When he prepared for his role in Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri", Stanislavski created a biography for Salieri in which he imagined the character's memories of each incident mentioned in the play, his relationships with the other people involved, and the circumstances that had impacted on Salieri's life. When he attempted to render all of this detail in performance, however, the subtext overwhelmed the text; overladen with heavy pauses, Pushkin's verse was fragmented to the point of incomprehensibility. His struggles with this role prompted him to attend more closely to the structure and dynamics of language in drama; to that end, he studied Serge Wolkonsky's "The Expressive Word" (1913).