The Actor's Notebooks of Innokenty Smoktunovsky

Innokenty Smoktunovsky did not leave substantial theoretical works that reflect on his own acting experience and explore his own technique. However, the notebooks filled with working notes in the margins by Innokenty Smoktunovsky provide a unique opportunity to glimpse into... the creative "inner workings". Smoktunovsky's entries became a kind of "black box" that preserved data about the process of creating roles. Rehearsals have passed, performances have already been removed from the repertoire, but folders with notebooks contain the spirit and course of work on the role, preserving the layered structure of the role, which appears whole and monolithic in live performance. To see the unpublished work of "warming up" the author's text, to understand the circle of associations, internal movements, tasks, and goals in a particular scene, the selection and rejection of adaptations, to observe how the author's discoveries are born. To investigate the interaction of the actor's "I" with the image, to understand the laws and mechanisms of this interaction; to identify the methods and approaches of the actor who "appropriates" someone else's "delight, someone else's sorrow"; to see how an image grows from the "rubbish" of guesses, associations, hints, and memories. Finally, to compare the resulting finished stage image with the image that the artist envisioned for himself. Thanks to Olga Yegoshina and her work on the collection and analysis of Smoktunovsky's actor notebooks, this has become possible. With the help of this book, we can touch upon the theatrical "kitchen" through the memories and experiences of the brilliant artist Innokenty Smoktunovsky, to learn how he created the images of Prince Myshkin, Tsar Fyodor, Golovlev, and Hamlet.

Leaving aside the artistic results of the actor's work, which have been repeatedly described in articles and monographs by theater scholars focusing on Innokenty Smoktunovsky, the author of this book would like to focus on analyzing the actor's technique, to reconstruct his working methods.
The book is addressed to specialists as well as to anyone interested in the problems of creativity and the legacy of the great actor.