Vsevolod Meyerhold

He was tortured, his wife was murdered, and he was executed on 2 February 1940.

Vsevolod Meyerhold studied at Classical high school number 1 named after V. Belinsky, Lomonosov Moscow State University and Russian Institute of Theatre Arts. Training under Constantine Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko is recorded. Valery Rybakov, Alexei Gripich and Khadisha Bukeeva are recorded as having studied under Vsevolod Meyerhold. The recorded working language is Russian. The field of work recorded is theatre, pedagogy and directing. Distinctions recorded are People's Artist of the RSFSR.

• Name — Vsevolod Meyerhold • Birth Name — Karl Kasimir Theodor Meyerhold • Birthplace — Penza, Russia • Died — 2 February 1940 • Place of death — Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union • Field — Theatre director • Training — Moscow Art Theatre • Movement — Symbolism, futurism, constructivistm • Patrons — Vera Komissarzhevskaya

• Illustration — Meyerhold preparing for the role of Treplev in Stanislavsky's 1898 Moscow Art Theater production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov. Vsevolod Meyerhold was born Karl Kasimir Theodor Meyerhold in Penza on to Russian-German wine manufacturer Friedrich Emil Meyerhold and his Baltic German wife, Alvina Danilovna (van der Neese). He was the youngest of eight children. His father came from an old noble family Meyerhold von Ritterholm. The elder Meyerhold emigrated to Russia in the 1850s. After completing school in 1895, Meyerhold studied law at Moscow University but never completed his degree. He was torn between studying theatre or a career as a violinist. However, he failed his audition to become the second violinist in the University orchestra and in 1896 joined the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School. On his 21st birthday, he converted from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity and accepted "Vsevolod" as an Orthodox Christian name (after the Russian writer Vsevolod Garshin, whose prose he loved).

• Illustration — Alexander Golovin's portrait of Meyerhold. Meyerhold began acting in 1896 as a student of the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School under the guidance of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, co-founder with Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theatre. At the MAT, Meyerhold played 18 roles, such as Vasiliy Shuiskiy in Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich and Ivan the Terrible in The Death of Ivan the Terrible (both by Aleksey Tolstoy). In 1898, in the first successful production of Chekhov's first play, The Seagull, Meyerhold played the lead male role, opposite Chekhov's future wife, Olga Knipper. After leaving the MAT in 1902, wanting to break free of the highly naturalistic 'missing fourth wall' productions of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, Meyerhold participated in a number of theatrical projects, as both a director and actor. Each project was an arena for experiment and creation of new staging methods. Meyerhold was one of the most fervent advocates of Symbolism in theatre, especially when he worked as the chief producer of the Vera Komissarzhevskaya theatre in 1906–1907. He was invited back to the MAT around this time to pursue his experimental ideas. Meyerhold continued theatrical innovation during the decade 1907–1917, while working with the imperial theatres in St. Petersburg. He introduced classical plays in an innovative manner, and staged works of controversial contemporary authors like Fyodor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius, and Alexander Blok. In these plays, Meyerhold tried to return acting to the traditions of Commedia dell'arte, rethinking them for the contemporary theatrical reality. His theoretical concepts of the "conditional theatre" were elaborated in his book On Theatre in 1913.

• Illustration — Portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold(1916) by Boris Grigoriev, depicting Meyerhold sharing the stage with his alter ego 'Doctor Dapertutto', a pseudonym he had borrowed from a character in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Adventure on New Year's Eve. On the day when the February Revolution broke out – on 25 February, under the old style calendar then used in Russia – Meyerhold's production of Masquerade by Mikhail Lermontov had a dress rehearsal at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, in front of an audience that included the poet Anna Akhmatova. That evening has been described as "the last act of the tragedy of the old regime, when the Petersburg elite went to enjoy themselves at this splendidly luxurious production in the midst of the chaos and confusion." Sergei Eisenstein, who was then a teenager but would later be a world-renowned film director, desperately wanted to see the production, having heard that it featured clowns, but having made his way across the city that was in the throes of a revolution was disappointed to discover that the Alexandrinsky was closed. Meyerhold was one of the first prominent Russian artists to welcome the Bolshevik Revolution – and one of only five out of 120 who accepted an invitation to meet the new People's Commissar for Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky in November 1917. (Among the others were the poets Alexander Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky.) He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918, narrowly escaping execution when he was caught on the wrong side of the battle lines during the civil war. He became an official of the Theatre Division (TEO) of the Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment. In 1918–1919, Meyerhold formed an alliance with Olga Kameneva, the head of the Division. Together, they tried to radicalize Russian theatres, effectively nationalizing them under Bolshevik control. Meyerhold came down with tuberculosis in May 1919 and had to leave for the south. In his absence, the head of the Commissariat, Anatoly Lunacharsky, secured Vladimir Lenin's permission to revise government policy in favor of more traditional theatres and dismissed Kameneva in June 1919. After returning to Moscow, Meyerhold founded his own theatre in 1920, which was known from 1923 as the Meyerhold Theatre until 1938. Meyerhold confronted the principles of theatrical academism, claiming that they are incapable of finding a common language with the new reality. Meyerhold's methods of scenic constructivism and circus-style effects were used in his most successful works of the time. Some of these works included Nikolai Erdman's The Mandate, Mayakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe, Fernand Crommelynck's Le Cocu magnifique (The Magnanimous Cuckold) and Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin's Tarelkin's Death. Mayakovsky collaborated with Meyerhold several times, and was said to have written The Bedbug especially for him; Meyerhold continued to stage Mayakovsky's productions even after the latter's suicide.

