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Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold (; ) ( — 2 February 1940 ?) was a Russia n Theatrical Producer , Director , and actor whose provocative experiments in unconventional theatre made him one of the seminal forces in modern theatre. LIFE AND WORK Meyerhold was born in Penza on January 28 (February 10), 1874 into the family of a Russian-German wine manufacturer Emil Meyerhold. After completing school in 1895 he studied law at Moscow University but never completed his degree. On his 21st birthday, Meyerhold converted from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity , and accepted "Vsevolod" as an Orthodox Christian name. His acting career began when in 1896 he became a student of the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School under the guidance of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko , co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre , where Meyerhold later served as an actor. There he played 18 roles such as Vasiliy Shuiskiy in "Tzar Feodor Ioanovich" and Ivan the Terrible in "The Death of Ivan the Terrible" (both by Alexey Tolstoy), and Treplev in Chekhov's " The Seagull ". After leaving the Moscow Art Theatre in 1902, Meyerhold participated in a number of theatrical projects, as both a director / producer and an actor. Each of his projects served as 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 Kommisarzhevskaya theatre in 1906-1907. 's portrait of Meyerhold.]] Meyerhold continued his search for theatrical innovation during the decade 1907-1917, while working with 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 to acting in the traditions of Commedia Dell'arte , rethinking them for the contemporary theatrical reality. His theoretical concepts of the ‘conditional theatre’ were elaborated on 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 Theater 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 theaters, effectively nationalizing them under Bolshevik control. However, 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 theaters and dismissed Kameneva in June 1919See Robert Leach and Victor Borovsky. A History of Russian Theatre, Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-521-43220-0 p. 303.. , 1916]] After returning to Moscow, Meyerhold founded his own theatre in 1922, which was known as '''s ''The Mandate'', Vladimir Mayakovsky ’s ''Mistery-Bouffe'', Fernand Crommelynck 's ''Le Cocu Magnifique'', and Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin ’s ''Tarelkin’s Death''. Mayakovsky collaborated with Meyerhold several times, and it is said that Mayakovsky wrote '' 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 Igor Ilyinsky and Erast Garin . In his landmark production of ''The Inspector General'' (1926): "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".Konstantin L. Rudnitsky. ''Meyerhold the Director''. Moscow, 1969. Meyerhold's acting technique had fundamental principles which would seem to be at odds with the modern-day Method Actor 's conception of it. 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 and focused on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing outward emotion. He argued 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. (right), 2000.]] Meyerhold inspired revolutionary artists and filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein , who studied with Meyerhold and whose films employed 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!'', which portrays the beginnings of the Bolshevik Revolution , the oppressive bourgeois are always obese, drinking, eating, and smoking, whereas the workers are athletic and chiseled. Meyerhold was strongly opposed to on February 1, 1940. The date of his death is unclear; some sources say he was Executed on February 2, 1940. The Soviet government cleared him of all charges in 1955 , during the first wave of Destalinization . The file on Meyerhold contains his letter from prison to Molotov: "The investigators began to use force on me, a sick 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap... For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal haemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain. "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." The interrogator, he added, urinated in his mouth. Meyerhold wrote this letter on January 13 1940 having confessed to whatever it was they wanted him to confess to (spying for the British and the Japanese, among other charges). Stalin needed confessions; he followed the progress of certain interrogations (lasting months or even years), and couldn't sleep until confessions were secured. NOTES SEE ALSO 's ''Puppet Show'' (1906).]]
BIBLIOGRAPHY in English: Texts by Meyerhold
Works on Meyerhold
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