Realism was a general movement

Art movement

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years...

 in 19th-century theatre that developed a set of dramatic and theatrical conventions

Dramatic convention

Dramatic Conventions are the specific actions or techniques the actor, writer or director has employed to create a desired dramatic effect/style....

 with the aim of bringing a greater fidelity of real life to texts and performances.

Russia's first professional playwright, Aleksey Pisemsky

Aleksey Pisemsky

Aleksey Feofilaktovich Pisemsky was a Russian novelist and dramatist who was regarded as an equal of Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky during his lifetime, but whose reputation suffered a spectacular decline in the 20th century. A realistic playwright, along with Aleksandr Ostrovsky he was...

 (whose A Bitter Fate

A Bitter Fate

A Bitter Fate , also translated as A Bitter Lot, is an 1859 realistic play by Aleksey Pisemsky. The play tackles serfdom in Russia and the social and moral divisions that it creates by means of a story that focuses on a provincial ménage à trois...

(1859) anticipated Naturalism

Naturalism (theatre)

Naturalism is a movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theatre that attempts to create a perfect illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies: detailed, three-dimensional settings Naturalism is a...

), and Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

 (whose The Power of Darkness

The Power of Darkness

The Power of Darkness is a five-act drama by Leo Tolstoy. Written in 1886, the play was banned in Russia until 1902.The central character is a peasant, Nikita, who seduces and abandons a young girl Marinka; then the lovely Anisija murders her own husband to marry Nikita. He impregnates his new...

(1886) is "one of the most effective of naturalistic plays"), a tradition of psychological realism in Russia culminated with the establishment of the Moscow Art Theatre

Moscow Art Theatre

The Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow that the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded in 1898. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas...

 by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko

Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko

Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was a Georgian-born Russian theatre director, writer, pedagogue, playwright, producer and theatre organizer, who founded the Moscow Art Theatre with his colleague, Konstantin Stanislavsky, in 1898.-Biography:Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was born...

. Their ground-breaking productions of the plays of Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...

 in turn influenced Maxim Gorky

Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...

 and Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhaíl Afanásyevich Bulgákov was a Soviet Russian writer and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, which The Times of London has called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.-Biography:Mikhail Bulgakov was born on...

. Stanislavski went on to develop his 'system', a form of actor training that is particularly suited to psychological realism.

19th-century realism is closely connected to the development of modern drama, which, as Martin Harrison explains, "is usually said to have begun in the early 1870s" with the "middle-period" work of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...

. Ibsen's realistic drama in prose has been "enormously influential."

In opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

, verismo

Verismo

Verismo was an Italian literary movement which peaked between approximately 1875 and the early 1900s....

refers to a post-Romantic Italian tradition that sought incorporate the naturalism of Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen. It included realistic – sometimes sordid or violent – depictions of contemporary everyday life, especially the life of the lower classes.

See also

• Naturalism
  Naturalism (theatre)
  Naturalism is a movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theatre that attempts to create a perfect illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies: detailed, three-dimensional settings Naturalism is a...
  
  
• Realism in the arts
  Realism (arts)
  Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
  
  
• Socialist realism
  Socialist realism
  Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
  
  
• Chanson réaliste
  Chanson réaliste
  Chanson réaliste, or realist song, refers to a style of music performed in France primarily from the 1880s until the end of World War II...
  
  
• Constantin Stanislavski

Sources

• Benedetti, Jean. 1999. Stanislavski: His Life and Art. Revised edition. Original edition published in 1988. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413525201.
• ---. 2005. The Art of the Actor: The Essential History of Acting, From Classical Times to the Present Day. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413773361.
• Brockett, Oscar G. and Franklin J. Hildy. 2003. History of the Theatre. Ninth edition, International edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ISBN 0205410502.
• Harrison, Martin. 1998. The Language of Theatre. London: Routledge. ISBN 0878300872.