In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin launched a campaign to bring Soviet artists to heel, and compel them all to observe the rules of 'socialist realism', which precluded avant-garde art and experimentation, and any art form reckoned to be 'formalist', in that the artist had paid more attention to the form of a work than to its political message. After Shostakovich had been singled out as being guilty of 'formalism', in January 1936, Meyerhold evidently surmised that he would soon be a target, and in March delivered a talk entitled "Meyer Against Meyerholdism" in which he said – reportedly to 'thunderous applause' – that "the path to simplicity is not an easy one. Each artist goes at his own pace, and they must not lose their distinctive way of walking... Soviet subject matter is often a smoke screen to conceal mediocrity." A year later, in April 1937, his wife, the actress Zinaida Reich, wrote Stalin a long letter alleging that her husband was the victim of a conspiracy by Trotskyists and former members of the disbanded Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. The letter was not answered. In December 1937, Lazar Kaganovich, a close associate of Stalin, went to a production at the Meyerhold Theatre, and walked out in disgust. The theatre was closed, by order of the Politburo, on 7 January 1938, on the grounds that 'throughout its entire existence, the Meyerhold Theatre has been unable to free itself from thoroughly bourgeois Formalist positions', his works were proclaimed antagonistic and alien to the Soviet people.

• Illustration — Meyerhold's mugshot, taken at the time of his arrest by Soviet police The ailing Stanislavsky, who was the director of an opera theatre now known as Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre, invited Meyerhold to be his assistant – an invitation that surprised many in Moscow, given their long standing artistic differences. Stanislavsky died soon afterwards, in August 1938. His dying wish was "Take care of Meyerhold; he is my sole heir in the theatre – here or anywhere else." Meyerhold directed his theatre for nearly a year, and was engaged with producing the première of Sergei Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko, when he was instructed that he was to choreograph a spectacle in Leningrad involving 30,000 athletes. On 15 June 1939, he addressed a conference of theatre directors, in the presence of Andrey Vyshinsky, the state prosecutor who had presided over the infamous Moscow show trials. His speech was not reported in the Soviet press, giving rise to a report that he had declared, defiantly: If what you have been doing with the Soviet theatre recently is what you call anti-formalism, if you consider what is now taking place on the stages of the best theatres in Moscow as an achievement of the Soviet theatre, then I would prefer to be what you consider a formalist... in hunting formalism, you have eliminated art. This is from a version of the speech written up later by the emigre musician Yuri Yelagin, from notes he said that he made at the conference – but its accuracy is disputed. After the speech, he returned to Leningrad, and was arrested on arrival on 20 June 1939. Shortly afterwards, intruders broke into his flat and repeatedly stabbed his wife, Zinaida Reich, who died from her injuries. Taken to NKVD headquarters in Moscow, and placed in the hands of the notorious torturer Lev Shvartzman, Meyerhold broke down and confessed to being a British and Japanese spy. In his final days, he wrote a letter to the head of the Soviet government Vyacheslav Molotov, which was retained in police files, where it was discovered after the dissolution of the USSR by the journalist Vitaly Shentalinsky. In it, he wrote: He was sentenced to death by firing squad on 1 February 1940, and executed the next day. The Soviet Supreme Court cleared him of all charges in 1955, during the first wave of de-Stalinization.

Meyerhold married his first wife, Olga Munt, in 1896 and together they had three daughters. He later met the actress Zinaida Reich when she began studying with him. They fell in love and he divorced his wife; Reich was already divorced and had two children of her own. They married in 1922 or 1924.

• Vsevolod Meyerhold (Routledge Performance Practitioners Series), by Jonathan Pitches, Routledge, 2003 • Meyerhold: The art of conscious theater, by Marjorie L Hoover, University of Massachusetts Press, 1974 (biography) • Vsevolod Meyerhold (Directors in Perspective Series), by Robert Leach, Christopher Innes (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1993 • Meyerhold's Theatre of the Grotesque: Post-revolutionary Productions, 1920–32, James M. Symons, 1971 • Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, by Edward Braun, University of Iowa Press, 1998 • The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution and the Modern Stage by Edward Braun, 1995 • Stanislavsky and Meyerhold (Stage and Screen Studies, v. 3), by Robert Leach, Peter Lang, 2003 • Meyerhold the Director, by Konstantin Rudnitsky, Ardis, 1981 • Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia by Alma H. Law, Mel Gordon, McFarland & co, 1995 • The Death of Meyerhold A play by Mark Jackson, premiered at The Shotgun Players, Berkeley, CA, December 2003. • The Theater of Meyerhold and Brecht, by Katherine B. Eaton, Greenwood Press,1985 • Meyerhold and the Music Theater, by Isaak Glikman, 'Soviet Composer', Leningrad, 1989 • Vsevolod Meyerhold Annotated Bibliography, by David Roy, LTScotland, 2002 • Stanislavsky in Practice: Actor Training in Post-Soviet Russia (Artists & Issues in the Theatre, Vol. 16) by Vreneli Farber, Peter Lang, 2008 (Meyerhold's ideas applied in post-Soviet actor training)

Vsevolod Meyerhold was recorded at birth as Karl Kasimir Theodor Meyerhold. He also worked under the name Доктор Дапертутто. The authorities additionally record the headings Karl Theodore Kasimir Meyerhold, Vsevolod Meyerkhol'd, Vsevolod. Meyerkhol'd and Karl Theodore Kasimir Meyerkhol'd. His recorded language was Russian. His recorded confession was Eastern Orthodox Church. He married Zinaida Nikolaevna Rajh. One child is recorded: Irina Vsevolodovna Meyerhold. Recorded as actor, playwright, politician, theatrologist and director.