The Philosophy That Killed the Soul: How Dialectical Materialism Became the Blueprint for the Physical Action method
This article was inspired by Anatoly Smeliansky’s talk to students of the Michael Chekhov technique. What follows a reckoning.
Stanislavski didn’t die in a blaze of glory. He didn’t go down swinging. He folded. Slowly. Politely. Under pressure. What we now call the “Method of Physical Actions” was a last-ditch attempt to stay alive and out of trouble.
He was exhausted, isolated, and watching his peers get erased, arrested, shot, erased again. So instead of God, imagination, or the subconscious, he started talking about movements. Units. Actions. And why? Because Stalin didn’t care for poetry. He wanted obedience.
Imagine if science, bureaucracy, and dogma had a baby. That’s dialectical materialism. The Soviet flavor of Marxism that said: there is no soul, only matter. No mystery, only mechanism. No spiritual seeking, just cause and effect. Everything changes through conflict, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But here’s what mattered: thought was no longer a force. Only behavior counted.
In the arts, that meant: no subconscious. No “inner life.” No “artistic intuition.” No unspoken mystery. Just actions. Objectives. Verbs. The actor as factory worker.
Everything had to look like labor. Everything had to be explainable. And most importantly, everything had to be loyal. You couldn’t act from inspiration. You had to act from instruction.
Stanislavski’s Quiet Surrender
You can see it in his later writings. The way he rewrote, backpedaled, folded ideas into careful, state-approved packages. At one point, he even wrote to Alexei Angarov, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1936 to ask for permission to include a simple phrase in his book: “Жизнь человеческого духа”, “the life of the human spirit.”
He begged to use it. Because under dialectical materialism, the “spirit” didn’t exist. It wasn’t real. It was second-rate metaphysics. And that one phrase could’ve derailed the whole book. That’s how much danger he was in.
And it didn’t stop there. One of his final letters was to his wife, Maria Lilina. He was 75. Frail. Dying. And he wrote: “I have to finish my article for Pravda, dedicated to the anniversary of the Soviet Komsomol.” Just let that land for a second. The godfather of modern acting, the man who gave us inner action, imagination, belief , spent his last months writing propaganda about the Communist youth league.
And it gets worse. He couldn’t finish the article because he didn’t have his Merkuzal, a medication that helped him urinate. That was the method of physical action in the end. Needing to pee in order to finish an ideological article. Literal physiology over metaphor. That’s where it all ended up.
He never saw his book in Russian. The first chapter was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta a week before he died. His wife wrote to their son in Switzerland: “Your father read it in silence. His hands were shaking. And all he said was ‘God, how boring.’”
That’s the real cost. Not just censorship. Not just political fear. But watching your life’s work get drained of its spirit, line by line, until it reads like a manual for a machine.
And Then Comes Knebel
Enter Maria Knebel. Talented actor, fine teacher. Not a director. Not a visionary. But very, very good at reading the room.
She took what was left of Stanislavski , the stripped-down, nervous, ideologically neutered fragments, and turned it into “active analysis.” Etudes. Rehearsals without scripts. Improv in the name of structure. But here’s the catch: her method doesn’t lead to performance. It leads to more etudes.
Directors hated it. Actors got lost in it. And instead of bringing us closer to the text, it made the actor a writer — exactly what Demidov warned against. You improvise your way to the author instead of stepping into their world. It’s clever. It’s safe. It’s probably somewhat useless on stage.
So where do we go now?
We stop pretending this story has a noble ending. It doesn’t. Stanislavski was used. His method was diluted, defanged, turned into ideological scaffolding. And the generation that followed — instead of rescuing it — built new ladders on top of the rubble.
But maybe, just maybe, the story isn’t over. Not if we’re willing to return to what mattered most to him before the fear: the mystery. The soul. The uncontrollable, unsanctioned thing that happens when an actor forgets the system and steps into something real.
That’s what Demidov tried to save. That’s what Chekhov ran toward. Not the corpse of a method, but its ghost.
And it’s that ghost — and that spirit — we owe something to.
Because despite the sad ending, we owe this man everything. He cracked the door open. He dared to name the invisible. He built a bridge between art and soul at a time when no one else could, and when everyone else would later deny it ever existed.
Without Stanislavski, there is no Demidov. No Chekhov. No actor as seeker. No craft with depth. Even in his surrender, he left behind the seed of something unkillable.
We owe him not just gratitude, we owe him our refusal to let it die again.
© 2025 Kimon Fioretos. All rights reserved.
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