Reflection on Meyerhold

It was very interesting to prepare a workshop about Meyerhold, especially for me, as a student who is really interested in history of Uzbekistan and USSR. The life and work of Meyerhold, in my opinion, is great and can be compared to Stanislavski’s. They were living in the same time period and were focusing on completely different aspects but doing almost the same work – making and building a way for better acting performance – to make theatre more realistic. The work of Meyerhold is very significant for the development of nowadays physical theatre.
Vsevolod Meyerhold was born in 1874 in Penza, Russian Empire. After abandoning his study of law he began his training as an actor at the school of Nemirovich-Datchenko and Stanislavski. It is common misconception that Meyerhold is the antithesis of Stanislavski. Meyerhold was an enthusiastic follower of Stanislavski; Meyerhold adopted his system. After some time he began to look for his own style of theatre practicing – for his own nonrealistic conception of theatre. Meyerhold and Stanislavski were respecting each other’s artistic endeavors throughout their careers. He, however, thought that Stanislavski is focusing only in inner life of the actor and felt that the actor inherently knew/know how to think, feel and remember but they did not know how express feelings and emotions through their body. In other words, they study how to express everything emotionally correct but never do that in a physical way. And that was skill, he thought, needs development. In 1913 he founds his own studio. In 1934 Stalin mandates only acceptable form of Soviet Art would be socialist realism, while Meyerhold moved far beyond. In 1940s Meyerhold is repressed and killed by so called Stalin’s Repressions. In 1972 Moscow Theatre of Satire invited Nikolay Kustov, who was, as well as Sergei Eisenstein, the students of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Kustov was supposed to trainee 8 actors the still-forbidden technique. Gennadiy Bogdanov is one of the 8...