An Actor Prepares Literary Elements

Allegorical Academic Text

Russia, 1936, an acting school

First person: Kostya, an inexperienced acting student in his first year of Stanislavski's training.

The text is allegorical and anecdotal: Kostya tells the reader about his classes in a somewhat friendly, albeit clinical tone.

Protagonist: Kostya

A group of young students, all of whom are fairly inexperienced, struggle to learn how to act, frequently making mistakes that their teacher corrects in order to teach the lesson.

The actors have a performance of their scenes and are able to show off their skills.

Stanislavski's lessons frequently begin with an innocuous exercise that then allows the author to explain how the reader should act by the end of the chapter. These examples foreshadow a lasting moral or lesson for an actor that is stated at the end of the anecdote

Tortsov frequently understates the challenge of acting to his students, giving them very simple instructions so that they may make mistakes that he can use to help them improve. When he tells Kostya to "go build a fire," what he means is "go perform the act of building a fire," anticipating Kostya's failures ahead of time.

The students perform scenes from Shakespeare's "Othello". Henrik Ibsen's play "Brand" and Gogol's "The Inspector General" are also mentioned.

Much of the imagery comes from the way the students sit or move onstage -- in one scene, an actress shifts around and shuffles her feet to show her lack of experience and nervousness. In another chapter, Kostya smears chocolate on his face to play Othello, showing a distinct misunderstanding of the way Stanislavski would like him to emulate the character.

The students' relationship with the quality of their acting could be called paradoxical: they work to "act" a certain way, when in reality their acting would be more realistic if they tried instead not to act but simply to emulate and feel that way. In chapter one, Maria "acts" like she is looking for a missing brooch, but her acting is better when her teacher tells her if she cannot find the brooch, she will have to leave the school, and therefore she genuinely searches for it.

Kostya and Tortsov could both be seen as parallels to Stanislavski himself: Tortsov is Stanislavski as a teacher, while Kostya is Stanislavski as a student, still learning his craft.

"The class" is an example of metonymy, in which the term refers to several disparate students, all of whom have their own journeys as actors.

Chapter four: "his imagination painted a picture"