Stanislaysky : A life. By David Magarshack. (Macgibbon and Kee.
2ss.) IT is thirteen years since Stanislaysky died at the age of 75, 53 years since he and Ncmirovich - Danchenko founded the Moscow Art Theatre. He has long been recognised as one of the great creative influences in the modern art of the theatre, although even today it is not sufficiently appreciated outside the more studious ranks in the profession that the Stanislaysky " system " became increasingly a matter of the actor's practical training and not of dramatic theory or of arise-en-scene and the rest. Of the man himself the English reader has been able to discover most until now from the fascinating volume, My Life In Art, originally published in 1925, in which Stanis- laysky sketched the development of his theatrical ideas and experience with charac- teristic warmth and sincerity. This is still a principal source for the biographer, and Mr. Magarshack has used it as such to good purpose. He has also found various new sources, however, in a great deal of material, including a large collection of Stanislaysky's letters, which has apparently been published recently in Moscow. It is a pity in the circumstances that he does not specify the authority for some of the statements he makes in his volume.
This is biography of a straightforward and undecorative kind, pleasantly instructive but rather too episodic in style to make the best sort of reading. One thing that Mr. Magarshack rightly emphasises all through, while illustrating how much the Moscow Art Theatre owed alike in prestige and security to Chckhov, is Stanislaysky's con- tinued failure, or partial failure, springing largely from his " literary " limitations, to understand Chekhov's plays. Nor was Ncmirovich-Danchenko in very much better condition. The breach between these two, incidentally, is handled justly and soberly, and there are sound sketches of figures un- known to the majority of English people familiar _ with the general record of the Moscow Art Theatre, like Stanislaysky's aid and counsellor for some years in the theatre, the Tolstoyan and saintly Leopold Sulerz-
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