Vsevolod Meyerhold
Encyclopedia
Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold (2 February 1940) was a great Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer
. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbol
ism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre.
Vsevolod Meyerhold was born Karl Kasimir Theodor Meyerhold in Penza
on 28 January o.s. (9 February n.s.) 1874 into the family of a Russian-German wine manufacturer Emil Meyerhold. Though he was by no means from a poor family, he was the last of eight children.
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 Meyerhold loved).
, co-founder 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
), and Treplev in Chekhov's
The Seagull
.
After leaving the MAT in 1902, 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
, introducing classical plays in an innovative manner, and staging 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.
The Russian Revolution of 1917
made Meyerhold one of the most enthusiastic activists of the new Soviet Theatre. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 and became an official of the Theatre Division (TEO) of the Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment, forming an alliance with Olga Kameneva
, the head of the Division in 1918-1919. 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 1922, which was known 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: Nikolai Erdman
's The Mandate, Vladimir Mayakovsky
’s Mystery-Bouffe
, Fernand Crommelynck
's The Magnanimous Cuckold, and Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin
's Tarelkin's Death. Mayakovsky collaborated with Meyerhold several times, and Mayakovsky was said to write The Bed Bug especially for him; Meyerhold continued to stage Mayakovsky's productions even after the latter's suicide
. The actors participating in Meyerhold’s productions acted according to the principle of biomechanics (only distantly related to the present
scientific use of the term), the system of actor training that was later taught in a special school created by Meyerhold.
Meyerhold gave initial boosts to the stage careers of some of the most distinguished comic actors of the USSR, including Sergey Martinson
, Igor Ilyinsky
and Erast Garin
. His landmark production of Nikolai Gogol
's The Government Inspector (1926) was described as the following:
Meyerhold's acting technique had fundamental principles at odds with the American method actor
's conception. Where method acting melded the character with the actor's own personal memories to create the character’s internal motivation, Meyerhold connected psychological and physiological processes. He had actors focus on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion physically. Following Stanislavski's lead, he said that the emotional state of an actor was inextricably linked to his physical state (and vice versa), and that one could call up emotions in performance by practicing and assuming poses, gestures, and movements. He developed a number of body expressions that his actors would use to portray specific emotions and characters. (Although Stanislavski inspired method acting, he was also at odds with it, because like Meyerhold, his approach was psychophysical).
Meyerhold inspired revolutionary artists and filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein
, who studied with Meyerhold. In his films, he used actors who worked in Meyerhold’s tradition. Eisenstein cast actors based on what they looked like and their expression, and followed Meyerhold's stylized acting methods. In Strike
, the bourgeois are always obese, drinking, eating, and smoking, whereas the workers are more athletic.
Meyerhold was strongly opposed to socialist realism
. In the early 1930s, when Joseph Stalin
repressed all avant-garde
art and experimentation, his works were proclaimed antagonistic and alien to the Soviet people. His theatre was closed down in January 1938; the ailing Constantin Stanislavski, then the director of an opera theatre now known as Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre, invited Meyerhold to lead his company. Stanislavski died in August 1938.
Meyerhold directed his theatre for nearly a year until his arrest in Leningrad on June 20, 1939.
Shortly after that his wife, the actress Zinaida Reich
, was found murdered by multiple stab wounds in their Moscow apartment on July 15, 1939. Later that year Meyerhold was brutally tortured and forced to confess that he worked for Japanese and British intelligence agencies
. He later recanted the confession in a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov
.
The file on Meyerhold contains his letter from prison to Molotov:
He was sentenced to death by firing squad
on February 2, 1940, and executed the next day. The Soviet government cleared him of all charges in 1955, during the first wave of de-Stalinization
.
Theatrical producer
A theatrical producer is the person ultimately responsible for overseeing all aspects of mounting a theatre production. The independent producer will usually be the originator and finder of the script and starts the whole process...
. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
ism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre.
Early life
Penza
-Honors:A minor planet, 3189 Penza, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1978, is named after the city.-Notable residents:...
on 28 January o.s. (9 February n.s.) 1874 into the family of a Russian-German wine manufacturer Emil Meyerhold. Though he was by no means from a poor family, he was the last of eight children.
