Theatrical Consciousness
The Actor's Mind in Russian Modernism

Alisa Ballard Lin (Author)

9780810148437

Paperback / softback, published 15 April 2025

200 pages, 16 b&w halftones
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.454 kg

"With a clear, eloquent tone and keen instinct for accessible storytelling, Alisa Ballard Lin connects incisive analyses of epoch-making Russian and Soviet theatrical innovations with essential, burning questions of psychology, philosophy, and concepts of the self." - Dassia N. Posner, Northwestern University

"Alisa Ballard Lin's lucid style deftly reveals the depth and breadth of her bountiful research. This is a masterful work of scholarship, essential reading for anyone interested in core questions about theater, acting, and cultural history." - David Chambers, Yale University

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.

Introduction: Surveying the Soviet Actor

Chapter One: The Actor as Self