From the proscenium: The influence of Konstantin Stanislavski and the psychology of acting in Vygotsky’s work

Lev Vygotsky, 1896–1934

Lev Vygotsky is often credited with the development of cultural-historical activity theory, which is a lens through which one can analyze human activity systems. The theory emphasizes the interaction between thought and activity situated within an environmental context (Engeström, 1999; Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999). His work stood in contrast to many of the approaches to psychology of his time, which viewed learning and development as divorced from their social surroundings and from broader institutions (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b). Vygotsky and his colleagues published several articles in psychological journals in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Although his first article in English was published in 1929, his work was not known or widely recognized in the West until the 1960s and 1970s. One possible reason for this is that his seminal work, Thinking and Speech, became available to western English-speaking scholars upon its translation in 1962 (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b).

Konstantin Stanislavski, 1863–1938

Stanislavski was an actor, a director, and the founder of the Moscow Public-Accessible Theater, later known as the Moscow Art Theater (MAT). He is regarded as most influential for his systematic manualization of actor preparation, training, and rehearsal, known as the Stanislavski “system” (Benedetti, 1990). The “system” emphasized a rigorous analysis of the actor’s role and objectives within the larger plot of the production. Stanislavski, following the revolution in realism ushered in by Ibsen and Chekhov (and Gorky), stressed a psychophysiological approach to acting, which integrated physical gestures (of all types) into the collaborative development of character and scene. His pedagogical approach to instructing his students and actors placed particular importance on preparation, during which actors would analyze the overarching plot and their character’s motivation and activity (Benedetti, 1982/2004; Stanislavski, 2008).

In this article, we argue that Vygotsky’s early experiences as a theater critic and exposure to the work of Stanislavski and the MAT influenced his later work as a psychologist. An intellectual connection supplemented by his ongoing collaborations with scholars at GAKhN (Государственная академия художественных наук—the State Academy for the Scientific Study of Art, founded in 1921) throughout his career influenced especially his later work in searching for a new type of psychology that emphasized human thought and activity as situated within and contingent on the context of the environment. Vygotsky was especially active in the GAKhN subsection on “The Psychology of the Actor,” which focused on the work of Stanislavski and his contemporaries. The subsection was chaired by Stanislavski’s editor, Liubov Gurevich. We suggest that Vygotsky’s lifelong fascination with theater, and his exposure to Stanislavski’s theory on (the psychology of) acting, made critical contributions to his thinking as he struggled to reformulate his understanding of psychology and the human condition. Failure to tie Vygotsky’s work to his contemporaries, and his attachment(s) to the artistic/theatrical revolution taking place in Russia during the early 20th century, is something Vygotsky himself might decry—ignoring the role his own emotional and social history played in his purposeful activity.

We connect different aspects of Stanislavski’s (1936, 1948) An Actor’s Work as translated and compiled by Jean Benedetti (Stanislavski, 2008), outlining the psychological aspects of character development and acting that Stanislavski developed over decades, with Vygotsky’s (1934/1987b) burgeoning ideas, finding their apogee in one of his final works, Thinking and Speech. While his ideas and methods for the study of human consciousness are often seen as groundbreaking and revolutionary in the field of psychology, it is important to consider that Vygotsky’s theories did not develop in a vacuum. Unlike in the West, Russia had departments within its colleges devoted to the study of the psychology of different arts, including music, material arts, and theatrical arts. Vygotsky, because of both his interests and his history, seems to have been drawn to the psychology of the actor. Gudkova (2019) establishes connections between Vygotsky and many of the preeminent theater scholars of the early 20th century in Russia. The academic epicenter of articulating and expanding Stanislavski’s theories was GAKhN. Vygotsky frequently attended presentations at the Theater Section throughout the 1920s (Gudkova, 2019). Earlier, Vygotsky developed pieces with the GAKhN Psychology of Acting faculty, including Shklovsky, Iakobson, and Eikhenbaum. These were published in the journal Zhizn’ iskusstva (Жизнь искусства) between the years 1918 and 1922. He maintained these collaborative ties as his work progressed into the 1930s. Although Vygotsky shifted his focus to studying psychology more broadly, “Iakobson’s work after GAKhN followed in Vygotsky’s footsteps” (Gudkova, 2019, pp. 301–302, note 5).

Vygotsky (1934/1987b) collaborated with scholars and regularly lectured at GAKhN, where Liubov Gurevich was a faculty member, leading up to the publication of Thinking and Speech. For instance, on January 23, 1928, Vygotsky presented a piece titled “Toward the Study of the Psychology of the Actor’s Work” at the Theater Section’s “The Psychology of the Actor’s” subsection (Gudkova, 2019). He maintained connections with GAKhN faculty well into the 1930s. Vygotsky’s (1932/1936) “On the Problem of the Psychology of the Actor’s Creative Work” (“К вопросу о психологии творчества актера”), written in 1932, was first published in 1936 as an appendix to GAKhN faculty member Pavel Iakobson’s Психологии сценических чувств актера (Psychology of stage feelings of an actor). In 1930, Gurevich defended a lecture by Iakobson “as endorsed by Vygotsky at a GAKhN Theater Section” (Gudkova, 2019, p. 610). Vygotsky exchanged ideas with these scholars. We argue that these experiences informed his thinking and the development of his later ideas. Perhaps the most important influence was Stanislavski himself. Vygotsky had access to Stanislavski’s (1936) theater textbook, as edited by Gurevich (the most relevant and comprehensive version of his work, not generally available even in Russia prior to 1936). There is direct evidence that Gurevich consulted Vygotsky on the manuscript to check Stanislavski’s terminology in 1929, immediately before Vygotsky experienced his personal and professional crisis, culminating in a radical reformulation of his theory. This is referenced in a letter from Gurevich to Stanislavski found in Volume 10 of a journal called Minuvshee (Минувшее; A. Lin, personal communication, March 11, 2021):

In some chapters—for example, the chapter on Affective memory—you used terms that are incorrect from the psychological perspective.

