STANISLAVSKY'S SECOND OTHELLO: THE GREAT DIRECTOR'S LAST REVELATIONS

Abstract

In March 1927, Konstantin Stanislavsky started to direct Othello at the Moscow Art Theatre. In 1929, Stanislavsky went abroad for treatment. While in Germany. He kept writing a detailed directorial plan, which he sent to Moscow through 1929 and 1930. In the thirties, though Joseph Stalin personally recognized Stanislavsky as “a Jiving legend”, the latter lived and under constant fear. Around 1930, he secretly informed his son, who live abroad, that his cousin died of scurvy and heart failure in prision, and his cousin’s mother had been sent to Siberia. I believe that Stanislavsky’s interpretation of Othello absorbed the turmoil of the socialist era. Thus, Othello’s central leitmotif, the slander and accusation of innocents, was the topic of the day. Othello, a loner outside the battlefield was a noble “outcast” like Stanilavsky himself. The discovery of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness made Othello take upon himself a great duty: to return justice to the word and restore its harmony by killing her. According to Stanislavsky in Othello’s eyes she became the Devil, and her angelic face was one of the Devil’s deceptions. The idea of cleansing was the “toast” in the Soviet ideology of the time. The open political processes cleansed the society from the “ enemies of the people”. Stanislavsky himself, though his relatives were the victims of such “cleansing”, dreamt about cleansing the Moscow Arte Theatre. The total confusion of “bad and good” cleansing overwhelmed the public minds. Stanislavsky’s interpretation of Othello does not have an end: his work was suspended after he learned (two weeks after the fact) of the premiere of Othello at the Moscow Art Theatre on March 14, 1930. But there is a certain metaphorical significance to it. In 1930, with most of the evil of Stalinism still ahead, there was not even a hope to restore the harmonious word.