies, an exemplary performance of the "grand style" of the empire of victorious socialism. The premiere of Anna Karenina (1937) was equated with events of national importance. The roles of Anna and Karenin became one of the highest stage achievements of Tarasova and Khmelev. In 1940, Nemirovich-Danchenko released The Three Sisters, defining the through action of the play: "longing for a better life."
Nemirovich-Danchenko did not formulate his own theory of acting art into a complete system, as Stanislavsky did, although in his manuscripts, in the records of rehearsals that were conducted from the mid-1930s, he developed the concepts of “the second plan of the stage life of an actor”, “physical well-being”, “grain of the image”, etc. In recent years, he kept an eye on specific figures who could take responsibility for the further fate of the Art Theater.
He highly appreciated the help of VG Sakhnovsky, especially in the productions of Anna Karenina and the Polovchansky Gardens. When Sakhnovsky was arrested in the fall of 1941, the head of the Moscow Art Theater showed unusual and dangerous persistence in seeking his return to the Moscow Art Theater and turned to Stalin personally. During the war, he achieved the organization of the Studio School at the Moscow Art Theater (1943), which bears his name.
VLADIMIR NEMIROVICH-DANCHENKO(right) and Konstantin Stanislavsky
Was complicated. You can even say this: fortunately for us, this community was not idyllic.
Infinitely respecting each other, appreciating the artist in each other, they almost never stopped arguing with each other, while arguing, they searched and found different ways to expand a single artistic platform.
The commonality of life ideals, views on creativity, the unity of the aesthetic position were the basis of this wonderful long-term friendship, which has always been distinguished by a tendency to mutual concessions, to mutual understanding.
The disagreements that arose between them almost always concerned the originality of the methods and methods of work. If you try to determine where the source of these disagreements is, why the creative searches of these two people went to some extent along different channels, then, in my opinion, you inevitably come to the following conclusion: Stanislavsky, ultimately, all his life he strove to create a science of acting, to create a coherent system of views on acting. Nemirovich-Danchenko, working next to Stanislavsky, building a theater with him, he felt his mission was much more modest.
The creator of the "system" was Stanislavsky. Nemirovich-Danchenko, creating his wonderful performances and asserting the unity of the aesthetic principles of the Art Theater, based on the scientific generalizations made by Stanislavsky, constantly enriching them. Two brilliant artists, two of the most distinctive in individuality, firmly relied on a single aesthetic platform and, through experimentation, created the science of acting and directing art. […]
What were the discrepancies great stage teachers?
Perhaps I will not be mistaken if I say that the first creative dispute between these two artists arose during the work of the theater studios on Povarskaya (1905), an active participant in which was Sun. E. Meyerhold. It was then that K.S. Stanislavsky was the first to propose to analyze the play by etude. Vladimir Ivanovich Not accepted this experiment. But at that time, in response to the objections of Nemirovich-Danchenko, Konstantin Sergeyevich could not answer otherwise than: “For me, this is an experiment. This is how I want to try to work on the play,” although in essence this was the beginning of a discovery, which many years later he formulated as a new law of play analysis. And Nemirovich-Danchenko and Meyerhold they did not understand then that a new, most valuable method was being born before their very eyes.
Thirty years have passed. And only in 1935, Stanislavsky, with a new, tenfold strength of conviction, began to preach the idea of analyzing the play in action, which he had found as a result of enormous labor and brilliant insight. […]
Although in the works of Konstantin Sergeevich there is no special chapter describing this discovery, his individual articles and statements on this issue are of great value. I have repeatedly written that the method of effective analysis is, from my point of view, the most important and surest way to influence the actor's imagination, a stimulator of his work. This technique is in apparent contradiction with the problem of design, on which Nemirovich-Danchenko so insisted.
Undoubtedly, the position of Vladimir Ivanovich - his indispensable active demand of the plan - is absolutely correct. You can't take a single step in a role if you don't link it to the next. At the same time, I allow myself to assert that Stanislavsky's method of effective analysis enriches the position of Nemirovich-Danchenko and makes a huge step forward in the field of the most organic penetration of the actor into the dramatic material, brings the actor to the realization of the whole, to the perception of both the author's and director's super-tasks.
Therefore, I consider the point of view that the problem of the director's intention is eliminated by the method of effective analysis is incorrect. It seems to me that this erroneous view hinders the understanding of the idea of both Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. One of the most important links in the method of effective analysis is "reconnaissance with the mind" before and after the etude.
But is it possible if the director has no intention? Is it possible to gradually, holistically unite the participants around the super-task of the future performance if the director has no idea? Of course not. Nemirovich-Danchenko, until the end of his life, insisted on the necessary "process of infecting the actor with the director's word." Do we have the right to ignore this proposition of Nemirovich-Danchenko? Of course not, because the position of Nemirovich-Danchenko reveals great demands on the director, on his ability to penetrate into the figurative essence of the play, on the ability to find exact, figurative words for the actor, on sensitivity in working with the actor.