I have been pointing out this imprecision in your terminology for a while now, but, unwilling to rely on my modest knowledge on the matter, last winter and this winter I purposefully consulted three prominent psychology experts to dispel my doubts: Chelpanov, Ekzemplyarsky and the young and very artistically sensitive Vygotsky. All of them corroborated my opinion. ¹

Stanislavski’s “system” reached its height in the Russian arts community at large just as Vygotsky became a theater critic. Stanislavski was becoming a celebrity of international renown. The young Vygotsky apparently knew Stanislavski’s work quite well from early on in his intellectual life.

We argue that Vygotsky’s exposure to the work of Stanislavski, Gurevich, and GAKhN scholars influenced his later cultural-historical theories of psychology. The first section of this article provides an overview of Vygotsky’s life as a theater critic in Moscow and his hometown of Gomel, during which he drew heavily on work being done at the MAT on a natural rather than hyperbolic approach to acting using psychological realism, borrowing terms and ideas directly from Stanislavski, as well as his later relationships with members of the GAKhN subsection as he was formulating his ideas on a unified approach to thought and activity. The borrowing of terms from An Actor’s Work (Stanislavski, 2008), many of which initially appeared in his theater reviews in Moscow and Gomel, later surfaced in Vygotsky’s publications dealing with problems in the field of psychology. In the second section of this article, we establish a connection between An Actor’s Work and Vygotsky through one of the best-known aspects of Vygotsky’s work: recognizing action as primary in understanding/analyzing human behavior. In the third section, we address the role of “bits and tasks”—a key component of both Stanislavski’s system and Vygotsky’s later work.

Individual history, social history, and volition in the development of Vygotsky’s theory

Vygotsky might advise that, to understand his own work as a psychologist, we as scholars must understand the mediating tools and settings he experienced during the years his thinking developed. Vygotsky was born into a large family in the city of Orsha and spent his youth in the city of Gomel at the height of the Silver Age, a period in Russian history characterized by a cultural blossoming in the domains of the arts, especially theater (Rubtsova & Daniels, 2016). Vygotsky’s family life reflected this historical moment; it was common for evenings to be spent around the table discussing literature as well as the latest theatrical productions (Lowe, 2009). He was an active member of Khudjestvenny Sovet (Художественный совет—the Art Council), which granted free access to performances in Gomel. Vygotsky was familiar with the famous Russian theatrical directors Konstantin Stanislavski and Vsevolod Meyerhold, was close friends with the literary critic Yuri Aykhenvald (who oversaw Vygotsky’s dissertation on Stanislavski’s 1912 production of Hamlet), and attended a reading group with the renowned Soviet Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam—whom he quotes at the beginning of Chapter 7 of Thinking and Speech (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b). In some ways, Chapter 7 of Thinking and Speech can be seen as a homage to this time and intellectual space in Vygotsky’s life. ²

Vygotsky left Gomel to be a theater critic in Moscow, particularly at MAT (Lowe, 2009). He inevitably came into contact with the tight community around MAT, including Gurevich. Vygotsky returned to Gomel a few years later. While in Gomel, he maintained his working relationship with the theater, writing over 80 essays, the majority of which were theatrical reviews published in the Nash ponedel’nik (Наш понедельник) and Polesskaia pravda (Полесская правда) newspapers (Sobkin & Klimova, 2018; Yasnitsky, 2012). In these reviews, the young Vygotsky explored the psychological aspects of character development and stage direction, drawing on the ideas of Stanislavki.

The topics addressed in Vygotsky’s reviews included distinguishing the external and internal planes of the actor, children at play, and the notion of dual meaning (later addressed in Thinking and Speech). He also wrote pieces on the emotional nature of dramaturgical experience, examining the utterance in the context of action and emotion, and the relationships between utterance, gesture, action, and emotion, which he addressed in has later work as a psychologist (Sobkin & Klimova, 2018). Additionally, his early reviews for the theater explored the idea of mood/affect as a moderator of an actor’s performance, and the notion of an actor’s accumulated experience defining their range and capabilities in terms of appropriate casting. This foreshadowed his ideas on how development progresses in accordance with the lived experiences and mediating tools to which an individual is exposed throughout their lifespan (Sobkin & Klimova, 2018). Vygotsky would continue to explore and develop his understanding of these topics through his later scholarship as a psychologist, reinforced by his exposure to Stanislavski’s manuscripts (via Gurevich), who was attempting to put his ideas on the psychotechnique of acting in writing as his career drew to a close.

In the later sections of this article, we will explore these relations between Vygotsky’s work and Stanislavski’s “system” further, but first, by way of establishing this linkage, we should note that Vygotsky drew terms and acting devices coined by Stanislavski in the theatrical critiques he published in Moscow and Gomel. These terms and concepts later resurfaced in his publications as a psychologist.

To our knowledge, Vygotsky mentions Stanislavski in 14 instances in his theater reviews, notes, and lectures that are available in existing archives between the years of 1917 and 1924 at the time of this publication (Sobkin, 2015). As Vygotsky transitioned from the theater to the academy to focus on psychology and human development, he carried the symbolist understanding of human psychology gleaned from Stanislavski’s work and his collaborations with GAKhN researchers into his later scholarship. ³ Vygotsky began to publish his ideas on a new human psychology in 1925.

