Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and the Moscow Art Theatre

This is an authorized translation of Nemirovich-Danchenko (Moscow, 1979) by Inna Solovyova, historian, author, and senior researcher of the Moscow Art Theatre Archives. Untranslated before now, it is the only comprehensive account of the life and work of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858–1943), co-founder with Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theatre and one of the pioneers of the art of directing. Nemirovich-Danchenko was one of the few prominent theatre practitioners who lived and worked from Russia’s Tsarist period through the inception and consolidation of its Soviet period. Thus, it is also a story about the development of Russian society and culture during the last half of the nineteenth century and the Soviet half of the twentieth century. Additionally, it explores the Moscow Art Theatre’s interpretive and production work on the plays of Chekhov, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, and many others. The central theme of the book focuses on the contingent dialectical relationship between artists and their changing socio-political realities. The author’s narrative is stylistically informal and based on archival documents, most of which are referenced here for the first time in English and will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies.