Stanislavski, Konstantin: My Life in Art, Jean Benedetti, trans. and ed., Routledge, NY, 2008. Unquestionably the urtext on the man and his thought. This edition, unlike the earlier translation by J. J. Robbins, is based on the revised (1926) version, undertaken after Stanislavski’s return to Russia following the European and American tour of 1923-24. (The first version was a hurried one, turned out for American audiences in connection with the tour.) Benedetti’s translations of the System itself have also been published by Routledge, and on the whole his work is to be preferred to the pioneering efforts of Elizabeth Hapgood Reynolds. (See Opera as Opera, p. 590, for further detail on this.) Opera devotees’ confidence as to accuracy will be shaken by Benedetti’s mangling of Stanislavsky’s observations on singing, which include rendering Sembrich as Zembrich, enthusing over Patti’s “collaratura,” and supposing that Capoul is a role to be sung by Manzzini (or Mazzini), even though just a page later, KS praises “the clarity, the precision, the polish, and the rhythmic acting” of the French lyric tenor Victor Capoul. I assume that these blunders spring from an ignorance of opera and a failure to check into the matter, and are not representative. The volume includes an essay by Laurence Selenick, Stanislavsky’s Double “Life in Art”, which is helpful in construing the differences between the first and second editions (some of which had to do with unruffling Soviet feathers) and understanding the struggle involved in writing the book for the inexperienced author. A preface by Benedetti also goes far to clarify the omissions in KS’s text, especially with respect to the rift with Nemirovich-Danchenko.  Extensive notes, but neither a bibliography nor an index.

———Stanislavski’s Legacy, Elizabeth Hapgood Reynolds, trans. and ed., Theatre Arts Books, NY, 1958, republished by Routledge, NY, 1999. For the nonprofessional reader (that is, not an actor or acting student), this is the best volume for “from the horse’s mouth” material, apart from the preceding entry. A collection of letters, talks and speeches, essayettes and commentaries, it gives a good picture of KS’s developing thought from the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre (1898) to shortly before his death in 1938. It includes several passages on the challenges of acting in opera, and reflects throughout an idealism of spirit and the need for renewal and return to study throughout an artist’s life. This second edition adds some later-discovered material not included in the first.

Wikipedia: The entry on Stanislavski is comprehensive, widely sourced, and, so far as I can judge from a skim-through, accurate as to everything that has factual evidence. At the least, a good starting place for any desired research.

And three personal favorites, having to do with Russian/Soviet acting and/or KS:

Houghton, Norris: Moscow Rehearsals/The Golden Age of the Soviet Theatre, Grove Press, NY, 1962, originally published in 1936; and Return Engagement, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, NY, 1962. Houghton was a director, designer, co-founder of the Phoenix Theatre in New York in 1953, and later a teacher of drama. On the one hand, as he acknowledges with the first sentence of Return Engagement, there are “some people for whom one look at the Soviet Union is enough.” On the other, as the distinguished designer Lee Simonson writes in the first sentence of the earlier book, “For the artist, all roads once led to Rome; yesterday to Paris. Today, for the artist in the theatre . . . the road leads to Moscow and the theatres of the U.S.S.R.” Houghton first traveled that road in 1934-35, observing rehearsals and performances at the MAT, the companies of Meierhold, Vakhtankov, Tairov (the Kamerny), and many others, and speaking with their directors. From that extended stay came the first book. He returned on a similar mission for three months in 1960—hence, the second. He was a deeply knowledgeable observer and an engaging writer, and though they touch on opera only glancingly, these are fascinating volumes.