Linguistic borrowings

Vygotsky’s relationship to Stanislavski and MAT was not only defined by the historical moment (although we believe both Vygotsky and Stanislavski would say that was enough to put his scholarly activities into a specific context). It was also defined by the way Vygotsky began to use the language of MAT to express his thinking. A preponderance of Vygotsky’s reviews addressed issues relating to the performance’s “super-objective” or “super-task” (sverkhzadacha, сверхзадача), a term drawn from Stanislavski’s work (Sobkin & Mazanova, 2015). Stanislavski (2008) defines it in his glossary of terms as: “The theme or subject of the play. The reason why it was written” (p. 684). This term is also the subtitle of the first part of the book (but was removed when published in the USA). We also see this term surface as an important part of Vygotsky’s (1927/2004) explorations into human thinking in later works such as “Imagination and Creativity in Childhood”: “The children draw, model, cut out, sew, and again all these activities take on meaning and purpose as part of a general objective [emphasis added] the children are engaged with” (p. 71). In this piece, Vygotsky establishes activity as always having a defined objective. This objective may be fluid, but it is always present, moderating thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We should note that sections of “Imagination and Creativity in Childhood” focus on using dramaturgical arts as an ideal setting for child development, as theatrical productions, including their preparation and set design, adhere to the criteria of always having a super-objective—perhaps a nod to Vygotsky’s earlier career as both a theater critic and a teacher of the dramaturgical arts. Early in his career, Vygotsky and his brother took out an advertisement in a local newspaper for an institute for the study of drama (Lowe et al., 2009).

Vygotsky also may have borrowed the terms nastroenie (“mood,” настроение) and obshchenie (“communicating/communing,” общение) from An Actor’s Work (Stanislavski, 2008), although skeptics could argue that these connections are more tenuous due to the common use of these terms in everyday speech, particularly when addressing the aesthetic nature of a work of art such as a theater production. However, it should be noted that even during his time as a theater critic, Vygotsky addressed these designations for aspects of productions in purely psychological terms (Sobkin & Klimova, 2018).

“Through-action” (skvoznoe deistvie, сквозное действие) is another term that bears linkage to the work of Stanislavski, and is connected to later Vygotskian ideas regarding action as primary. Stanislavski (2008) defined the through-action as “[t]he logical sequence of all the actions in the play that gives coherence to the performance” (p. 684). In other words, action is what makes the production real and gives it life. Stanislavski (2008) provides a definition within the dialogue of An Actor’s Work that positions this psychological concept beyond the proscenium opening:

The Through-action is the direct extension of the dynamic of the inner drives that have their origin in the mind, will, and creative feeling of the actor. If there were no Through-action, all the Bits and Tasks in the play, all the Given Circumstances, communication, adaptations, moments of truth and belief, etc. would vegetate separately from one another, with no hope of coming alive.

But the Through-action brings everything together, strings all the elements together, like a thread through unconnected beads, and points them towards the common Supertask. (p. 312)

Stanislavski acknowledges the fundamental human element of this concept in relation to goal orientation, motivation, and action as the core of creating a theatrical production that is authentic and natural: “Let us agree for the future to call this vital goal a human being/actor has, the Supertask and the super-Through-action” (p. 314). This concept broadly aligns with Vygotsky’s (1987a) later ideas on education and psychology, with his work placing action as the genesis whence all human consciousness emerges on both the external and internal planes.

Perhaps Vygotsky’s most well-known borrowing from Stanislavski is the concept of perezhivanie (переживание, pronounced pe-re-zhe-vah-ni-e). The exact translation of this term has confounded translators, but both Sobkin (for Vygotsky) and Benedetti (for Stanislavski) translate it as “experiencing” (Benedetti, 1982/2004; Sobkin & Mazanova, 2014). The word is defined vaguely by Stanislavski (2008) in the glossary of terms of An Actor’s Work as “[t]he process by which an actor experiences the character’s emotions afresh in each performance” (p. 683), and it is central to their work and their “system.” ⁴ Vygotsky first used this term in his piece “The Red Torch Tour: Cricket on the Stove—Dog in the Manger—Ocean—Victory of Death” (“Гастроли ‘Красного Факела’: Сверчок на печи—Собака на сене—Океан—Победа смерти”), in which he references Stanislavski directly:

The Stanislavski system also strives to replace the art of presentation with the art of perezhivanie [emphasis added]. The author himself called this spiritual naturalism.^[5] The actor is to elicit in [them]self on every occasion the feeling [they are] acting out, rather than just portraying it. The system was, remarkably enough, created as a way to combat the empty theatrical platitude, the cliché, the sham that says nothing. (Sobkin, 2015, p. 340) ⁶

Vygotsky (1934/1998) would carry this struggle between representation and perezhivanie into his last work (i.e., “The Problem of Age”).

There are other examples of this artistically oriented (MAT) version of perezhivanie in Vygotsky’s early writings on the theater. In his review of Anatoli Lunacharsky’s silent film Locksmith and Chancellor (Слесарь и Канцлер) from 1923, Vygotsky (1923) writes: “a true-to-life metamorphosis, the same perezhivanie [emphasis added] of the artists as the lining underlying his acting, … which infects the spectator and establishes the intimacy in their soulful intimacy to everything unfolding in front of them” (p. 4) ⁷

Here, we see early signs of Vygotsky’s later ideas on an actor’s socio-historical experiences accumulated prior to being cast in a given role as the basis for their artistic expression. Placing action as the genesis of an authentic actor–audience relationship in this 1923 review, Vygotsky is already establishing the actor’s performance of the role as being moderated by their accumulated social experiences/tools, and making methodological decisions in ways that are consistent with his later scientific research program.

Vygotsky must walk the same fine line as Stanislavski did throughout his theory development. Stanislavski came to recognize that he was restricting the possibilities of an actor in varied roles by treating prior life experience as definitive. It was one of the reasons why he moved to the concept of action as not only the product of emotional memory and social history, but also generative and forward-looking. We suggest that Vygotsky attempted to thread the same psychological needle: action as both the product of perezhivanie and the point of departure for all future relationships, communications, and activities.

