Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor's Mind in Russian Modernism - Paperback

by Alisa Ballard Lin (Author)

Investigating late imperial Russian and early Soviet modernism's reinvention of the actor

In this wide-ranging study, Alisa Ballard Lin argues that Russian theatrical theory and practice contributed to a broad pre- and postrevolutionary discourse about the mind, profoundly reshaping concepts of consciousness, perception, identity, and the constitution of the subject. Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor's Mind in Russian Modernism examines efforts in Russian theater--from around the turn of the century through the mid-1930s--to stimulate, train, imagine, and ultimately understand the actor's, as well as the spectator's, mind. Discussing key figures of the period, including Nikolai Evreinov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Alexander Tairov, Lin identifies an underappreciated dimension of humanism within Russian modernism: a humanism that resisted the pressures of an increasingly technologized, industrialized, and politicized modernity that challenged the place of the human within it.

Author Biography

ALISA BALLARD LIN is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. She is the translator and editor of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's That Third Guy: A Comedy from the Stalinist 1930s with Essays on Theater.