Stanislavsky, captivating his students with a new technique, focused on the creative well-being of the actor in the initial process of penetration into the role. Nemirovich-Danchenko was worried about the problem of design, primarily from the position of the director.
The director's intention of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko was always precise, purposeful and fieryly clear. But Konstantin Sergeevich tried not to reveal his goal to the actor, trying to make it appear spontaneously - from within, organically, as a result of internal and external actions, the actor's own reflections on the role, the play as a whole.
And Vladimir Ivanovich was convinced that until he revealed his idea to the actor, the acting imagination is silent and the creative process cannot go in the right direction. Therefore, he spared no time to "infect" the actors with his visions.
Knebel M.O., School of directing Nemirovich-Danchenko, M., "Art", 1966, p. 5 and 7-8.
You read the press, and you get the impression that critics are waiting for the premiere as a signal to attack. The spectator thinks that the director is staging the performance, the critics think that he is setting himself up. And I'm still trying to understand: when and why did the theater and criticism, always doing a common thing, dispersed on opposite sides of the barricades?
Conflict
As expected, the next musical premiere in Moscow sounded like a command "Face!". It cannot be otherwise now: there is no more scandalous genre in the theater than opera. They write about the new "La Traviata" at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater. They write that the girls from the Erotic Show "strum their boobs" there, and gloat that one of the springy ball-chairs at the premiere fell off the stage into the orchestra. Everyone unanimously celebrates the third act of the "black Tarzan" among the strippers. They report about "terry entertainment to the chords of old Verdi" and that the directors want to set another fire in the theater. One critic squeamishly describes the "settings of a provincial visiting house", where "the main element of the decor is huge transparent flasks in which an invisible air jet creates a whirlwind of multi-colored petals", but does not admit in which province she saw a visiting house with such intricate flasks.
It would be possible to grab your head from the horrors happening on the sacred stage, if the reviews of different authors would not annihilate each other: someone scolds striptease, someone admires it (“the girls were excellent”), someone smashes the “flasks” to smithereens, someone respectfully calls them “columns” and finds meaning in their flicker. Someone thinks that the performance of the role of Violetta by theater prima Khibla Gerzmava "did not seem convincing in terms of quality", someone in connection with her writes about a musical event that should not be missed. Opera critics are in permanent confusion, and this can be understood: all the usual criteria are knocked down, it remains to grumble and, in any case, stick out your lip with meaning. If the director Alexander Titel had staged this "La Traviata" without any fuss with glass and striptease, and the courtesan Violetta would have remained with him the traditional grand lady of high moral standards, the performance would still have been scolded for seditious boobs).
Context
Here is an unexpected reprimand! - the center of the most daring, on the verge of a foul, search for theatrical directing suddenly shifted to a genre that was declared dying - to the opera. Here, the dreamer has a powerful stream of emotions excited by music as allies. Here the plot can be rewritten beyond recognition, because in addition to the plot meaning, the score carries its own themes, which can be unraveled endlessly.
You enter the opera house, anticipating an adventure. And you even feel disappointed if figs and old-fashioned backdrop painting appear on the stage. Even if it is beautiful, as in Falstaff at the Bolshoi Theatre, staged in 1980 by Giorgio Strehler in Milan and exhumed in 2005 in Moscow. The theater is a living thing, and the canned masterpiece of a quarter of a century ago resembled a dried-up cocoon from which a butterfly had flown.
Opera today is like a sponge, it absorbs the techniques of all spectacular genres - from variety shows to cinema and computer animation. It has ceased to be a stamp reserve and exists in a general cultural context. This is a risky search, because opera critics are most often narrowly specialized people: everyone knows about musical traditions, but they don’t know what artistic ideas roam in the cinema and what upheavals in art the computer is preparing. It is a risky quest, but it is what makes opera a living and modern art. And it opens up new reserves of contacts between the opera and the public, which is now noticeably younger.
Recently, on the pages of "RG" we talked about this with the most experimental director of opera in Russia - the creator of "Helikon" Dmitry Bertman. And it only remains for me to recall his finds with the bowling guillotine in the "Dialogues of the Carmelites" or with the transfer of the action of "The Tale of a Real Man" to a modern hospital ward, where a war veteran dies of no use to anyone ("Fallen from the sky"). Incidentally, he also came up with the idea of rethinking the scene of Onegin's duel with Lensky, which is so admired by critics in Dmitry Chernyakov's performance "Eugene Onegin" at the Bolshoi - also, as you know, scandalous. It was Bertman who, in the production of the Swedish Royal Opera, followed the logic not of Pushkin, but of Tchaikovsky: Onegin cannot shoot at a friend, he asks for peace, and then Lensky, blind with jealousy, shoots himself in despair. This was shocking, but it also made me think in a new way about the situation stamped by the opera - it gained psychologism.