Vygotsky uses perezhivanie in his later academic work such as Ape, Primitive Man, and Child: Essays in the History of Behaviour (Luriia & Vygotsky, 1930/1992), “Imagination and Creativity in Childhood” (Vygotsky, 1927/1990), “Mind, Consciousness, the Unconscious” (Vygotsky, 1930/1997c), and “On the Problem of the Psychology of the Actor’s Creative Work” (Vygotsky 1932/1999). The timeline for these publications, going back to his use of the term in his early reviews, demonstrates a continuity between his work and interest in the theater and his research in the field of psychology. Vygotsky employs perezhivanie in his later writings to establish action(s) within a setting that allow for an individual to experience given circumstances, engage with them via action in some capacity, and thereby learn and develop through that action. Action within the context of perezhivanie is culturally situated and typically includes cooperation with others (Glassman et al., 2023).

These linguistic borrowings establish a link between the work of Stanislavski and that of a “young and very artistically sensitive Vygotsky” (Gudkova, personal communication, March 11, 2019), who carried the influence of his understanding of theatrical production and the systematic development of the actor’s psychotechnique into his work on psychology. Conceptually, the terms are further developed and articulated to readers through the dialogues of An Actor’s Work (Stanislavski, 2008) and through Vygotsky’s lectures, articles, and experiments in psychology. On careful examination of their work, it is possible to see how the theoretical underpinnings guiding Stanislavski’s and Vygotsky’s thinking and writing on both the theater and psychology are aligned. Indeed, they complement one another, with Stanislavski’s An Actor’s Work serving as the praxis and Vygotsky’s work serving as the theory.

Vygotsky’s crisis in psychology

Two years seem to have been of particular importance in the evolution of Vygotsky’s thinking on psychology and the directions he was looking to take: 1926 and 1930. In 1926, Vygotsky entered the Zhakarino hospital in Moscow with tuberculosis. It is believed that Vygotsky wrote a draft of The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology or at least laid out the intellectual groundwork for his thinking during this stay (Hyman, 2012). For a full explanation, one can explore the work of a number of scholars (see Hyman, 2012) or read the work of Vygotsky (1997b) himself.

In short, Vygotsky identified several issues with existing approaches to psychology, which he refers to wholistically as “The Crisis.” First, he notes that there was no unified theoretical basis for building knowledge in the field. Each school of psychology at the time was building its own principles, and thereby battling with other schools of thought for primacy (Hyman, 2012; Vygotsky, 1997b). Second, he identified flaws in existing methodological approaches to studying psychological phenomena. And third, he notes that there were inconsistent terminologies across different schools of psychology, which he refers to as philosophical “babyhood” (Vygotsky, 1997b, pp. 298–300). In response to this Crisis, Vygotsky proposes the development of a “general discipline” that would unify approaches to studying psychology and allow for the coordination of research programs (Hyman, 2012).

Vygotsky never published this work in his lifetime, but he outlined his ideas for a new dialectical psychology and a program of research (van der Veer & Valsiner, 1994). Zavershneva (2012, 2014) makes the argument that Vygotsky did not publish this manuscript because he believed it was flawed—a perspective spurred in part by the critiques of a second reader, who left notes in the margins of the pages. Zavershneva (2012) notes that Vygotsky published some central ideas first expressed in The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology in 1930 in articles such as “Mind, Consciousness, the Unconscious” (Vygotsky, 1930/1997c) after he ostensibly would have read the draft of Stanislavski’s (2008) An Actor’s Work given to him by Gurevich. In both the original Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology and the later “Mind, Consciousness, the Unconscious,” Vygotsky’s stated alternative approach to psychology strongly resembles Stanislavski’s psychophysiological technique as a unitary understanding of human behavior (Benedetti, 1990; Zarrilli et al., 2012). When Vygotsky uses the term dialectical to describe this new psychology, he may have been referring to a Stanislavskian dialectic of mind and body (more akin to the modern cybernetic concept of feedback loop; Tilak et al., 2022), psychology and physiology, as much as other more preeminent scholars who have used the term, such as Marx (whom he cites directly) or Trotsky, with whom Vygotsky was inevitably familiar (Newman & Holzman, 2013).

How and why did Vygotsky come up with what was at the time a revolutionary idea in psychology while lying in the hospital, and why did he return to and reconceptualize these ideas in 1930? We argue that, in 1926, he was only a few years removed from immersion in the theater and collaborations with scholars at GAKhN. As Vygotsky became more frustrated with the nature of psychological research, he turned, at least in part, to Stanislavski’s conceptualizations of his technique (it took Stanislavski decades to develop the idea of the psychophysiological technique). Reading the early chapters of An Actor’s Work (Stanislavski, 2008) around 1929–1930 may have finally congealed Vygotsky’s thinking on this alternative approach to psychology.

In the following sections of this article, we reify the connection between Stanislavski and Vygotsky by exploring two areas of alignment in the psychophysiological technique: (a) action as primary and (b) bits and tasks.

Action as primary

A fundamental characteristic of Stanislavski’s (2008) system of developing the actor’s psychotechnique to authentically portray a role is the concept that action is the primary source from which all true playing and “true being” emerge. An Actor’s Work (Stanislavski, 2008) functions as a guide for actors to develop a deep understanding of how human psychology functions and how to exercise that understanding via an applied, practical method to convey a humanistic unification of feelings and experience onstage. The goal was to truly experience a role, and thereby portray the character and the larger production realistically through actions. This authentic portrayal of the internal and external human experience onstage (with the external being a window into the internal) was the embodiment of the early modernist aesthetic that blossomed at the beginning of the 20th century in Russia and throughout the West. Stanislavski (2008) believed himself to be a psychologist of acting, possessing a natural understanding of human thought and behavior, and how they functioned as a unity in action. His station in the theater, soundly outside of the behaviorist laboratories and academic circles of the age, afforded him the space to objectively analyze and interpret human psychology and behavior through his own personal experience and observation. Throughout An Actor’s Work, Stanislavski goes to great lengths to explain and expand in real-world circumstances his ideas of how the genesis of authentic human thought and feeling is action.

