Vsevolod Meyerhold

Vsevolod Meyerhold , 1874-1940?, Russian theatrical director and producer. Meyerhold led the revolt against naturalism in the Russian theater. Working with the Moscow Art Theater , he experimented with his own directing ideas until the outbreak of the Revolution. Meyerhold was a member of the Bolshevik party, and as head of theatrical activities for the state he directed the first theater to specialize in Soviet plays. He was among the earliest advocates of the theater of the absurd. In his avant-garde productions he employed various grotesque elements, pantomimes, and acrobatics, emphasizing the plays' visual, nonverbal aspects. He produced Bolshevik propaganda dramas, using bare constructivist settings and formalized scenery, and eliminating the curtain. Meyerhold directed his actors according to his principle of "biomechanics," reducing the actors' individual contributions to a minimum, in the interests of the play as a whole. His work eventually became unprofitable, and the state discontinued his subsidy. He was an outspoken opponent of socialist realism . A victim of the Soviet purges, Meyerhold died under circumstances that remain unclear; the date of his death is open to question.

Bibliography: See Meyerhold on Theater, ed. by E. Braun (1969); biography by M. L. Hoover (1974); J. M. Symons, Meyerhold's Theatre of the Grotesque (1971).

Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilievich (1874–1940/3), Russian actor and director, who after training under Nemirovich-Danchenko joined the Moscow Art Theatre on its foundation in 1898, making his first appearance as Treplev in Chekhov's The Seagull. In 1902 he left to found his own company, with which he toured the provinces until 1905, in which year he was invited by Stanislavsky to take charge of a newly opened studio theatre. It was soon apparent that his conception of the actor as a puppet to be controlled from outside by the director (a concept he formulated under the influence of Gordon Craig) was totally opposed to the naturalism of the Moscow Art Theatre style, and the studio closed. From 1906 to 1907 Meyerhold worked with Vera Komisarjevskaya, but again came into conflict with the actors when he tried to put his theories into practice, and was forced to leave. For some years he directed productions at the Imperial theatres in St Petersburg. After the Revolution he was the first theatre director to offer his services to the new government. He was also the first to stage a Soviet play, Mystery-Bouffe (1918) by Mayakovsky, also directing his The Bed-Bug (1929) and The Bath House (1930). In 1936, with the establishment of Socialist Realism, Meyerhold, who was already out of favour because of his Formalism, was dismissed, and in 1938 he was imprisoned. He was rehabilitated in 1955 and is now recognized as one of the most important directors of his time. The date and circumstances of his death are still unknown.