Stanislavsky on the Arbat

On the occasion of the 160th anniversary of the birth of the legendary director, one of the founders of the Moscow Art Theater and the author of the famous system of stagecraft, Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky, the Moscow Department of Culture, the Moscow Directorate of Mass Events and the Moscow Art Theater Museum presented a joint photo project that reveals Stanislavsky as an actor.

The exposition presents unique photographs of Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky from the collection of the Moscow Art Theater Museum in various acting works. The first part of the photo exhibition deals with Stanislavsky’s early theatrical roles, played in a home theater in a Moscow house near the Red Gates and in the estate of the Alekseev family (Stanislavsky’s real name) in Lyubimovka. Another step that brought Stanislavsky closer to the professional stage was the creation of the Moscow Society of Art and Literature, where he played more serious roles from the classical and modern repertoire.

In the second part of the exhibition, Konstantin Stanislavsky appears in roles already on the professional stage, in the Moscow Art Theater he created in 1898 together with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, in which he becomes both director and director. In the exhibition you can see photographs of Stanislavsky, playing roles in performances based on the works of A.P. Chekhov, M. Gorky, I.S. Turgenev, Molière. In each of the roles, he demonstrated the greatest talent and depth of the classical Russian acting school.

“In our exhibition, we want to talk about how a man who was destined by fate to become a famous merchant became an outstanding director who turned the history of Russian and foreign theater upside down,” said Marfa Bubnova, curator of the exhibition, deputy director of the Moscow Art Theater Museum, “everyone knows Stanislavsky as a reformer Russian and foreign theater, as the founder of the Moscow Art Theater, but few people know that Stanislavsky was a brilliant actor! He became interested in acting at an early age. It is officially believed that he went on stage on September 5, 1877, it was his mother’s name day, and an amateur performance was staged, where the boy took part. Interestingly, Konstantin Sergeevich began to collect his legendary library, which is called the director’s library, at the age of seven. The exhibition turned out also thanks to the fact that Stanislavsky took care of his archive: even early childhood photographs have been preserved. Looking at photographs of the images created by the genius of Stanislavsky, one involuntarily wonders: is this one person, because the actor Stanislavsky was amazingly able to reincarnate.

Konstantin Stanislavsky is the founder of the Moscow Art Theater and the author of a system thanks to which actors from all over the world have been honing their skills for more than a century. More than 100 roles were played by Stanislavsky-actor, 88 performances were staged by Stanislavsky-director, without all this, a unique and unique system in the world would not have been created, leading to complete immersion in the image, giving complete freedom of creativity and bearing the name of the great Stanislavsky.

The open-air photo exhibition on the Arbat will run until May 5, 2023.

Mikhail Kovalyov.

Author’s photo