The question of emotions and aesthetic experience: the dialogue between Vygotsky and Stanislavski around actor’s psychology

Abstract

The paper examines the occurrences of the perezhivanie concept in Vygotsky’s texts about art, particularly the essay on Hamlet, written in 1915, The Psychology of Art, written in 1925, and the book chapter Aesthetic Education, published in Educational Psychology in 1926. Then, the paper focuses on the text "On the problem of the psychology of the actor's creative work," aiming to understand how Vygotsky critically analyses the ideas of Denis Diderot and Konstantin Stanislavsky to propose his original outlook on the psychology of the actor's scenic perezhivanie. The paper seeks to contextualize the 1932 text in Vygotsky's framework of interests that articulate theatrical art and the study of emotions against the background of previous writings.