How to play the role of Onegin

But to be able to dissect a character in your mind does not mean that you are a talented actor. There are many actors who can analyse their parts very well, but are unable to play them satisfactorily. You can learn nothing in the art of acting except the bare text or the notes. All you can do is to put the little word 'if' in the circle of your attention with the help of your thoughts and your imagination before the start of your creative work and in this way begin to live with the images of your inner life....

If I am Onyegin, how do I arrive at the country house of the Larins on my first visit? Do I represent a pompous, starchy coxcomb who, in appearing before an audience, is afraid to forfeit his reputation and the dignity of a leading actor who is used to be met with applause on his entrance as 'darling' Onyegin? Such an actor will, while waiting for his cue in the wings, have thought a hundred times how his voice sound that night, having already tried how he would 'take' the word 'dreams' in the third scene;' he is constantly worried about his appearance, but he has forgotten the most important thing of all: he has forgotten that it was not in his dressing room that he put on his make-up, that he was really living in the country, that Lensky was the dearest person he had met since he had begun leading the life of a bored country squire, that his friendship with Lensky had started before his visit to the Larins, that he was not anxious to meet Lensky's friends, his fiancee's family, that it is they who are the living thoughts-images, invisible to anyone but himself, with whom his creative imagination will people the circle of his public solitude in the subsequent stages of his life on the stage that night. And it is them he has to scrutinise attentively, physically, at his first entrance.

Stanislavsky on the Art of the Stage by Konstantin Stanislavsky. 1986. Page 149.