ABSTRACT
In the 1960s Russian director Adolf Shapiro decided to study with Maria Osipovna Knebel, one of Stanislavsky’s last assistants, in order to prove that the master’s ideas were no longer valuable. Shapiro’s assumptions had come from his knowledge of the “official” Stanislavsky, manufactured by Stalin in the late 1930s, promoted by authoritative Marxist practitioners and scholars during most of the twentieth century, and taught in the Soviet theatrical institutes. Soviet censorship did more than ban books; it also prescribed what could be said and written. Censors became educators and enforcers of politically correct content, form and style, giving writers to understand that “everything is forbidden; what is permitted is obligatory”. Censors modified everything that Stanislavsky said and published in Soviet Russia, from 1917 to 1938 and posthumously. In turning to the specific ways in which censorship shaped and reshaped Stanislavsky’s words, analysis best begins with a consideration of a series of private conversations.
