Books in the Heidelberger Publikationen zur Slavistik.B.Literaturwissenschaftliche Reihe series

Nephew of Anton Chekhov and a disciple of Konstantin Stanislavskii, Russian émigré actor Michael Chekhov (1891-1955) created one of the most challenging and inspiring acting theories of the 20 century. This book is a reinterpretation of Chekhov¿s theory both in the context of the cultural and political milieu of his time and in the light of theatre semiotics: from Prague Structuralism to French Poststructuralism and contemporary performance theory. This work presents Chekhov¿s understanding of the actor¿s stage product ¿ stage mask ¿ as a psychological, psychophysical and cultural construct engaged with the mysteries of the actor/character or, what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as the author/hero, dialectical relationships. It offers new horizons in interdisciplinary and intercultural visions on theatre acting described by Chekhov as a most liberating and cathartic process.

In this book, Zinaida Afanasievna Vengerova, a once famous literary critic, whose importance for the turn of the century European intellectual world is no longer sufficiently appreciated, receives her first full length systematic study. Her intellectual exploration at the turn of the 19th century brought her into contact with Symbolist ideas from several European countries, and she used her profound understanding of these different currents of Symbolism to fashion for herself an ambassadorial role between Western Europe and Russia. In many critical studies she introduced the Russian intellectual world to a wide spectrum of Western European literature, art and thought, including Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, and the French Symbolist poets, Pre-Raphaelite and Expressionist art, and the thought of Nietzsche. As a regular contributor to the Mercure de France in Paris and the Fortnightly Review in London, she acquainted Western audiences with Chekhov and other fin-de-siècle Russian writers. Vengerova was instrumental in developing a theory of Symbolism, especially as it came to be understood in Russia. This book examines her life and work, and the intellectual milieu in which she lived; and serves as a window on Western European and Russian cultural history from the fin-de-siècle through the pre-war period and into the age of Russian émigrés of the 1920s and 1930s.