ABSTRACT
Stanislavsky’s road to committing his acting thoughts to paper is long and winding. The success of the Moscow Art Theatre’s American tours in the early 1920s and the ailing health of his son, Igor, persuaded him to do so eventually, and his autobiography, My Life in Art, was the first book to appear in 1924. He was more reluctant to publish his ‘system’, in case his experiments seemed prescriptive once he locked them down into written words. Others didn’t seem so concerned, with various publications appearing expounding Stanislavsky’s theories, including (in 1919) Michael Chekhov’s own account of the First Studio. It was really after his heart attack in 1928 that Stanislavsky focused on the task.
