Stanisławski i jego system aktorski – próba psychologicznej weryfikacji

The creator and reformer of the turn-of-the-century theatre, Konstantin Stanislavsky, created one of the most famous acting systems still in use today. In An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary, Stanislavski presented a comprehensive set of recommended practices for stage creation, which he developed based on years of observations. The artist also showed that in order to better understand how one should act on stage, it would be good to make use of psychological knowledge, which was not widely available to him at the time, also due to the fact that psychology as a scientific discipline was only just being formed at the time. This paper is an effort to integrate selected aspects of Stanislavski’s system with contemporary psychological research. The paper focuses primarily on introducing the issues of memory together with the most important classifications thereof. It also develops the issue of ‘emotional memory’, which Stanislavski wrote about, in an attempt to interpret the category of memory created by the artist in the light of available terminology and psychological research.