Meyerhold, Vsevolod

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MEYERHOLD, VSEVOLOD

MEYERHOLD, VSEVOLOD (1874–1940), Russian theatrical director and producer.

One of the most innovative and influential theatrical directors and pedagogues of the twentieth century, and a central figure in the history of modern Russian culture, Vsevolod Meyerhold worked in Russia during a particularly exciting and turbulent period in the country's history. His career began in the promising decades just before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution (which he embraced with enthusiasm) and ended in tragic repression under the regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Born on 9 February (28 January, old style) 1874 into a Russified German family in the provincial city of Penza, Meyerhold went to Moscow in 1895 to study law, but soon gravitated to the world of theater. Like many aspiring actors, he enrolled in the legendary classes taught by the director and playwright Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the drama school of the Moscow Philharmonic Society.

In 1898 Meyerhold was invited to take the role of the neurotic writer Treplev in a production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull for the first season of the new Moscow Art Theater, founded by Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky. This groundbreaking interpretation established Chekhov as a successful playwright, and introduced the basic elements of what became known as the Stanislavsky "method": creation of evocative atmosphere (through sound effects, scenery, costumes, music) and psychological realism in acting style (achieved through the actor's use of personal memory and experiences). Meyerhold later vehemently rejected Stanislavsky's psychological and realistic approach, but the two men remained friends and colleagues until the end of Stanislavsky's life.

In 1902 Meyerhold founded the Company of Russian Dramatic Artists and began his prolific career as a director, which eventually included nearly three hundred productions. He began to move away from realism in several productions for the Studio of the Moscow Art Theater in 1905, and even more so at a theater in St. Petersburg founded in 1906 by the actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya. There Meyerhold began to develop a new "symbolist" theater, particularly with his staging of Balaganchik (The fairground booth), by the symbolist poet Alexander Blok, which uses the familiar masks and conventions of the Italian commedia dell'arte to create an abstract and highly artificial theatrical environment that rejects logical psychological motivation and breaks down the barrier between audience and performer.

Despite his strong avant-garde and iconoclastic leanings, Meyerhold was appointed in 1908 as an assistant to the director of the conservative imperial theaters in St. Petersburg, a post he held until the collapse of the tsarist government in 1917. In this capacity, he assisted other directors and staged his own productions, including the operas Tristan and Isolde, Boris Godunov, Elektra, The Nightingale, Orpheus and Eurydice, and The Queen of Spades. Music was an essential part of Meyerhold's work as a director. He incorporated music into his productions in unusual and aggressive ways, sometimes matching the emotional mood and rhythm of the stage action, sometimes contradicting it, in highly self-conscious counterpoint. He also worked closely with leading composers. With Sergei Prokofiev (to whom he gave the idea for the opera Love for Three Oranges) and Dmitri Shostakovich he enjoyed particularly close relationships.

Like most progressive Russian artists, Meyer-hold welcomed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the foundation of the world's first socialist state as a unique opportunity to (in Blok's words) "redo everything." But much more than most, he participated in the actual building of the new Soviet culture, by opening new theaters and institutes for training theater people in a new way of working. A Communist Party member from 1918, Meyerhold held numerous high-ranking positions in the cultural bureaucracy and engaged vigorously in the bitter ideological conflicts that raged within the Soviet leadership over the role of theater in the new utopian society.

In 1926 Meyerhold was rewarded with a state-supported theater in Moscow bearing his name. There, as he had done throughout his career, Meyerhold trained actors in his method of "biomechanics," a system that emphasized specific physical techniques related both to the non-realist traditions of commedia dell'arte and the highly stylized gestures of Kabuki. Biomechanics was also closely linked to the ideas of constructivism, which reached its peak in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and viewed humans as cogs in a giant social machine. One of Meyerhold's most celebrated constructivist productions was The Magnificent Cuckold by Fernand Crommelynck, with sets by Lyubov Popova (1922).

With Stalin's ascent to power in the 1930s, Meyerhold's position worsened, as the ideas of the Soviet revolutionary avant-garde were discarded in favor of the conservative totalitarian doctrine of socialist realism. To his credit, Meyerhold was one of the very few who refused to disown his out-spoken convictions, even in the face of overwhelming pressure and danger. In June 1939 he was arrested and charged with being a "wrecker" of the Soviet theater. He was executed in Moscow on 2 February 1940.

See alsoBlok, Alexander; Chekhov, Anton; Russia.