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The name Stanislavski is to the art of acting what Shakespeare is to the art of playwriting. In the broadest outline, from the beginning of this century, Stanislavski was the guiding genius of the Moscow Art Theater until the 1930's when he was forced into semiretirement by a heart ailment. He died in 1938 at the age of seventy-five. The Moscow Art Theater has been described as "perhaps the greatest acting unit the world has ever known." For forty years Stanislavski was not only its co-director and guiding force, but also one of its chief actors.
John Gielgud, in an introduction to one of Stanislavski's three books, An Actor Prepares(1936), has aptly stated, "He is Olympian, a specialist in every department of the theatre, who cares so passionately for his art that he wishes to bequeath something from his great store of experience and knowledge to anyone who cares to read what he has set down." Stanislavski's most celebrated achievement is the development of a theory and system of dramatic acting and teaching referred to as the Stanislavski Method. This theory, briefly stated, emphasizes that it is essential for the actor to enter the lives of the characters he portrays, their emotions and personality, as thoroughly as possible.
The psychoanalyst, interested in creative imagination, turns to the life history of a person and, in Stanislavski's case, finds that many positive factors contributed to the development of his great talent and genius. Stanislavski's childhood suggests that the notion an artist must suffer to create is wrong. One should rather say that an artist