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
Lutheranism
Lutheranism is a major branch of Western Christianity that identifies with the theology of Martin Luther, a German reformer. Luther's efforts to reform the theology and practice of the church launched the Protestant Reformation...
to Orthodox Christianity and accepted "Vsevolod" as an Orthodox Christian name (after the Russian writer Vsevolod Garshin, whose prose Meyerhold loved).
Career
Meyerhold began acting in 1896 as a student of the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School under the guidance of Vladimir Nemirovich-DanchenkoVladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was a Georgian-born Russian theatre director, writer, pedagogue, playwright, producer and theatre organizer, who founded the Moscow Art Theatre with his colleague, Konstantin Stanislavsky, in 1898.-Biography:Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was born...
, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre
Moscow Art Theatre
The Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow that the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded in 1898. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas...
. 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
The Death of Ivan the Terrible
The Death of Ivan the Terrible is an historical drama by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy written in 1863 and first published in the January 1866 issue of Otechestvennye zapiski magazine. It is the first part of a trilogy that is followed by Tsar Fiodor Ioannovich and concludes with Tsar Boris. All...
(both by Aleksey Tolstoy
Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy
Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, often referred to as A. K. Tolstoy , was a Russian poet, novelist and playwright, considered to be the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist...
), and Treplev in Chekhov's
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
The Seagull
The Seagull
The Seagull is the first of what are generally considered to be the four major plays by the Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. The Seagull was written in 1895 and first produced in 1896...
.
After leaving the MAT in 1902, 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
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
in theatre, especially when he worked as the chief producer of the Vera Komissarzhevskaya
Vera Komissarzhevskaya
Vera Fyodorovna Komissarzhevskaya was the most celebrated Russian actress at the turn of the twentieth century.Vera Komissarzhevskaya was the daughter of Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, a leading tenor of the Mariinsky Theatre, and sister of Theodore Komisarjevsky, a famous theatrical director...
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
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
, introducing classical plays in an innovative manner, and staging works of controversial contemporary authors like Fyodor Sologub
Fyodor Sologub
Fyodor Sologub was a Russian Symbolist poet, novelist, playwright and essayist. He was the first writer to introduce the morbid, pessimistic elements characteristic of European fin de siècle literature and philosophy into Russian prose.-Early life:...
, Zinaida Gippius
Zinaida Gippius
Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius, was a Russian poet, playwright, editor, short story writer and religious thinker, regarded as a co-founder of Russian symbolism and seen as "one of the most enigmatic and intelligent women of her time in Russia"....
, and Alexander Blok
Alexander Blok
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was a Russian lyrical poet.-Life and career:Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg...
. In these plays, Meyerhold tried to return acting to the traditions of Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. The closest translation of the name is "comedy of craft"; it is shortened...
, rethinking them for the contemporary theatrical reality. His theoretical concepts of the "conditional theatre" were elaborated in his book On Theatre in 1913.
The Russian Revolution of 1917
Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917...
made Meyerhold one of the most enthusiastic activists of the new Soviet Theatre. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 and became an official of the Theatre Division (TEO) of the Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment, forming an alliance with Olga Kameneva
Olga Kameneva
Olga Davidovna Kameneva was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician. She was the sister of Leon Trotsky and the first wife of Lev Kamenev.-Childhood and Revolutionary Career :...
, the head of the Division in 1918-1919. Together, they tried to radicalize Russian theatres, effectively nationalizing them under Bolshevik control. Meyerhold came down with tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
in May 1919 and had to leave for the south. In his absence, the head of the Commissariat, Anatoly Lunacharsky, secured Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
'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 1922, which was known 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
Constructivism (art)
Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th...
and circus
Circus
A circus is commonly a travelling company of performers that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, unicyclists and other stunt-oriented artists...