I don't see any crime in such liberties. They have an idea, without which any premiere would be a copy of the previous one.
Due to the purism of local trendsetters, Moscow is still aloof from many European theatrical fads. Baroque boom in Europe. The performances of Rameau's operas in Paris are the most hit. More than 1700 performances withstood his "Gallant India" at the theater Palais Garnier. Conductor William Christie led a super-academic musical performance with the temperament of a rock DJ, and director Andrey Serban played out a mythological story-journey with seas-oceans and earthquakes so inventively, modernly and with such humor that the three-hour performance seemed like a sparkling moment.
Even more daring are Ramo's Paladins at the Chatelet Theatre, choreographed by José Montalvo. He is known for his virtuoso use of computer animation synchronized with stage action. Each character in the love story split into two: one pathetically depicts heroic impulses and ardent passions, the other - ballet - plastically comments on the singing, expressing the feelings really tearing apart the hero. There are funny contrasts like cowardice that wants to pretend to be brave. Two levels of the stage with live performers are shaded by a computer-generated background: royal castles and paradises, cyclopean Venuses and various living creatures are projected onto the backdrop: a natural dancer plays with a good-natured lion and escapes from a giant chicken, giants turn into dwarfs, a peacock turns into a herd of zebras and rabbits, and all this can be swept away by a rolling subway train. The choreography used not only classics, but also b-boys with robots and break dance. And in bulk "striptease" - from the humorous (a really naked dancer with an inflatable heart forever falling from his loins) to the pathetic (live, but again naked statues in the finale). The spectacle is bright, witty, fun sensual - attractive. And "Old Man Rameau" in the temperamental interpretation of the same William Christie is absolutely at ease here. "Baroque is rock!" - say the authors of the performance, connecting the 17th century with the 21st.
I can imagine how well the Moscow critics would have walked on this risky show.
Play
And the new Moscow "La Traviata" was interesting to me. It is not at all designed for a scandal, but it has become a musical event for Moscow. Conductor Felix Korobov reunited the hit "numbers" into a single pulsating sound stream, and he is unpredictable enough in his handling of tempos to create a sense of an improvised, live, spontaneous drama, here and now. I would consider Khibla Gerzmava's performance as Violetta outstanding: I don't want to count even rare technical flaws, because it was not a conservatory exam, but a theater where destinies ascended, experienced a moment of happiness and perished. This is an unusual Violetta: strong, passionate, bright, incompatible with death, which makes the tragic ending especially acute. Let me remind the severe critics of directing that the life that has passed before us is the main, rather rare result of a carefully thought-out, deeply psychological directing in the opera, and not only balls-ottomans and flasks-columns. Alfred is also unusual, the new tenor Alexei Dolgov looks like a modern bespectacled student. Of course, the game "in everyday life" can be recognized as too detailed and grounded for a musical performance. Of course, the style of theatrical performance is confused by the introduction of costumes. But the party of life-seekers that arose on the stage and the return of the plot to the story of a VIP whore, who no longer waited, but suddenly knew the happiness of love, seem to me to be an appropriate, meaningful and even relevant decision. The striptease, which replaced the gypsy scene, was done correctly, in such a solution to the performance it looks organic and does not stick out at all, as they say, counting on a "sensation". Why he so shocked his colleagues in the pen cannot be understood: in the context of today's drama theater and cinema, it was chastity itself.
Film critics don't listen to music. Literary criticism does not happen in art galleries. Theatrical - does not know where the screen is in the cinema. The viewer turns out to be smarter and more educated: he watches everything. It's just in context. Hence the constant forks: what the viewer applauds, the critic automatically begins to despise.
The most high-profile scandals around opera premieres
1. Critics were indignant at "La Traviata" and in "Helikon": director Dmitry Bertman unfolded the action on a huge bed.
2. In the "New Opera" Violetta rode a bicycle.
3. In the Berlin Staatsoper, Othello was white, Iago sported a blazer, and the action took place in the likeness of the Odessa seaport with beauties in bikinis on the beach.
4. "The Barber of Seville" in the Opera Bastille Colin Cerro moved to the Arab world - it turned out even funnier than Rossini's.
5. Peter Sellars played "Don Juan" in modern Harlem, and Cosi Fan Tutte - in New York fast food.
6. But the loudest scandal broke out recently around the premiere of "Idomeneo" in Berlin: there, the severed heads of Christ, Buddha and Mohammed were brought onto the stage. Christians and Buddhists reacted calmly to this, Muslim extremists promised to blow up the theater. The result of the scandal: Mozart's little-known opera became the biggest hit of the year.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian theater was in a state that was the result of decay. The gradual degradation of realism on the Russian stage, its replacement by the usual declarative, deliberate theatricality, the absence of any effective school of acting led the state of affairs in the national theater to a general decline.