In the case of the play, the action required by the character’s volition within the given role and plot is the culmination of the character’s/actor’s inner drives (through-action) within the broader super-objective of the production. Action, in addition to physical behaviors, involves the mutually dependent relationship between thought and affect that takes place in the mind of an individual on the internal plane. These predicated internal thoughts (internal actions) are then externalized in the actor’s words and deeds (external actions).

In the case of real life, this is the action required by the given cultural-historical circumstances of a person’s life within a social context moderated by their needs, fears, and desires. An individual’s broader objectives over the span of their life form the super-objective; their behaviors (words and deeds) are the externalization of their motivations and affective sentiments as their given circumstances relate to cooperation with others and the achievement of said objective. Each word, each gesture, each variation in tone is the microcosmic externalization of inner consciousness. Just as the sun reflected in a raindrop is a microcosm of the sun, each human action is a microcosm of an individual’s consciousness (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b).

For Stanislavski, authentic action onstage (and in life) must adhere to this theoretical model. Otherwise, it is “play-acting,” or what Vygotsky (1934/1987b) later referred to as “mimetic behavior,” a less advanced behavior within the ontogenic trajectory of human development. Early 20th-century theater emphasized mimetic naturalism—a form of acting that employed a scripted and rehearsed repertoire of reactions and behaviors instead of authentically experiencing a role. Stanislavski’s system became the cornerstone of the broader aesthetic couched in the symbolist movement that he and others, such as Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg, were looking to bring to the stage. This emerging school of acting, which incorporated the psychology of the actor and the development of the psychophysiological technique, stood in stark contrast to the exaggerated play-acting of the age.

Beyond positioning action as primary in authentic human behavior, Stanislavski’s (2008) pursuit of a system for developing and fostering authentic physical and affective action on the stage led him to establish criteria for what it means to act as “natural, human” (p. 181). To be authentic, he claimed that all action must adhere to the following criteria: (a) flow in a logical sequence; (b) be inwardly well founded; and (c) be plausible in the real world. To guide his students toward these behaviors, Stanislavski prescribed that action must always justify the moment as experienced by the actor (their desires, motives, and immediate task):

Having felt inner and outer truth and believing in it, an impulse to action automatically arises, and then action itself. If all aspects of an actor’s nature, as a human being, are working logically, sequentially, with genuine truth and belief, then the process of experiencing is complete. (Stanislavski, 2008, p. 169)

For Stanislavski (and for Vygotsky, as we will explain in the next section), human agency flows through the following trajectory: action, belief, and truth. When internal and external belief and truth are present, impulse for action automatically emerges, followed by externalized action itself.

In the pursuit of establishing his system, Stanislavski sought to understand the essence of human psychology and behavior in a practical sense. Stanislavski felt that to understand how to act and think onstage, actors must understand how humans act and think in real life. As Tortsov (the fictional instructor in An Actor’s Work, thought by many to be a pseudonym for Stanislavski) notes to his first-year acting students:

We are trying to understand how we can learn to do things onstage, not in a histrionic way—“in general”—but in a human way . . . with the truth of a living organism, freely, not in the way the conventions of the theatre demand, but as the laws of a living, natural organism demand. (Stanislavski, 2008, p. 56)

Understanding the laws that govern living, natural organisms led to the idea that external and internal action is primary, with action’s relationship to the individual’s affect moderated by goals and given circumstances (Stanislavski, 2008).

The system applied in Vygotsky’s psychological research

Vygotsky’s perhaps most celebrated work, Thinking and Speech, describes the onto- and phylogenetic roots of thought and word in human development and consciousness. The final chapter crescendos with Vygotsky (1934/1987b) stating a rebuttal to the Book of John: “In the beginning was the deed,” not the word (p. 283).

A recurring theme throughout Vygotsky’s (1934/1987b, 1931/1997a) work that we continue to develop as psychologists is the theory that all higher mental functions are social—their development and externalization is moderated by accumulated experiences. That is to say that human development emerges from actions enacted by and upon an individual over the course of the lifespan:

Every higher mental function was external because it was social before it became an internal, strictly mental function; it was formerly a social relation. . . . The means of acting on oneself is initially a means of acting on others or a means of action of others on the individual. (Vygotsky, 1931/1997a, p.105)

Here, Vygotsky not only notes that human development is the product of shared action and experience, but also—a deviation from the existing psychological theories of his time—places action as primary in both the moderation and articulation of human thought. In his theory, Vygotsky also establishes the dual nature of these relationships. The process is a scientific articulation of the action–belief–truth chain of reactions that Stanislavski (2008) explicated in An Actor’s Work—what Vygotsky (1931/1997a) referred to later as “direct and mediated relations between people” (p. 104). These relations manifest through shared “forms of expressive movement and action” (p. 104). Within this framework, Vygotsky created a new scientific basis for understanding the ontological development of humans that in many ways mirrors Stanislavski’s work.

Vygotsky explains that action is primary in that human experience and cognition is the accumulation and resemiotization of the cultural tools and symbols that a person is exposed to over their lifespan (Vygotsky & Luria, 1930/1994). In the stages of infancy, the actions that take place around the developing child moderate their development. This developmental moderator (action) stays constant throughout the lifespan. As beings develop, they become collaborators (Vygotsky & Luria, 1930/1994). These experiences and actions within a dynamic set of given circumstances lead to the accumulation of memories and beliefs, becoming an integrated system of cultural tools (Vygotsky & Luria, 1930/1994). Thoughts and emotions emerge naturally, expressed via internal thoughts and external actions, and dynamically shape a continuous stream of circumstances and experiences over our lifetime (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b). Thought, word, and gesture (action in general) are the unfolding of consciousness and feeling in any given moment as the culmination of the aforementioned forces (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b).

