The Vakhtangov Sourcebook (review)

Yevgeny Vakhtangov was one of the great figures of twentieth-century Russian theatre. A protégé of Stanislavski's, he acted in a number of the Moscow Art Theatre's productions in the years leading up to the Revolution. He directed several landmarks of modernist theatre, including legendary productions of Ansky's The Dybbuk at the Habima Theatre and Gozzi's Princess Turandot at his own studio, both of which premiered in 1922, shortly before his life was cut short by cancer. He was also a master acting teacher whose students, in an attempt to carry on his legacy, maintained his studio as the Vakhtangov Theatre Institute, which remains one of the leading conservatories in Russia. Vakhtangov set himself apart by finding a style, which he called "fantastic realism," that synthesized Stanislavski's drive toward authenticity with Vsevolod Meyerhold's theatricality by demanding that his actors live creatively, immediately, and truthfully within the reality of the play and the reality of the auditorium simultaneously. Despite his importance as an artist and teacher, however, he has received much less attention than many of his contemporaries from English-language scholars.

The Vakhtangov Sourcebook, the first collection of Vakhtangov's writing to appear in English in nearly thirty years, is, therefore, an extremely welcome correction to this state of affairs. In it, Andre Malaev-Babel gathers an excellent selection of Vakhtangov's journal entries, essays, director's notebooks, and letters, as well as lecture and rehearsal notes taken by his actors. Many of these writings appear in English for the first time (in Malaev-Babel's own clear and accurate translations), and several of the essays that have been previously translated into English are published here in fuller versions (previous publications of Vakhtangov's important 1921 diary entry on Stanislvaski, Meyerhold, and the future of theatre, for example, had been heavily edited to soften his criticism of Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko). Malaev-Babel's collection was produced following a consultation of the manuscript of Viacheslav Ivanov's monumental two-volume, Russian-language collection of Vakhtangov's writings (2011), so it is completely up to date with contemporary scholarship. The book is also generously illustrated with photographs of Vakhtangov and his actors in performance, and also contains several full-color plates of Natan Altman's and Ignaty Nivinsky's spectacular designs for his major productions.

In his introduction, Malaev-Babel, a graduate of the Vakhtangov Theatre Institute and student of Aleksandra Remizova, one of Vakhtangov's star pupils, proves a knowledgeable and insightful guide to Vakhtangov's writings. He ably extracts and elaborates upon key concepts in Vakhtangov's thinking, in addition to providing biographical information, describing key productions, and helpfully situating Vakhtangov's ideas within the broader explorations of performance pedagogy that were pulsating through Russia at the time. Malaev-Babel also provides an extremely helpful glossary at the end of the book, which offers helpful in-depth discussions (sometimes up to a page long) of these concepts, synthesizing points made in different writings with the collective knowledge maintained by Vakhtangov's disciples.

While Vakhtangov's ideas, and his implementation of them, should be of interest to anyone interested in actor training and/or directing, this book may be especially valuable to teachers working in theatre departments that rely heavily upon Stanislavski-based actor training. Vakhtangov's work, which created presentational productions that were built on a foundation of experiential authenticity, might suggest a useful way to construct less naturalistic performances with these tools.

The remainder of the book—parts 2-9—consists of selections from Vakhtangov's writing and the notes kept by his students and are organized thematically, beginning with his more philosophical statements, before moving on to documentation of his practices in the classroom and during rehearsals. Part 2 gathers notes from his lectures dealing with broad questions of theatrical practice: the nature of theatre, the actor's process, and the relationship between creativity and truth. Part 3 contains the excerpts from Vakhtangov's diaries and notebooks, in which he sketches the ideas that lead to fantastic realism, notes on...