It was during the theatrical crisis that occurred in the spring of 1897 in Moscow at the Slavyansky Bazaar restaurant that a significant meeting took place between V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko and K.S.
During this meeting, they discussed the current sad situation all night, but they expressed ideas to each other about creating a new theater. It must be said that the future brilliant reformers of the Russian theater at that time did not yet have a clear idea of what it should be like.
V. Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote later: “We were only Protestants against everything pompous, unnatural, “theatrical”, against the memorized stamped tradition.”
The first rehearsals of the new theater
The initiators assembled a young troupe, which, after a year of active work, moved from Moscow to Pushkino and settled in the country house of director N. N. Arbatov. In the premises of the wooden barn, preparations are being made for productions for the first theatrical season, the search for and development of new directions for the domestic theater and new artistic techniques. This young theater subsequently had to play a huge role in the development of the entire theatrical life in Russia and the world, as well as to form qualitatively new principles of stage craft.
Origins of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater
If domestic theatricality, which was in a deep crisis, served as fertile ground for creative protest, then the experience of foreign theaters was, of course, the source of new ideas:
- The Meiningentsev Theatre, which visited Russia twice in the late 1980s. Everything that was embodied on the stage by the theater of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen was fundamentally different from what happened on the Russian stage. There were no premieres in his troupe, and everything was subject to strict discipline. Each actor was ready to play any role: from the main character to the lackey, and the talented performance was complemented by stage and, above all, lighting effects. This had a strong impact on the local audience, unaccustomed to this approach to work in local theaters.
- Antoine's Free Theater also had an influence on some Russian theaters, which followed his stage experience and productions with interest. Stanislavsky, visiting Paris, attended his performances personally, but the theater itself never came to Russia on tour. At the same time, the naturalism professed by the Free Theater was close to Russian actors, since the topics of a social nature that it touched upon were very much in tune with the problems that occupied Russian culture. Bribed the audience and the scenic method of the director, who did not recognize props and tried to rid the acting game of traditional theatrical conventions.
It should be noted that, however, attempts to implement the experience of foreign theaters on the Russian stage were made even before the creation of the Moscow Art Theater. So, for example, in 1889, during one of the productions of a private Moscow theater, real carpenters appeared on the stage, who cut boards for the scaffold right during the performance, which seriously impressed the viewer. Nevertheless, it became possible to talk about the tangible influence of the traditions of the Meiningents and the Antoine theater troupe on the Russian theater only after the appearance of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko theater proper.
V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko - teacher, playwright and critic
By the time the theater was founded, Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko had already earned fame and respect for himself, working in the field of dramaturgy, theater criticism, and also teaching at the Moscow Philharmonic.
From his pen came articles about the theatrical crisis in Russia and about ways to overcome it, and shortly before the fateful meeting with Stanislavsky, he compiled a report on unfavorable trends in Russian state theaters, on the decay of the theatrical tradition, on the danger of its complete destruction and on measures to reform these processes.
In the field of teaching, he also enjoyed authority. Being a born psychologist, he was able to intelligibly reveal to the actor the essence of his role and point out the ways of its maximum embodiment. The authority of the teacher became the reason for the arrival of many of his students in the troupe he assembled in 1897:
M. G. Savitskaya, I. M. Moskvina, O. L. Knipper, Vs. E. Meyerhold and many others.
"Amateur Theatre" Stanislavsky
Coming from a wealthy merchant family, Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky in his younger years could be considered only an amateur in all those areas in which his future colleague Nemirovich-Danchenko was known as a professional. However, from an early age, he aspired not to parental affairs related to the production of gold thread in a factory, but to the theater. Even as a child, he was engaged in playing in home performances and staging them, and while in Paris, secretly from his parents, he entered the conservatory, since from childhood he cherished the dream of becoming an opera performer. Gravitating towards theatrical showiness, he even arrived on a black horse, dressed in black, to say goodbye to the late N. Rubinstein, director of the Moscow Conservatory. It is possible that his theatrical roots affected his preferences: his grandmother was the French actress Varley.
A) became the initiator of the creation of the Moscow Society of History and Literature;
b) the opening of a drama school under him, where he studied himself;
c) assumed the leadership of an amateur drama circle, within which he staged performances from time to time.
There he received the nickname "express director" for the swiftness and dynamics of the created productions. As an experimental director, he increasingly gravitated towards abandoning the conventions of the theater in favor of realism and reproducing life's vicissitudes on stage. In many ways, this was facilitated by his communication with the famous artist Fedotova, a representative of the school of Shchepkin himself. Some of his productions were so successful that they were compared by the public with the works of the Maly Theater in Moscow.
