Meyerhold and Stanislavsky:

Art and Politics in the Russian Theatre

(1898 -1940)

by Gerard George for Russian Theater Website

What we need is a new kind of theatre. .. We need new forms.... I don't want to show life how it is, or the way it should be, but the way it is in dreams.

Treplyov/Meyerhold, The Seagull (1898)

I'd like to be in your shoes for an hour, to see through your eyes and find out what you're thinking and what kind of person you are.Trigorin/Stanislavsky, The Seagull (1998)

Stanislavsky is a real artist, he transformed himself into the general so completely that he lived his life down to the smallest detail. The audience didn't need any explanations. ... In my opinion that is the direction the theatre should take. Lenin (1918)

It has become clear that Meyerhold cannot and apparently will not comprehend Soviet reality......Do Soviet art and the Soviet public really need such a theatre?

Platon Kerzhentsev (1937)

A towering and bizarre personality, shrouded in legends and myths, an object of both hatred and veneration. .... Meyerhold earned worldwide renown in his lifetime, but his end was that of a martyr. Twentieth-century theater is unthinkable without Meyerhold.....

Alla Michailova

Whatever thread one takes up in the history of twentieth-century drama leads back to Stanislavsky.

James Roose-Evans

Theatre is not a mirror to life, it is a magnifying glass.

Mayakovsky

Article (48 Pages)

Stanislavsky and Meyerhold

Art and Politics in the Russian Theatre

1898-1938

Preface

Stanislavsky and Meyerhold , the two great Russian theatrical innovators of the twentieth century, had a curious relationship. They first worked together in 1898 at the inception of the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavsky was the 37 years old co-founder of the Art Theatre, and Meyerhold at 24 was one of the young actors invited to join the troupe. Meyerhold, amid controversy, left the group in 1902 and formed his own company in the provinces where he attempted new symbolist staging along with the more conventional theatrical techniques he had learned at the MAT.

In 1905 Stanislavsky, then interested in the symbolist theatre, asked the young Meyerhold to return to head a Studio dedicated to experimental theatre. Displeased with Meyerhold's work, Stanislavsky never allowed the work of the Studio to be shown publicly. Meyerhold was to spend the remainder of his career deriding the realistic theatre and working in the theatrical (later branded by the Soviets as the "formalist") mode. Stanislavsky, although always experimenting, was to perfect and defend the realist method of theatrical presentation and acting method based on psychological truth on stage.

They did not work together again until the mid 1930's when both were old men. They had little face to face encounter for thirty years and were professional rivals throughout this period. But this did not diminish their respect for one another. They began to meet together from 1936 until Stanislavsky's death in 1938. Meyerhold completed an opera production Stanislavsky had been working on at the time of his death and at Stanislavsky's request was made director of the Stanislavsky Opera Theatre. During this period when the Communist Party was bent on destroying Meyerhold and his theatre, Stanislavsky was one of he few to come to his side. That Stanislavsky should be the only one to offer Meyerhold an opportunity to work in the theatre when his reputation and his life were at stake seems a strange turn. But no stranger than the tortuous relationship these men had to the changing political power structure of Russia during the four decades in which they dominated the Russian stage.

Introduction

One cannot fully understand the theatre of Meyerhold and Stanislavsky without taking into account the politics of their time. Their professioanal lives spanned the era from Nicholas I to Stalin during which they saw their country go from one form of repressive autocracy to an even starker one. Finally, in the 1930's both Stanislavsky and Meyerhold became the unfortunate victims of Soviet politics. As a result Meyerhold lost his life and Stanislavsky lost his personal freedom. How and why did this happen? How were they affected by the politics of the time in which they lived? How did their politics affect their art?

During the first part of their professional careers from 1898 to 1917, Russian political life was dominated by tzarist attempts to perpetuate autocratic rule over the peasant, merchant and urban working classes in favor of aristocratic privilege. Attempts at organizing theatres to reach the masses were suppressed, and plays were heavily censored for any hint of political dissent or intent to incite the masses An unintentional consequence of this suppression was the development of an aesthetically dominated pre-Revolutionary theatre beginning in 1905, which provided the groundwork for the great theatrical innovations of the decade after the Revolution.

When the tzar was deposed in 1917, it seemed to Russian artists that it might be possible to fulfill the intelligentsia's nineteenth century progressive ideal of bringing culture closer to "the people". ⁽¹⁾ This proved difficult to acheive because by 1921 the country was in a state of chaos and ruin. From 1917 to 1928 Russia lived through the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), the Civil War between monarchists and the Communists (1917-1921), and then attempts by the victorious Communists to restructure all aspects of Russian society. The Bolsheviks recognized the potential of the theatre to further the aims of the new socialist experiment and all types of theatrical productions flourished, from street theatre to highly polished professional theatre. Lenin's New Economics Policy, (NEP), which allowed limited capitalistic forms to prevail in commerce and agriculture was a brief period (1921-1928) when innovation was tolerated by the Soviets. This was the great period for experimentation by the avant-garde of which Meyerhold was the leader, buiding on his experimental work during the pre-Revolutionary era. The 1920'a are considered the high hey-day of the Russian theatre. Ironically this was also a period of emerging orthodoxy as the government was to take more and more control over the theatre and all other aspects of Soviet life.

