'People Understand You Better': The Life and Times of Zinaida Sokolova

• In Event: New Perspectives on Russian Theater and Performing Arts I: Liberating Lost Histories: Reclaiming Revolutionary Theatre Innovators

Abstract

Zinaida Sergeevna Sokolova (1895 - 1950) belongs to the list of women-directors that have been systematically erased from theater history. Sokolova (nee Alekseeva), Stanislavsky's younger sister, plays, in official historiography, the role of one of the women who gathered around the "system's" inventor as a bureaucratic organizer and not-so-talented actress and teacher. Nevertheless, recent archival research has proven otherwise. Sokolova was not only the actual director behind Stanislsvsky's famous Evgenii Onegin opera success, she was the creator of a great part of the pedagogy attributed to Stanislavsky's "system." Even earlier, Sokolova left Moscow for the rural interior, where she conducted a campaign to bring literacy to the women-peasants of three villages and founded Russia's first peasant theatre. This paper will analyze Sokolova's short autobiographical note, written in 1949 and found in the MAT Museum Archive in 2017. With it, I will draw attention to this important, obscured, but extremely important person in the history of Russian and Soviet theatre.

Author

• Diego Moschkovich, U of Sao Paulo (Brazil)