Preparation of the first productions of the Moscow Art Theater
In addition to the students of Nemirovich-Danchenko, Stanislavsky's entourage formed the basis of the new theater: A. A. Sanin, Lilina, Burdzhalov, Samarova, V. V. Luzhsky, Artyom and others. For the first season, the Moscow Art Theater prepared several diverse plays:
"Samoupravtsev" Pisemsky;
Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice;
"The Seagull" by Chekhov.
Preparations for the opening of the theater coincided with the elimination of censorship restrictions on the work "Tsar Feodor Ioannovich" by Alexei K. Tolstoy, which was chosen by the artists for
The establishment of the new theater by K.S. Stanislavsky and V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko became the first stage in the history of the creation of the Moscow Art Theater and the starting point in the reformation of Russian theatrical art at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Did you like it? Do not hide your joy from the world - shareOn June 22, 1897, at two o'clock in the afternoon, one "significant meeting" began in the Moscow restaurant Slavyansky Bazar. The younger participant in the meeting described the older one, who at that time approached his forties:
“... he was then a well-known playwright, in whom some saw Ostrovsky's successor. Judging by his testimonies at the rehearsal, he is a born actor who just happened to not specialize in this area ... [Besides, he] directed the school of the Moscow Philharmonic Society. Many young Russian artists passed through his hands on the imperial, private and provincial stages.
The elder also left a portrait of the younger, 34-year-old:
“On the theatrical field [he] was a completely new person. And even a special one ... An amateur, that is, not a member of any theatrical service, not associated with any theater either as an actor or as a director. From the theater, he has not yet made his profession ... "
On that summer day, two people spent 18 hours in conversation. They wanted to create their own theater - free, independent, artistic, opposed to the official stage. The eldest was Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko; junior - Konstantin Sergeevich Alekseev (on stage - Stanislavsky). A year later, they will open the Moscow Public Art Theater, which in the history of world stage art will become the emblem of a new era - the era of the director's theater.
It is difficult for a modern viewer to imagine a theater without a director. Questions immediately arise: how then was the theatrical process organized in the pre-director's era? And who "invented" the theatrical performance?
The position of director existed in the Russian practice of the 19th century and, above all, on the imperial stage, but it was a technical (administrative) unit with an indistinct range of duties. The creator of theatrical performance in the era of pre-director theater was considered a playwright (author of a play)
and / or actor (author of the role).
From the beginning of the 19th century, under the influence of various political, economic and sociocultural reasons, the old theatrical system began to deform, the old well-functioning mechanisms broke down and stopped working. And first of all, the unity of action in dramaturgy was destroyed, and in the art of acting, in connection with this, the hierarchy. This meant that instead of the story of one main character - and therefore, one actor-premier on the stage - there were several parallel developing stories and several main roles. The clear three-stage structure (premier actors, secondary and tertiary actors) was replaced by the idea of an ensemble, soloing different actors at certain moments. Such a dramatic construction excluded the spontaneous "directing" of the actor-premier, who was more busy on the stage than others and, willy-nilly, became the "axis of action." There were now several competing centers in the play.
The playwright's right to authorship in the theatrical process was also shaken. The conflict situation was created by the new, growing role of the decorator. Playwrights did not want to give in: in particular, in the "new drama" new drama- a term that describes the work of innovative playwrights at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries: Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and others. they significantly increased the remarks, direct authorial instructions, through which they tried to dictate the artistic will not only to the actors, but also to theatrical artists.
It is interesting that a similar process took place at the same time in another performing art - in music. The emergence of the director's theater can be compared with the appearance of a symphony orchestra and the role of a conductor in it. A small group of musicians, among whom there was always a “first”, was replaced by orchestras in which there are no main ones, but there are solo instruments at different times. The organizing conductor (such as Hans von Bülow or Anton Rubinstein) does not exist inside, but outside the orchestra. He is between listeners and musicians: facing the musicians, back to the audience. Essentially, this is the place and role of the theater director.
The director arose "out of his own" (playwrights or actors), but gradually became a separate independent figure. The functions of directing as a new profession did not take shape immediately. Although the process went quickly, it is still possible to distinguish several stages in it. Directing was born to solve organizational problems, and only later creative rights were added to them.
First of all, a generation of theater directors of a new type appeared (in many European languages, the director is still denoted by the phrase "theater director"). They no longer simply recruited a troupe ready to play whatever they had to, but had a common program: they were looking for a certain repertoire, like-minded actors, a stationary building adapted for their purposes. An example of such a directorship is André Antoine and his Free Theater in Paris, founded in 1887.
The second organizational task is to coordinate the theatrical process. The preparatory stage has become important for the theater (collection of material, especially for historical performances; rehearsals, including explanatory, "table" rehearsals). During the creation of the performance, it was necessary to unite the entire theatrical team under one command, observe discipline, and unquestioning obedience. It was on these foundations that another early European director's theater arose - the German troupe of the Duke of Meiningen, which in 1866 was headed by Ludwig Kroneck.