Word and gesture became of particular interest to Vygotsky in his psychological research, echoing the exploration of word as an expression of affect in his early theater reviews. For instance, in a review of Monna Vanna in 1922, Vygotsky wrote:

F. F. Kirikov has all the competence for this style of acting. His muted, sinister, monotonous voice, dry and solemn, is excellent material for it, just like his reserved, abrupt, schematic gesture. However, even his Prinzivalle was underwhelming in the last act: he simply stayed silent, he had no dialogue lines. In the second act, the proportions of his marionette swings—from demands to denial of a kiss—were drastically minimized, and everything had a trivial and insignificant, lackluster character. (Sobkin, 2015, p. 170) ⁸

For both Stanislavski and Vygotsky, action is the manifestation of thinking in the moment—emotional history influenced by the setting and the actions of others—starting with the volition to solve a problem, becoming belief that the action will solve that problem, and evolving into truth, which can set the context for working through future, similar problems. Stanislavski developed this continuous action–belief–truth cycle throughout the early part of the 20th century. He taught his students that action is a direct expression of a character’s psychological state based, above all else, on the affect-laden choices they make in a dynamic psychology tied to the past (individual and cultural history), the immediate (material, physical, and social circumstances), and the future (setting trajectories for future activities). Vygotsky (1934/1987b) refers to this as a “chain of reactions.” For Vygotsky, thought and experience spawns new and continued action from the interlocutors with whom the agents are cooperating. Vygotsky (1932/1936) expands on this notion in “On the Problem of the Psychology of the Actor’s Creative Work,” when he accounts for the historical epoch and social setting as a moderator of an actor’s emotional range, as well as human behavior and expression more broadly.

Vygotsky began developing these ideas early, when his interests were primarily with the theater. For instance, in a review published in 1922 that he wrote for E. V. Geltser’s tour, Vygotsky states:

E. V. Geltser is a master of the most complex technique of classical dance. Her dazzling technique somewhat faded on our stage, too tight and small for her powerful jump and “the soulful flying,” she seemed a bit listless in strictly constrained pieces of the program, lacking everything that gives passion, tempest, and then smoke and the wind of dance; its most subtle nuances and forceful swings could not be shown. However, the most important part was there: the personal ardor of her dance. (Vygotsky, 1922, pp. 8–9) ⁹

In the theories and analyses that Vygotsky (1934/1987b) developed in his later work as a psychologist, action was examined as the primary means for understanding mind and consciousness, thought and word, and the development of the child. Vygotsky (1934/1987b) also posited that understanding setting (the cultural-historical moment) is essential to understanding human behavior. With the knowledge that “all [word and] action must be purposeful, productive, and genuine” (Stanislavski, 2008, p. 57), Vygotsky continued to develop theories and methodologies that place action as the primary route for understanding human psychology throughout his career.

Bits and tasks

Previously, we noted that Stanislavski was not a psychologist. He worked closely with Gurevich and other GAKhN academics such as Pavel Iakobson and N. I. Zhinkin to refine his ideas and develop what he called the psychology of acting. GAKhN faculty helped Stanislavski fulfill his expressed goal of manualizing a system for his students that would allow players to access their subconscious through the volitional actions of their character, thereby leading to the expression of perezhivanie onstage. In order to authentically play a role, Stanislavski believed that one had to understand the volition, goals, ecological setting, and affect (ultimately, the psychological unity of the character). Affect and volition are conveyed via the character’s (even smallest) actions (a nod, a look). In the MAT’s initial production of Uncle Vanya, Chekhov pleaded with Stanislavski not to turn Astrov’s (who Stanislavski was playing) feelings for Helena into melodrama—to be careful with the character’s actions so they encompassed his larger through-action in being both a country doctor and a conservationist (Borny, 2006). ¹⁰ Astrov desires Helena, but it is a desire of resignation and despair that captures his larger emotional history of creating a more meaningful life, manifested in sighs, drinking, and his halting and careful conversations with Helena. If we start from who Astrov is, the obstacles he faces in his life on a short- and long-term basis comprise the tasks that give meaning to his actions (bits). Players used what Stanislavski referred to as the “bits and tasks” method to understand their character’s overall motives, analyze the character’s external actions, and then take those actions onstage, moving past beliefs to truth through the cooperative work of the troupe.

Bits and tasks functioned as a sort of theatrical structuralism, in which players would take a bird’s-eye view of the piece, examine the major milestones comprising the plot, and then establish the actions and motives of their character in the story arc. Each activity milestone comprised what Stanislavski (1936) called “bits” (единицы). The bits, and how the character goes about completing them, fed back into the larger volitional inclinations (what the character desires to happen), which Stanislavski (1936) referred to as “tasks” (задания, originally translated by Hapgood as “objectives”):

“You need to divide the play into bits not only so that you can analyze and study the work but for another, more important reason, which is hidden deep within each bit,” Tortsov explained. “There is a creative task stored in each bit. The task arises organically out of its own bit, or, vice versa, gives birth to it.” (Stanislavski, 2008, p. 142)

Stanislavski (2008) instructed his students to undertake this process to ensure that their role was “properly analyzed and studied” (p. 142). The purpose of any analysis is to provide a deeper understanding of a subject or system. Using the “bits and tasks” framework, actors established the goal orientation of the characters and carefully broke up the production into the actions for which they were responsible (bits). The character’s goal orientation (tasks) and given circumstances then created the affective state onstage and how they went about completing their bits of the production. Astrov might stutter when Helena enters a room, darken when another character dominates her time, stare out a window to the farm in a moment of repose—each bit portraying a man torn by competing desires (the unreachable Helena and the natural world that calls to him).