-style effects were used in his most successful works of the time: Nikolai Erdman
Nikolai Erdman
Nikolay Robertovich Erdman was a Soviet dramatist and screenwriter primarily remembered for his work with Vsevolod Meyerhold in the 1920s. His plays, notably The Suicide , form a link in Russian literary history between the satirical drama of Nikolai Gogol and the post-World War II Theatre of the...
's The Mandate, Vladimir Mayakovsky
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.- Early life :...
’s Mystery-Bouffe
Mystery-Bouffe
Myster-Bouffe is a socialist dramatic play written by Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1918/1921. Mayakovsky stated in a preface to the 1921 edition that "in the future, all persons performing, presenting, reading or publishing Mystery-Bouffe should change the content, making it contemporary, immediate,...
, Fernand Crommelynck
Fernand Crommelynck
Fernand Crommelynck was a Belgian dramatist. He was born into a family of actors, the child of a French mother and a Belgian father and he himself was also an actor...
's The Magnanimous Cuckold, and Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin
Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin
Aleksandr Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin , was a Russian nobleman, chiefly known for the works he authored as an amateur playwright. His sister Evgenia Tur was a popular novelist, critic and journalist.-Biography:...
's Tarelkin's Death. Mayakovsky collaborated with Meyerhold several times, and Mayakovsky was said to write The Bed Bug especially for him; Meyerhold continued to stage Mayakovsky's productions even after the latter's suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
. The actors participating in Meyerhold’s productions acted according to the principle of biomechanics (only distantly related to the present
Biomechanics
Biomechanics is the application of mechanical principles to biological systems, such as humans, animals, plants, organs, and cells. Perhaps one of the best definitions was provided by Herbert Hatze in 1974: "Biomechanics is the study of the structure and function of biological systems by means of...
scientific use of the term), the system of actor training that was later taught in a special school created by Meyerhold.
Meyerhold gave initial boosts to the stage careers of some of the most distinguished comic actors of the USSR, including Sergey Martinson
Sergey Martinson
Sergey Alexandrovich Martinson was a Russian eccentric comic actor, the master of pantomime, buffoonery and grotesque. He became People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1964....
, Igor Ilyinsky
Igor Ilyinsky
Igor Vladimirovich Ilyinsky was a famous Russian actor and notable silent film comedian.-Early years:Igor Ilyinsky was born on 24 July 1901 in Moscow.At the age of 16 he entered the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre Studio and in half a year already debuted on the professional stage in Kommisarzhevskaya...
and Erast Garin
Erast Garin
Erast Pavlovich Garin was, together with Igor Ilyinsky and Sergey Martinson, one of the leading comic actors of Vsevolod Meyerhold's company and of the Soviet cinema. He was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1977....
. His landmark production of Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...
's The Government Inspector (1926) was described as the following:
"Energetic, mischievous, charming Ilyinsky left his post to the nervous, fragile, suddenly freezing, grotesquely anxious Garin. Energy was replaced by trance, the dynamic with the static, happy jesting humour with bitter and glum satire".
Meyerhold's acting technique had fundamental principles at odds with the American method actor
Method acting
Method acting is a phrase that loosely refers to a family of techniques used by actors to create in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters, so as to develop lifelike performances...
's conception. Where method acting melded the character with the actor's own personal memories to create the character’s internal motivation, Meyerhold connected psychological and physiological processes. He had actors focus on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion physically. Following Stanislavski's lead, he said that the emotional state of an actor was inextricably linked to his physical state (and vice versa), and that one could call up emotions in performance by practicing and assuming poses, gestures, and movements. He developed a number of body expressions that his actors would use to portray specific emotions and characters. (Although Stanislavski inspired method acting, he was also at odds with it, because like Meyerhold, his approach was psychophysical).
Meyerhold inspired revolutionary artists and filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein , né Eizenshtein, was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage"...
, who studied with Meyerhold. In his films, he used actors who worked in Meyerhold’s tradition. Eisenstein cast actors based on what they looked like and their expression, and followed Meyerhold's stylized acting methods. In Strike
Strike (film)
Strike is a 1925 silent film made in the Soviet Union by Sergei Eisenstein. It was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film, and he would go on to make The Battleship Potemkin later that year. It was acted by the Proletcult Theatre, and composed of six parts...