Another function is pedagogical, which consists in educating both actors and spectators in certain rules suitable for this particular theater.
The director's creative ability lies primarily in creating mise-en-scenes. Mise-en-scène is literally the location on the stage: the actors in relation to each other, to individual parts of the scenery, to the space of the stage, to the viewer. In the director's era, complex thought-out mise-en-scene became a new theatrical language along with word and plasticity (gesture, posture, facial expressions), and it could form only when someone appeared - the director - who saw the stage from the side of the auditorium.
And finally, when all these tasks and opportunities came together, the director announced himself as the author of the play - instead of the playwright and actor. From that moment on, it was the director's idea and the director's composition of the performance that became decisive and dominant. Then it became possible to speak about the integrity of the performance, subject to one artistic will.
The first European directors appeared in England in the 1850s and 60s, and in France and Germany in the 1870s and 80s. The peculiarity of the Russian situation was that, firstly, Russia was a young European theatrical power and all processes were going on here in a somewhat different rhythm compared to theatrical Europe. Secondly, the law on theatrical monopoly, issued by Ekaterina II, held back the energy of theater development in St. Petersburg and Moscow for almost a century. According to this decree, private theatrical enterprises were not allowed in the two capitals (unlike the provinces), and only imperial theaters could exist. The abolition of the state monopoly in 1882 released this energy and led to the emergence of private theaters in the capitals. However, it was difficult for these theaters to compete with the imperial stage. Private theaters of the 1880s-90s arose and soon closed, not having time to have a significant impact on St. Petersburg and Moscow theatrical life.
By the time the Moscow Art Theater was born, Moscow was looking forward to a new private theater. And the initial agreement and unanimity of the two dreamers, the founders of this theater, can be considered a miracle. Ahead they will still have the most difficult half-century relationship, often on the verge of a break, but Stanislavsky wrote about that “significant meeting”:
“The World Conference of Nations does not discuss its important state issues with such precision with which we then discussed the foundations of the future business, questions of pure art, our artistic ideals, stage ethics, technique, organizational plans, projects for the future repertoire, our relationships.”
Nemirovich echoed him:
“The conversation began immediately with extraordinary sincerity. The general tone was captured without any hesitation. Our material was great. There was not a single place in the old theater that both of us would not have attacked with merciless criticism.<…>But more importantly, there was not a single part in the entire complex theatrical organism for which we did not have a ready-made positive plan - reform, reorganization, or even a complete revolution.<…>Our programs either merged or supplemented one another, but nowhere did they collide in contradictions.
Almost immediately, they agreed on a dual management of the theater. They also took into account the organizational gift of Stanislavsky, the authority of the Alekseev family in the Moscow philanthropic environment (it is he who will allow the creation of a society of shareholders to start theatrical activity), and the literary reputation of Nemirovich. In the practice of the Moscow Art Theater, Nemirovich will receive the right to a literary, and Stanislavsky - to a staged veto (that is, a ban). The basis of the troupe will be amateur actors from the Alekseevsky circle and young people from the class of Nemirovich in the Philharmonic Society of various editions: Ivan Moskvin, Olga Knipper, Vsevolod Meyerhold and others.
In this instantly formed program of the future theater (and in fact, in one of the beautiful utopias of the Silver Age), the “new directors” probably took into account all the components of the theatrical process. Something will be easily accomplished by them and immediately left behind, something will have to go for years and decades, and some provisions will remain an unattainable dream.
At first, after the word "artistic" in the theater's name, there was the word "publicly accessible", but it quickly disappeared, since the idea of targeting, "one's own" spectator circle turned out to be more important. Not just another theater was created, but a common home, a strong theatrical family, which included the audience. In this idea of a "commune" - a form of community life - the theatrical ideas of the Moscow Art Theater were correlated with the attitudes of the democratic intelligentsia.
From the very beginning, they tried to build relations within the troupe differently than on the official stage, based on social and creative equality. Nemirovich listed the shareholders of the Moscow Art Theater:
“... a tradesman of the city of Odessa, a wonderful actor; a wonderful actress, a peasant woman in the Saratov province, Butova; calligraphy teacher, charming Artyom; "Rurik" Count Orlov-Davydov, Prince Dolgorukov; Her Excellency of Jerusalem is our grande dame Raevskaya; honorary merchant, another merchant, Countess Panina, Prince Volkonsky, doctor Anton Chekhov.
“Ideal human relationships” were dreamed of, removing all sorts of hierarchy: “Today you are Hamlet, tomorrow you are an extra.” The new actor was presented as a model for the man of the future.
