1916
Vsevolod Meyerhold by Boris Grigoriev
1925
Saint Peterburg
Vsevolod Meyerhold and Zinaida Meyerhold-Reich
Photograph of the Russian actor Vsevolod Meyerhold (Всеволод Эмильевич Мейерхольд) preparing for his role as Konstantin in the Moscow Art Theatre's 1898 production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. Taken at Pushkino during rehearsals.
Alexander Golovin's portrait of Meyerhold
Meyerhold's mugshot, taken at the time of his arrest by Soviet police
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/8492639067/?tag=2022091-20
2010
(A major reissue of a book which is used by students of Me...)
A major reissue of a book which is used by students of Meyerhold across the world This was the first collection of Meyerhold's writings and utterances to appear in English and covers his entire career as a director from 1902 to 1939. These are supplemented by a critical commentary, relating Meyerhold to his period and containing descriptions, based on eye-witness accounts, of all his major productions.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0413387909/?tag=2022091-20
(Russian Edition)
Russian Edition
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/2742755594/?tag=2022091-20
Vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold was born Karl Kasimir Theodor Meierhold in Penza on 28 January 1874 to Russian-German wine manufacturer Emil Fyodorovich Meierhold and his Russian-Dutch wife, Alvina Danilovna (née van der Neese). He was the youngest of eight children.
After completing school in 1895, Meierhold 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 (now Russian Academy of Theatre Arts).
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. 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.
For his presentation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in 1906, Meyerhold rebelled against the stylized naturalism popularized by Konstantin Stanislavsky’s art theatre and instead directed his actors to behave in puppetlike, mechanistic ways. This production marked the beginning of an innovative theatre in Russia that became known as biomechanics. Meyerhold’s unorthodox approach to the theatre led him to break with Komissarzhevskaya in 1908.
Thereafter, drawing upon the conventions of commedia dell’arte and Asian theatre, he went on to stage productions in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg). During 1920-1935 Meyerhold achieved his greatest artistic success as a director, beginning with Fernand Crommelynck’s Le Cocu magnifique (1920; The Magnificent Cuckold) and ending with his controversial production in 1935 of Aleksandr Pushkin’s story "Pikovaya Dama" ("The Queen of Spades").
Although he embraced the Russian Revolution of 1917, his fiercely individualistic temperament and artistic eccentricity brought reproach and condemnation from Soviet critics. He was accused of mysticism and neglect of Socialist Realism. Meyerhold refused to submit to the constraints of artistic uniformity and defended the artist’s right to experiment.
In 1939 he was arrested and imprisoned. Weeks later, his actress-wife, Zinaida Raikh, was found brutally murdered in their apartment. Nothing more was heard of Meyerhold in the West until 1958, when his death in 1942 was announced in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia; in a later edition the date was changed to 1940.
(A major reissue of a book which is used by students of Me...)
(Russian Edition)
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).
Quotes from others about the person
In autumn 1921, Meyerhold was appointed head of the State Higher Theatre Workshops, in Moscow, where one of his first students was Sergei Eisenstein, who later wrote: "The God-like, incomparable Meyerhold, I beheld him then for the first time and I was to worship him all my life."
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.
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 poet Sergey Yesenin and had two children with him. After their divorce, she married the director Vsevolod Meyerhold.