Based on his own experiences staging plays from Chekhov to Ibsen and Shakespeare, Stanislavski (2008) began to believe that the human condition comprises a series of objectives and obstacles that we are constantly co-constructing, navigating, and attempting to achieve: “Each of these obstacles creates a Task and the action to overcome it. A human being wants something, fights for something, wins something every moment of [their] life” (p. 143). Theater is a grand staging of human bits and tasks.

Stanislavski (2008) felt that one of the fundamental mistakes that players of the early 20th century were making was focusing on the (preconceived) result of the action instead of the action itself. Most actors of the time were trained to represent the emotions and feelings of characters imposed by the playwright/poet or director through repeated training and mimicry. Stanislavski instructed his students to analyze the actions, goal orientation, and volition of the characters onstage to understand their conscious state so that emotions were not predetermined, but came out of the characters’ actions (very much resembling the action–goal–motive scheme that would become central to activity theory). For Stanislavski, through the process of living the characters’ experience within the given circumstances of the story arc and fulfilling (or not) the tasks and actions for which they are responsible in the plot, authentic emotion and perezhivanie would emerge naturally and drive future actions forward.

For instance, in life, the simple act of reaching out and shaking someone’s hand (a bit) has embedded within it all the feelings and emotions that exist between the two subjects taking part in the activity. Feelings of curiosity, anxiety, respect, admiration, or disdain are conveyed naturally through the completion of the action itself. Stanislavski understood that personality is physically manifested through action. And the way these actions are fulfilled is a data point that allows one to understand the general psychological state of the person completing the action. One might follow the way Astrov shakes (or does not shake) the main character’s hand before and after the character has announced he will sell his farm, betraying the land and taking away Helena from his life.

The system gave Stanislavski’s students a means by which to separate the production into bits, allowing for the meaningful understanding of the characters’ operations (actions), goals, and motives in the context of socio-historically derived affect. Stanislavski prescribed the analytical process of breaking down the individual actions comprising the characters’ behavior into bits and tasks as a means of understanding the unified nature of internal thoughts and external actions.

Vygotsky used a similar approach and terminology as he posed nascent approaches to psychology. In the article “Mind, Consciousness, the Unconscious,” ostensibly after reviewing Stanislavski’s manuscript, Vygotsky (1930/1997c) returned to his unfinished (and unpublished) thinking from the year he spent in the hospital recovering from tuberculosis in 1926, calling for a theoretical and methodological reframing of the “three fundamental psychological issues” (p. 109) referred to in the piece’s title. Vygotsky (1934/1987b) notes that the existing approach being employed by psychologists to explain “the problem of the relationships and connections among the various mental functions was inaccessible to traditional psychology” (p. 41). Vygotsky voiced the same critique of early 20th-century psychologists as Stanislavski had of theater directors and actors of his era—they were focusing on the result and not the action.

Vygotsky’s predecessors and contemporaries often used reflexological explanations for issues of the mind and consciousness (Münsterberg et al., 1910). Even as scientific breakthroughs emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries incorporating the unconscious (Freud, 1915/1957) into explanations of human thinking and behavior, a conceptual folly predominated in the field, with different psychological schools tending to study mental functions independently of each other (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b). Driven by an obsession with being positioned amongst the natural sciences, the explanations and methods of the field(s) for studying relationships between various mental functions focused on physiology, refusing to study the mind (losing the roles of emotional history and affect); solely on mental processes (losing the primacy of action in driving thought and behavior forward); or on understanding the mind through the unconscious (losing the unity of the mind and physiology; Vygotsky, 1934/1987b). While these various schools of psychology had different ways of understanding the mental functions of the brain, a common methodological practice was to study mental functions as distillate phenomena instead of a unified system. Operating under the false (and unclearly formulated) premise that the links between the functions of the mind are fixed, relationships between thought and memory, memory and perception, and perception and attention were studied as separate constants (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b).

Vygotsky’s time in the theater and his connections with the scholars at GAKhN might have influenced his conclusion that existing explanations of thought, word, and action (human consciousness) were flawed, not least because they ignored the roles of volition and affect in a unified perspective of human behavior (action and thinking as integrated). They also isolated the aspects of mental function and physical action that scholars at GAHkN and Stanislavski (1936) contended should be developed as a unified system. Vygotsky’s collaborators at GAKhN, including Iakobson, were articulating similar theories. In contrast to his contemporaries in the field of psychology, Vygotsky proposed an approach wherein the mind is studied as a series of dynamic psychosociological processes that manifest and develop dialectically in context with the current ecology. Mental and physiological processes are a unified product; there exists an irreducibility between them (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b). The only way to understand human actions and thinking is to observe actions, reduce them to their smallest constituent bits, and then work backwards toward emotional memory and volition/motive. Reminiscent of Stanislavski’s system, both internal thought and physical actions are an integrated expression of the subject’s or character’s psychological state; the goal of the actor or psychologist is to understand how external actions are material manifestations of this state.

A psychology concerned with the study of the complex whole . . . must replace the method of decomposing the whole into its elements with that of partitioning the whole into its [bits]. Using this mode of analysis, it must attempt to resolve the concrete problems that face us. (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b, p. 44)

Vygotsky proposed a possible solution to the problem of understanding the relationships of the various mental functions as unified. Functions of thought, speech, memory, and affect are seen as part of a whole. Human activity is the key to understanding this system, articulated in specific actions that tie back to a goal and a motive (Glassman, 1996); development is enmeshed with an immediate environment that functions within the broader social-historical setting(s). In order to study human cognition, behavior, and ultimately consciousness in accordance with this understanding, Vygotsky proposed employing a methodological approach reminiscent of Stanislavski’s “bits and tasks” system of analysis. Instead of focusing on examining the elements of mental functions, Vygotsky proposed using the bit as the unit of analysis. Vygotsky defined a bit as

a product of analysis that possesses all the basic characteristics of the whole [emphasis added]. The [bit] is a vital and irreducible part of the whole. The key to the explanation of the characteristics of water lies not in the investigation of its chemical formula but in the investigation of its molecule and its molecular movements. (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b, p. 44)

In the same manner as Stanislavski’s system, Vygotsky’s methodology posited external action as the point of origin for understanding behavior and sought to separate actions into bits to analyze their internal subtext.