The changing relationship between the stage and the auditorium was supposed to be helped by the space of the theater building in Kamergersky Lane, which was reconstructed by Fyodor Shekhtel. “The theater begins with a hanger” - this famous phrase of Stanislavsky is not at all anecdotal, as it might seem. A cloakroom appeared in the Moscow Art Theater, where all the spectators must hand over their outerwear. Not only obligatoryness - unusual in general for the European theater - but also democracy (equality of spectators), in which both a modest soldier's overcoat and a luxurious fur coat hung side by side in this wardrobe, without class analysis, caused surprise. Subdued light in the audience foyer, neutral olive color of the walls, austere curtain - everything is thought out and executed for cooperation, joint work of actors and spectators.
The actors are preparing for the performance for a long time and seriously: the "table" period - reading the play, analysis; multiple rehearsals on stage; dress rehearsal. But the audience is also being prepared for a meeting with a theatrical event, accustoming them - with the help of new, strict rules that did not previously exist in the Russian theater - to the role of a "silent witness": do not enter after the third call, do not move around the hall, do not applaud and do not encore during the action and so gave it, that is, do not interfere with the concentrated acting work. But there are also rules: for example, ladies in hats with large brim are recommended to take off their hats before entering the hall (this is so that the audience takes into account each other's interests).
Nemirovich-Danchenko dreamed of a "literary" theater. From the very first days, the Moscow Art Theater was concerned about the high level of dramaturgy in its repertoire. Nothing passing and random. At the same time, the literary program of the artists was not limited to any one stylistic or thematic direction. Stanislavsky in "My Life in Art" listed several lines that had developed in the poster of the first decade of the Moscow Art Theater: the historical and everyday line (Aleksey Tolstoy), the line of intuition and feelings (Chekhov), the socio-political line (Gorky, Ibsen), the social and everyday line (Hauptmann, "The Power of Darkness" by Leo Tolstoy), the line of fantasy and symbolism ("The Snow Maiden" by Ostrovsky, Me terlink).
It took a year and a half to prepare for the opening of the Public Art Theater. During this time, they rented a theater room in the Hermitage Garden, gathered a troupe. They chose a play - the historical drama "Tsar Fyodor Ioan-no-Vitch" by Aleksey Tolstoy, finally allowed by the censors. The play responded to one of the primary tasks of the new theater - to become "the second Maining Gen-tsy" (the touring performances of the troupe of the Duke of Meiningen amazed both Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky). The Meiningens were imitated in historicism - the authenticity of the setting, in the elaboration of crowd scenes, in the impeccable coherence of the elements of the performance.
The first performance of the Public Art Theater - "Tsar Fyodor Ioan-no-vich" - was played on October 14, 1898 (and it seemed symbolic that 74 years before that, the Maly Theater opened on the same day). However, Nemirovich-Danchenko recalled:
“... the new theater has not yet been born.<…>Fine external innovations did not blow up the deep essence of the theatre. There was success, the play made full collections, but there was no feeling that a new theater was born. He was to be born later, without pomp, in a much more modest environment.
Sophocles (“Antigone”), Shakespeare (“The Merchant of Venice”), Ibsen (“Hedda Gabler”), Pisemsky (“Self Rulers”), Hauptmann (“The Sunken Bell” and “Gannele”) and Chekhov (“The Seagull”) were among the theatre’s repertoire announcements. Nemirovich ironically:
“... a whole fleet of battleships and dreadnoughts, heavy artillery - howitzers and mortars. Among them, Chekhov with his "Seagull" seemed like a small ship, five thousand tons, some kind of six-inch gun. Meanwhile…”
Meanwhile, it is The Seagull with its ordinariness, lack of historical showiness, exoticism, with everyday things (“zolaism”, that is, naturalism), with its speech pauses filled with sounds, with internal concentration and sparseness (there are no winning mass scenes in the play) that the Art Theater owes its real birth.
On December 17, 1898, at the premiere of The Seagull, the theater was half empty. Chekhov's play did not make a full collection. And suddenly - the unexpected success of the performance, which not only determined the future fate of Chekhov the playwright and the Art Theater, but also changed the theatrical art of the 20th century as a whole. Later, it was four Chekhov's dramas (from "The Seagull" to "The Cherry Orchard") that became the program basis of the artists, the laboratory where the most important discoveries in the field of directing psychological theater were made. "Uncle Vanya", which Chekhov almost gave to the Maly Theater. "Three Sisters" - the best, in Nemirovich's opinion, performance on the ensemble cast and "mise-en-scene" Stanislavsky. And finally, The Cherry Orchard is the brightest and most expressive symbol of the Art Theatre. By the way, Chekhov was dissatisfied with the production of The Cherry Orchard. In this seemingly, at first glance, private episode, the future conflict between the two authors - the playwright and the director - was sharp and relevant to this day.