, the bourgeois are always obese, drinking, eating, and smoking, whereas the workers are more athletic.
Meyerhold was strongly opposed to socialist realism
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
. In the early 1930s, when Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
repressed all avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
art and experimentation, his works were proclaimed antagonistic and alien to the Soviet people. His theatre was closed down in January 1938; the ailing Constantin Stanislavski, then the director of an opera theatre now known as Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre, invited Meyerhold to lead his company. Stanislavski died in August 1938.
Arrest and death
Shortly after that his wife, the actress Zinaida Reich
Zinaida Reich
Zinaida Nikolayevna Reich was a Russian actress and became one of the main stars of the Meyerhold Theatre until it was closed under Joseph Stalin. Reich married the poet Sergey Yesenin and had two children with him. After their divorce, she married the director Vsevolod Meyerhold...
, was found murdered by multiple stab wounds in their Moscow apartment on July 15, 1939. Later that year Meyerhold was brutally tortured and forced to confess that he worked for Japanese and British intelligence agencies
Intelligence agency
An intelligence agency is a governmental agency that is devoted to information gathering for purposes of national security and defence. Means of information gathering may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis, cooperation with other institutions, and evaluation of public...
. He later recanted the confession in a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
.
The file on Meyerhold contains his letter from prison to Molotov:
He was sentenced to death by firing squad
Execution by firing squad
Execution by firing squad, sometimes called fusillading , is a method of capital punishment, particularly common in the military and in times of war.Execution by shooting is a fairly old practice...
on February 2, 1940, and executed the next day. The Soviet government cleared him of all charges in 1955, during the first wave of de-Stalinization
De-Stalinization
De-Stalinization refers to the process of eliminating the cult of personality, Stalinist political system and the Gulag labour-camp system created by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Stalin was succeeded by a collective leadership after his death in March 1953...
.
Marriage and family
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.Texts by Meyerhold
- Meyerhold on Theatre, trans. and ed. by Edward Braun, with a critical commentary, 1969. London: Methuen and New York: Hill and Wang.
- Meyerhold Speaks/Meyerhold Rehearses (Russian Theatre Archive), by V. Meyerhold, Alexander Gladkov (ed.) and Alma Law (ed.), Routledge, 1996
- Meyerhold at Work, Paul Schmidt (ed.), Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1996
Works on Meyerhold
- 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
- Vsevolod Meyerhold Annotated Bibliography, by David Roy, LTScotland, 2002
See also
- Nikolay OkhlopkovNikolay OkhlopkovNikolay Pavlovich Okhlopkov was a Soviet actor and theatre director who patterned his work after Meyerhold.He was born in Irkutsk, Siberia and started his acting career there in 1918...
- Mikhail Chekhov
- Yevgeny VakhtangovYevgeny VakhtangovYevgeny Bagrationovich Vakhtangov was a Russian actor and theatre director who founded the Vakhtangov Theatre. He was a friend and mentor of Michael Chekhov.Vakhtangov was born to Armenian-Russian parents from Ossetia in Vladikavkaz...
- Sergei Mikhailovich Tretyakov
- Andrei DrozninAndrei DrozninAndrei Droznin is a Russian theatre director and movement coach. He is perhaps best known for his stage movement technique that has become an essential part of theatre training programs throughout the world .-Career:...
- List of theatre directors
External links
- Meyerhold's Boris Godunov
- Meyerhold in the Encyclopædia Britannica
- Meyerhold Memorial Museum
- Meyerhold's theatrical system
- Meyerhold's Biomechanics, Etudes, Training
- Meyerhold's Biomechanics Training
- Meyerhold's biomechanics
- Oliver M. Sayler article on Meyerhold's theatre
- Meyerhold on russiandrama.net
- Moscow Meyerhold Theatre
- Meyerhold and Henri Barbusse
- Meyerhold & Mayakovsky - Biomechanics & the Communist Utopia
- Meyerhold in Russian periodicals
- Meyerhold's Theatre and Biomechanics DVD