Vygotsky used this method of analysis to pose nascent solutions to many of the problems of psychology that vexed his contemporaries. For instance, previous studies of the word in human thought analyzed meaning and sound separately (Vygotsky, 1932/1999). Vygotsky instead proposed focusing on the word as an action in context, wherein both the linguistic meaning and intonation/sound are considered in understanding the relationship between thinking and speech. Speech—both the meaning of the words and the tones and sounds—is a unified expression of the subject’s psychological state. The subject’s motive and affective state determine both the words used and how they are said (including gestures and tone). The sounds of the words as spoken not only alter the meaning but also represent the most basic component of a task.

We have tried to substitute the analysis based on decomposition into elements with the analysis partitioning the complex unity of verbal thinking into bits; we understand the latter as the products of analysis that, in contrast to elements, are the initial generative moments, not in relation to the whole phenomenon under investigation, but in relation to only its separate, concrete aspects and characteristics. Unlike elements, these products of analysis do not lose the explainable characteristics of the whole but contain in a simple, primitive form the characteristics of the whole that the analysis aims to investigate (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b).

An example of this bidirectional relationship between the unified whole and the deconstructed bits can be found in Vygotsky’s (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b) dissection of a scene from Dostoevsky, in which the competing, complex motivations of six drunken workers can be broken down to not just the single word they keep repeating to each other, but also the tone with which the word is voiced—allowing the observer to develop a keen understanding of the emotional and social issues facing each of the characters at that moment, as well as the evolving relationships between them. Vygotsky also proposed using this method as a means for understanding development during adolescence. Prior to his proposed methods, Vygotsky believed that these relationships were wholly inaccessible to psychologists. Vygotsky argues, “it is our contention that it is accessible to an investigator who is willing to apply the method of [bits]” (1934/1987b, p. 47).

Another problem of psychology that traditional methodological approaches were unable to reconcile was that of the connection between affect, intellect, and action. Other schools studied mental functions in isolation, for the most part ignoring affect and volition in studies of the intellect. Traditional methods also ignored the social nature of thinking and speech: “Thinking was divorced from the full vitality of life, from the motives, interests, and inclinations of the thinking individual. Thinking was transformed either into a useless epiphenomenon, a process that can change nothing in the individual’s life and behaviour” (Vygotsky, 1934/1987b, p. 47).

Just as Stanislavski had instructed his students at MAT to use the analytical process of focusing on bits to establish the goal orientation and allow the affective state of their characters to manifest in their words and actions, Vygotsky’s method focused on analyzing actions to understand their internal subtext. The original term (единицы) has sometimes been translated as “units,” depending on the translator. However, both Stanislavski and Vygotsky use the same source Russian term and, more importantly, the same application of the term and conceptual approach to understanding human activity. This interpretation and proposed method for analysis centered around the idea that every thought possesses a vestige of the subject’s affective relationship to reality. Vygotsky (1934/1987b) explains in Thinking and Speech that analysis into bits allows investigators to clearly understand the reciprocal relationship between a subject’s needs, desires, and activity.

Conclusion

Vygotsky’s early life experiences, academic collaborations outside of the psychological sciences, and exposure to the manuscript of Stanislavski’s (2008) An Actor’s Work likely shaped his later thinking and research as a psychologist. It is not only Stanislavski, however, who was part of Vygotsky’s intellectual orbit, but a generation of artists who came of age just as Vygotsky was beginning to make his way in the world. Gurevich was a major intellectual force of the times (and, like Vygotsky, considered herself as the other because of her Jewish heritage). Members of “The Psychology of the Actor” theater section at GAKhN were exploring new ideas on the role of action in human consciousness. We suggest that his collaboration with these scholars shaped Vygotsky’s approach to psychology, and some of the core concepts and nomenclature found in his later work. Activity theory in particular and psychology in general continue to use many of the phrases Vygotsky developed from (we argue) his connections to the “psychology of the actor” subsection at GAKhN. The idea of motive as an overarching force in human behavior and goal orientation as a context for activity, which has had a major impact on psychology far beyond cultural-historical activity theory, may not have started with Stanislavski, but he and his colleagues at MAT were among the first to systematize these ideas. Stanislavski was among the first to explore the idea of action as primary and that all thinking in some way follows from these complex actions. Stanislavski was also central in bringing the role of affective memory as integrated into human thought and action—an idea we believe is a core component of Vygotsky’s late model for a new type of psychology, yet often ignored in favor of more “how-to” applications such as the zone of proximal development and recognition of context in teaching and learning processes (see Glassman et al., 2023).

We feel it is important to remember that neither Vygotsky nor Stanislavski came up with these ideas over just a couple of years; they certainly did not develop them in isolation. Stanislavski explored and experimented with his psychology of the actor over decades, interacting with luminaries such as Chekhov, Bulgakov, Nemirovich, Craig, Bernhardt, and, later, Meyerhold in the theater; Tolstoy as he turned from realism to mysticism later in life; Gurevich; and other stalwarts in the Russian symbolist movement. His notes suggest the psychology of the actor came slowly and painfully, accompanied by failure, as new ideas often are. We suggest that Vygotsky, absorbed with theater in general and Stanislavski’s work in particular through a large part of his life, recognized the possibilities that the psychology of the actor offered in solving what he viewed as the crisis in psychology. Stanislavski’s manuscript and the work being done at GAKhN were central to Vygotsky’s attempts to turn psychology in a new direction. As we work to refine our understanding, application, and further development of Vygotsky’s ideas, these connections can provide an additional guidepost for future inquiry.

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