Feeling the Actor: Pavel Iakobson’s Psychology of the Stage

• In Event: Escaping the Discipline: Mind, Body, and Behavior in Early Soviet Biomedical and Psychological Discourses

Abstract

This paper discusses Pavel Iakobson’s book Psychology of the Actor’s Stage Feelings (1936) in dialogue with Lev Vygotsky’s 1934 essay on the actor’s psychology. Lin argues that although Iakobson and Vygotsky were nurtured theatrically in the early 1920s, an era that explored big, abstract questions about the actor’s psychology, their 1930s texts portray this psychology—particularly stage feelings and their relation to emotions of the real world—in terms more amenable to Soviet censors.

Author

• Alisa Ballard Lin, Ohio State U