"Innokenty Smoktunovsky's Acting Notebooks"About the author: Olga Vladimirovna Egoshina, Doctor of Art History, Professor at the Moscow Art Theater School, art director of the Directing Lessons Festival, theater critic.About the book Innokenty Smoktunovsky did not leave any solid theoretical works reflecting on his own acting experience and exploring his own technique. But the artist's notebooks, written in the margins with Innokenty Smoktunovsky's work notes, give a unique chance to look into the creative "interior". Smoktunovsky's recordings have become a kind of "black box" that preserves data on the role creation process. Rehearsals have taken place, performances have already been removed from the repertoire, and folders with notebooks keep the spirit and progress of work on the role, store the layered structure of the role, which appears solid and monolithic in live performance. To see the unreleased work of "warming up" the author's text, to understand the range of associations, internal movements, tasks and goals in a particular scene, the selection and screening of devices, to see how the author's findings are born. To explore the interaction of the actor's "I" with the image, to understand the laws and mechanisms of this interaction; to identify the methods and ways of working of an actor who "appropriates" to himself "someone else's delight, someone else's sadness"; to see how an image grows out of a "litter" of guesses, associations, hints, memories. Finally, compare the resulting finished stage image with the image that the artist dreamed up for himself. Thanks to Olga Yegoshina and her work on collecting and analyzing Smoktunovsky's acting notebooks, this became possible. With the help of this book, we can touch the theatrical "kitchen" through the memories and experience of the brilliant artist Innokenty Smoktunovsky, find out exactly how he created the images of Prince Myshkin, Tsar Fyodor, Golovlev, Hamlet.Leaving aside the actual artistic results of the actor's work, which are repeatedly described in articles and monographs by theater critics dealing with Innokenty Smoktunovsky, in this book the author would like to focus on analyzing the actor's technique and reconstruct his working methods.The book is addressed to both specialists and anyone interested in the problems of creativity and the legacy of the great actor.