Secrets of the Russian Language

About the author Anna Nikolaevna Petrova is a Doctor of Arts, a professor in the Department of Stage Speech at the MHAT School-Studio, author of books and manuals. Since 1956 she has taught stage speech at the MHAT School-Studio. Laureate of the International Stanislavsky Prize and the special Golden Mask award for “outstanding contribution to the development of theatrical art.”

Her new book consists of two parts. In the first part, Anna Nikolaevna discusses speech problems—spoken and written speech, living conversational speech, and modern speech, including modern stage speech—along with the laws and rules of Russian speech, intonation, punctuation, and stress; the monologue; interpretation of the author’s text; and working with words. She analyzes examples from classical Russian literature, touching on the topic of authorial style (Pushkin, Tolstoy, etc.), reveals the secrets of a free and healthy voice, correct diction—and all this is considered through the prism of Russian theatre and stage speech.

That’s why the second part of the book consists of questionnaires. Throughout her life, Anna Nikolaevna collected interviews with her colleagues—famous actors and directors—asking them questions about words, stage speech, work on a role, on classical works, the laws of speech, and speech technique. These are 22 questions about words for great masters of stage speech.

These questionnaire-interviews are unique: in them “sound” the voices of masters who have already gone—Oleg Tabakov, Georgiy Tovstonogov, Mikhail Gluzsky, Yuriy Zavadsky, Evgeniy Yevstigneev, Aleksey Gribov, Mariya Knebel, Evgeniy Lebedev, Andrey Myagkov, Vyacheslav Nevinny, Sergey Yurskiy, Anatoliy Efros, and others—as well as contemporary actors and directors such as Vladimir Mashkov, Evgeniy Mironov, Konstantin Khabenskiy, Vera Alentova, Konstantin Bogomolov, Marina Golub, Nikita Mikhalkov, Alla Pokrovskaya, Konstantin Raikin, and others. Almost every questionnaire is written in the hand of these masters, with their own signature. Each question by Anna Nikolaevna in these questionnaires intersects with a chapter in the theoretical part of the book, so that the question about words is answered not only by Anna Nikolaevna, but also by famous masters of the stage.

It is theatre people, going different paths, who created a powerful practice for improving speech, revealed the secrets of a free voice and ways to heal it. The discoveries of theatre masters are important for Russian culture and should be available to everyone in everyday life in society.