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EXPERTISE
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PERSONAL STATEMENT OF ACADEMIC PURPOSE
By Dr. Andrew D. Kaufman
Written in Los Angeles, California, May 2003
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From Slavic Studies to the Stage and Back Again:
My Extended Sabbatical in the Performing Arts and Return to Academia
So strong was my growing fascination with drama upon graduation in 1998 from Stanford Ph.D. program in Slavic Languages and Literatures, and so meager was the job market at that time that I made the decision to take time away from academia to pursue my interest in theater for a period of time. Little did I expect that this "period of time" would last almost four years. As unorthodox as my decision to pursue theater may appear, I am certain that it was a necessary step for me to take at that time in my life, both professionally and personally. I am equally certain that the life of the professional theater actor is not for me, and that I would like to integrate my interest in Russian theater into a renewed full-time academic career that includes scholarship, teaching, and participation in a professional intellectual community.
My interest in theater was linked from the beginning to my scholarly interests. While taking a course on Chekhov with Professor Stephen Moeller-Sally at Stanford, I became fascinated with Chekhov’s drama. Out of curiosity, I started taking beginning acting classes at the San Jose Repertory Theater. I asked to study scenes and monologues from Chekhov’s plays. My first assigned monologue was that of Lopakhin from The Cherry Orchard. A new world began to open up for me. I discovered I had a talent for acting. Equally importantly, I also discovered a new dimension to Chekhov, a dimension that included a sensitivity to the dramatic experience contained within a Chekhovian play. I was also made aware of the invaluable contributions the actors, director, costume, set and lighting designer, and audience all make to the full realization of that dramatic experience.
I pursued my interest in acting for the next several years, taking part-time classes and trying out for community theater productions. In 1999, I was offered my first leading role in a City College of San Francisco’s production of Clifford Odets’ “Paradise Lost.” I played Leo Gordon. During one of my performances I was “discovered” by a talent scout, who suggested I audition for professional theater productions and also for part-time study at top professional acting schools. I did. I was accepted at several top schools, and I began to experience success as a working actor.
While working professionally in theater and also as a cultural reporter, the "Silicon Valley Scoop Guy," on the national radio talk show, "Computerdaze" (Talk America Radio Network), I pursued part-time study of the craft of acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute and the Stella Adler Academy of Acting in Los Angeles. As part of my training I studied and publicly performed scenes from Chekhov's major plays under the direction of the well-known Russian actor and director, Evgeny Lazarev, a faculty member at the Stella Adler Academy. Professor Lazarev is also a professor at the Theater Academy of Russia and the Moscow Art Theater Studio School, founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky in the late nineteenth century.
During my time in the performing arts I gained significant insight into the world of Russian dramatic art, and into Chekhov’s dramatic world, in particular. I developed a deepened understanding of Chekhov from the standpoint of the performer, not just the literary scholar. This deepened artistic appreciation of Chekhov led me, in turn, to want to understand Chekhov’s plays in a renewed scholarly context. Having learned the actor’s craft of creating Chekhovian experience on stage, I wanted to step back and analyze what exactly I was doing in such moments, and how the complex network of poetic devices in Chekhov’s plays permitted me to do it.
I began to undertake that analysis during the fall of 2003, at the time that I decided I would be returning to academia full-time. I have begun to prepare a talk for a theater course at the Stella Adler Academy of Acting, in which I discuss the issue of dramatic experience in Chekhov in the context of the larger scholarly problem of realism in Russian literature. The talk attempts to clarify the relationship between Chekhov’s particular brand of realism and his metaphysics in his drama. What is our experience of “reality” in Chekhov’s dramatic universe, and how does he create it artistically? How does Chekhov’s use of sounds, sights, textures, smells, tastes, and text contribute to our overall experience of his artistic reality? What contribution to Chekhov’s sense of reality do the director, the actor, and the audience make? I set this discussion against the backdrop of the theoretical debates about the practice and nature of dramatic art during the flowering of the Moscow Art Theater in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
As part of my plan to expand this talk into a scholarly publication, I have developed the idea of an “experiential myth” at the core of Chekhov’s dramatic art. This notion is different from the well-known concept of mimesis, in that mimesis refers to the idea of external reality being reproduced by an artistic text, whereas Chekhov’s “experiential myth,” I argue, recreates reality and infuses it with an element of grandeur, perfection, and artistic completeness lacking in the non-artistic real world. These unique qualities of Chekhov’s drama are what lend his art its powerful aura of tragicomic empathy, and (if fully realized) its capacity to transport audiences to a realm of sublime experience through seemingly mundane portraits of everyday life.
My interest in the problem of the poetics of realism in the Tolstoyan novel, first explored in my doctoral dissertation, has thus expanded into an interest in realism across multiple genres. I am beginning to make what I believe are fresh, lively contributions to this old debate in Russian literary studies by drawing on my expertise as both a professional Slavist and a professional theater actor.
Since my decision to return to academia, made in the fall of 2003, I have also been hard at work on other scholarly projects related to Russian theater. At the 2003 AATSEEL annual convention I chaired and acted as discussant for the panel entitled: “Dramatizing History: Tom Stoppard’s Trilogy, The Coast of Utopia.” In addition, I am currently working on a paper to be delivered at the 2004 AATSEEL convention, entitled: “Why Chekhov Loved to Hate Stanislavsky.” In this paper I develop the thesis that Chekhov needed Stanislavsky, the daring director and unorthodox acting teacher, to realize his revolutionary theatrical vision, and that Stanislavsky similarly needed Chekhov to give expression to his own developing unorthodox notions about theater. The playwright and the director were thus engaged, I argue, in a necessarily symbiotic relationship--a relationship that allowed for the fullest possible flowering of both of their radically new ideas about the art of the theater. And as in the case of most symbiotic relationships, theirs was fraught with frustrations and competitive thrusts and parries which made their working relationship less than ideal, but made their individual creative ideas stronger and richer. Based on the Chekhov-Stanislavsky relationship I offer a tentative hypothesis about the productive value of “competitive collaboration” inherent in the realization of any piece of dramatic art. I also pose the larger question: Is competitive collaboration also a necessary element in the successful creation of other types of art?
I hope to have communicated here that, in addition to my preparedness and eagerness to return full-time to academia, I am hard at work on a well-defined scholarly program that unites my “old” interests with my “new” ones. The “old” and the “new” are really of a piece, though, since they both stem from my longtime interest in both Russia and in the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of Russian literature. They stem also from my persistent desire to answer the question: What makes a work of literary art work?
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