On July 21, 1938, shortly before Stanislavski’s death, a manuscript of An Actor Prepares was brought to him at Leontyevsky for his approval before printing. Lying on a couch in his spacious office—divided by Swedish bookshelves, behind which the “medical department” monitoring his health was concealed—he was handed unbound pages of the future book.
“When he took the book,” recalls E.N. Semianovskaya, “his face turned red, and his fingers trembled. At that moment, he may have believed he would see it completed.” “He had a thirst for life,” remembers L.D. Dukhovskaya from those same days, “to live in order to complete his work, to achieve the goal of his life. It seemed miraculous to him that, without being a scientist, he was creating a teaching of art. And this thirst to complete his work made him painfully afraid that he might not have enough time.”
A few days earlier, he had read excerpts from the book that was about to be published in Literaturnaya Gazeta. M.P. Lilina wrote to her son: “…he read it and, as always, criticizing himself more than anything else in the world, after reading all the excerpts, he said: ‘How indifferent!‘”
On August 9, he was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery, beside A.P. Chekhov.
(Note: K.F.: And I believe there was a serious reason for his disappointment; he had realized that his foundation was flawed—something Demidov had already made clear. It was too late to overturn it; his additions to the system from 1933 to 1938 were not pedagogically sufficient but were primarily directorial in nature, as physical actions and active analysis were not tools for the classroom but for the stage.)