In performances according to Chekhov (in the “line of intuition and feeling”), the “fourth wall theater” (that is, a theater clearly divided by an invisible imaginary plane into a stage and an auditorium) studied theatrical psychologism. Chekhov's pauses, the inconsistency of the words and actions of his characters revealed a gap between the external and the internal (the so-called psychological subtext). The attention of the audience switched from external events to the shades of the characters' experiences, to the subtle and complex tie of human relations. Both the characters on the stage and the audience in the hall were aimed at understanding the inner world of the “other”. The artistic integrity of the performance was created with the help of the atmosphere (that emotional authenticity that allowed contemporaries to define Chekhov's performances as "mood theatre").
Having barely emerged, the Moscow Art Theater became a favorite (and fashionable) theater of the intelligent public, who found in its performances a correspondence to their ideals, tastes, and aspirations. However, the theatrical process in the first fifteen years of the 20th century developed rapidly. Only four seasons will pass, and Nemirovich's favorite student, one of the leading actors of the Art Theater Vsevolod Meyerhold, will suddenly leave Stanislavsky and Nemirovich, open the New Drama Association in the province, trying himself not only as an actor, but also as a director. And three years later, in the summer of 1905, in the Studio on Povarskaya (a branch of the Moscow Art Theater), Meyerhold, invited by Stanislavsky, together with the artists Nikolai Sapunov and Sergey Sudeikin, begins to free himself “from the naturalistic fetters of the Mei-Ningen school”, from the “unnecessary truth” (expression of Valery Bryusov) of his teachers. The theater-studio has become "a theater of search for new stage forms." And although the audience did not see the performances prepared in it, Meyerhold in this work for the first time approached the idea of a theater of intentional convention - the opponent of psychological theater.
Having gone to the possible limit one of the paths of the "conditional theater" of the early 20th century - the symbolist "static theater", going back to the theory and practice of Maurice Maeterlinck, Meyerhold discovers the aesthetics of the booth theater. On the eve of the new year, 1907, he puts on the stage of the St. Petersburg theater of Vera Fedorovna Komissarzhevskaya "Balaganchik", the poster of which read: "The authors of the performance are Alexander Alexandrovich Blok and Vsevolod Meyerhold." For the first time, the director directly called himself "the author of the play."
The theory of the booth theater referred to those theatrical eras in which there was no rigid literary basis (written dramaturgy). The actor was the center of such a theatrical action that created not a “life reality”, but an open “play of life” with improvisation based on a “scenario” - a sequence of dramatic situations, with an image-mask outlining types of behavior without specific individual characteristics (“not one Harlequin, but all the Harlequins ever seen”), with the conventions of the stage space and the objective world. “The public is waiting for you-thought, play, skill,” Meyerhold manifested in the program article “Balagan” in 1912. And this meant: the study of acting techniques (handicraft basics), past theatrical eras to extract techniques (tricks), mastering the grotesque - "the favorite trick of the farce."
By the beginning of the 1910s, two poles were clearly identified in the director's theater. One shows the psychological, literary "theater of the fourth wall." On the other, there is a playful, impromptu (in the spirit of commedia dell'arte) theater-booth. Between them (next to them), complementing and mutually influencing each other, there were various types of combinations of "life-like" and "conditional" theatrical art.
A little more than 15 years have passed since the legendary meeting at Slavianski Bazaar. During this time, not only the Moscow Art Theater arose and strengthened its position, which largely determined the theatrical art of the first half of the 20th century, but a new creative profession was born that radically changed the theatrical language, there was a change in the author - the "owner" of the performance. The appearance of the director provoked the theater to define its boundaries, to realize the independence of theatrical art. And the direction itself, which goes back to the Moscow Art Theater experiments, went different ways, trying, experimenting in several directions at the same time.
Many years later, Mikhail Chekhov, in a lecture for American students “On the Five Great Russian Directors,” tried to generalize the experience of early Russian stage direction, rich in names, discoveries, experiments, that part of the cultural heritage of the Silver Age, which became significant not only for the Russian, but also for the world stage. Mikhail Chekhov singled out five great director names: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Evgeny Vakhtangov, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Alexander Tairov - and gave a brief description of the work of each: Stanislavsky with his fidelity to the “truth of inner life”, Meyerhold with his “demonic imagination” (“he saw evil in everything first of all”), Vakhtangov with his “juicy theatricality yu”, Nemirovich-Dan-chen-ko with his mathematical thinking, sense of structure and the whole, Tair-rov with his beauty as an end in itself. In the end, according to Chekhov, they all expanded the limits of the theater and opened up freedom in choosing a creative method: “Comparing the extremes of Meyerhold and Stanislavsky with the theatricality of Vakhtangov, we eventually come to the conclusion: everything is permissible, everything is possible in the theater.” The main lesson of the early director's theater: “Everything is compatible and compatible! Courage! Freedom! This is how Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Tairov and others brought us up.”
