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I’ve been thinking a lot about a an artist named Meyerhold these last 9 months. My degree is in theater with my concentration in both Experimental and Classical. Throughout my college years nearly every textbook that wasn’t classical was dominated by Meyerhold.
He was a contemporary of Stanislavsky, in fact he was more successful for his time and arguably more vital for what became modern performance (as we see it today from music videos to film to the musical Hamilton) but his name is far less known. This isn’t only because...
he was toward the end of Stanislavsky’s life brought on to be his assistant. It’s because, I believe, of something much darker that like him, is part of our modern era even if his name or artistry isn’t well known. In 1938 Stanislavsky said on his death bed...
“Take care of Meyerhold; he is my sole heir in the theatre - here or anywhere else." So what happened? Well, in simplistic terms one could say two things; the Marxist Russian Revolution which ushered in Leninism and then the rise of Stalin.
Now Meyerhold wasn’t opposed to the revolution; quite the opposite actually. Meyerhold was an ardent supporter of the the Revolution and a true believer. Today this might seem less than surprising. I ask you remember that as I go on. How well known he was, even outside the arts
is also something we can imagine now. Look at the way the play Hamilton blew away all expectations and even found its way onto Disney streaming when Broadway was shuttered. Meyerhold was the stuff back then and everyone knew who he was.
The Russian film maker Eisenstein said this “The God-like, incomparable Meyerhold, I beheld him then for the first time and I was to worship him all my life.” You may not have known, but you were watching one of Meyerhold’s innovations just recently if you saw this.
. In performance the utilization of symbolism and a method he called Biomechanics are Meyerhold’s babies you can say. Chaplin also exemplified his philosophy; movement with precision depicting a dichotomy of comedy and tragedy.
I mentioned Hamilton here’s one of many possible examples... So I mentioned he was a sincere supporter of communism and he lived during and post the revolution in Russia so what gives?
Well, along with his “purges” Stalin also decided that an art form called “formalism” was to sweep the nation. Stalin believed that this form; which was counter to Socialist Realism and placed the work over its political message was undesirable (problematic) and any artist
who’s work was not in keeping with socialist realism was labeled a formalist. Meyerhold swiftly began to realize that people would disappear for such work. However he was confident that his qualifications and dedication to the party as well as his fame and success and admiration
by his peers and critics and political friends including the president and party members earned him the right to continue his work and speak on it with that same precision and humor he was known and renowned for. He was mistaken.
Stalin ordered Meyerhold’s arrest and the murder of his wife. She was stabbed 17 times and her eyes gouged out, a cruel rebuke of Meyerhold’s philosophy and utilization of the body and symbol unwelcome in socialist realism. Meyerhold, while captive wrote furiously to his comrades
Many of the letters survive and were made part of a declassification of soviet russian documents in the mid 90s. Of course his theater was closed and his name was no longer welcome in polite Soviet company. He dared to say during a speech which is believed to have been his last
before his arrest was a criticism of what had come to the art world “..in hunting formalism, you have eliminated art.” With comrades as high as the President he did not think he or his wife had anything to fear. Perhaps his wife’s brutal execution was meant as proof; art lived.
Those letters included ones desperately penned to the President explaining in horror what was being done to his body. “They beat my back with the same rubber strap and punched my face, swinging their fists from a great height ... The intolerable physical and emotional pain caused
my eyes to weep unending streams of tears. Lying face down on the floor, I discovered that I could wriggle, twist and squeal like a dog when its master whips it ... When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after 18 hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour's time
for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever ...
"death, oh most certainly, death is easier than this!" the interrogated person says to himself. I began to incriminate myself in the hope that this, at least, would lead quickly to the scaffold.” The KGB's Literary Archive. Harvill: John Crowfoot. pp. 25–26. ‘95.
He wrote that letter to the head of the Soviet government, Vyacheslav Molotov in February 1940. He did as he foretold quickly, falsely confessed and was quickly sentenced to death and executed by firing squad the next day.
As more and more of our arts are relegated to be above all, political and any divergence from this formal status quo is punished or threatened, performers fired, institutions told to fall in line and show deference to the politic, I wonder how many people would be so quick...
to concede if they knew that it was quite likely they had Meyerhold to thank for the modern performance as we know it and even more if they knew what he suffered because, unlike many of the arbiters of cultural criticism and art today, he refused to allow even his own politics
and those of his fans, students, mentors and friends bend to their silence and the threat of Formalism. He refused to allow art to be destroyed by a false notion that all art was political. And he couldn’t believe that anyone else would allow it either.