In 1928 Stalin introduced the first of his Five Year Plans and all experimentation in the economy and the arts was abruptly stopped. The early Stalinist period from 1928 to 1938 witnessed a hardening of the Communist line and personal and economic freedom faded. All attempts at individualist expression in the arts were stifled. ⁽²⁾ The theatre, just as industry and agriculture, was to come under the complete control of the government. It was the time of the show trials and executions. Suppression ruled the day. Any attempt to present plays in any but the prescribed form to further the ends of Stalin's vision of the socialist revolution were forbidden. This was translated into a movement to eradicate all non realistic theatre art and allow only new plays with a positive socialist message. During this period Meyerhold was declared an "Enemy of the People" and executed, and Stanislavsky because of his deteriorating health became a virtual prisoner of the State. His theatre came under the personal control of Stalin who made Stanislavsky's theatre and acting techniques the model for all Soviet theatres.

Astonishingly, amid this turbulent backdrop, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold managed to bring transparency to the central theatrical issues of the century in Russia: struggles between an actor centered and a director centered theatre; between a "realistic" theatre and a "theatre of convention"; between "humanistic" and "formalistic" concepts of theatre art and, finally in the Stalin era, between the role of the theatre as an art or as a vehicle in service of the political status quo.

I

The Pre-Revolutionary Period:

The Search for an Open Theatre

1898-1917

Prior to the 1917 Revolution Stanislavsky and Meyerhold both held the liberal and progressive political views typical of the intellectual young members of the merchant class into which they were born. ⁽³⁾ In accordance with that philosophy, they would have been against tzarist oppression in the arts and would have lamented the tzar's reluctance to have Russia join the liberal democratic countries of Europe. As persons of the theatre they wanted to help bring culture to the masses. However, they held different views on how this should be accomplished and what the proper relationship should be between politics and the theatre.

Their attitudes towards towards both politics and art were formed prior to the Revolution of 1905. Stanislavsky was by that time an important and established force in the realistic movement, firm, even then, in his belief that the theatre should be apolitical. The younger Meyerhold,in the first decade of the century, was an early advocate of the anti-realist style in the theatre and a staunch believer in the idea that art should have a political and social message. It is with some irony that Meyerhold, who was a product of the avant-garde aesthetic tradition of the early twentieth century based on the premise that art existed for its own sake should become, in maturity, a political person, while Stanislavsky, a product of the nineteenth century realistic school, which viewed art as didactic and related to social moral or political themes, should be apolitical throughout his life. Their early lives shed some light on how they developed these differing and somewhat anomalous attitudes.

Before 1898: Early Influences

Stanislavsky was from one of the wealthiest and most influential families in Moscow, owners of a silver and gold thread factory. The young Stanislavsky had the best that bourgeois life could afford. From an early age, he was exposed to both the world of politics and art in Moscow, in the last part of the nineteenth century when it was the artistic and mercantile center of Russia. In 1877, when Stanislavsky was 14, his father was elected head of the merchant class in Moscow, one of the most important and influential positions in the city, the highest position a person not of the aristocracy could reach. ⁽⁴⁾ The Alexei family home was noted for its literary and musical soirees and concerts. Actors from the Maly, dancers from the Bolshoi and musicians and writers were regular visitors. Stanislavsky and his brothers and sisters performed theatricals in the theatre at their country estate. This privileged exposure to artistic Moscow encouraged Stanislavsky to become a theatre dilettante from early childhood. As a young man, his aesthetic tastes and attitudes were formed by his exposure to the Russian classical tradition of the nineteenth century. His cultural education was assimilated from the plays of Moliere, Shakespeare and Corneille, which he read in preparation for his visits to the Maly. He read Shchepkin's autobiography and was affected by the realistic theoretical writings of Pushkin and Gogol. He was deeply influenced by his theatre going which included seeing Salvini and the Saxe-Meiningen troupe on their visits to Moscow. ⁽⁵⁾

In 1886, his family made entrance into formal politics when his cousin, Nikoli, at the age of thirty-one became Mayor of Moscow and appointed Stanislavsky, then twenty-two, Chairman of the Russian Music Society and Conservatoire. Young Konstantin worked with leading composers such as Tchaikovsky and the prominent patrons of fine art, dealing with problems of program-planning, the negotiation of artists' contracts and improvement of the Society's school. These skills were to prove helpful later in life. Stanislavsky was of a practical bent and successfully ran the family business after his father's death in 1893 until the 1917 Revolution. He enjoyed solving the pragmatic problems afforded by his work in the family business and later as a director in the theatre. It was this trait of pragmatically adapting to the situation at hand that undoubtedly helped him through difficult times such as his differences with Nemirovich at the Moscow Art Theatre , the loss of his fortune at the time of the Revolution and his adjustment to the early Bolshevik regime under Lenin and then to the totalitarianism of Stalin.

In 1888, Stanislavsky was to begin his departure from his family's orbit and eventually join the professional theatre where he was exposed to more progressive sentiments and ideas. He gave up his prestigious post at the Conservatory to form the Society of Art and Literature with Alexander Fedotov, a former member of the Maly Theatre. Part of the Society's program involved amateur theatricals. It was in this area that Stanislavsly was to put most of his energy. Fedotov, who was trained in the realistic school of Shchepkin, was to have great influence on Stanislavsky's political, social and aesthetic views. Not only did he revolutionize Stanislavsky's acting technique, but he also introduced him to the ideas of the Russian intelligentsia and Vissarion Belinski, the leading Russian polemicist and critic of the early nineteenth century, who coined the word "intelligentsia" and is credited with setting the agenda for all discussion on the relationship between art and society for at least a century after his death in 1848.

Stanislavsky came to believe in Belinski's ideas concerning the relationship between the poet and politics:

[He must not] be the instrument of this or that party or of that sect, which might be ephemeral and disappear without a trace, but the instrument of the profound and secret thoughts of a whole society, the instruments of aspirations of which they may only as yet be dimly aware. In other words the poet should express not the particular and the contingent but the general and the necessary which give the age in which he lives its flavor and meaning. ⁽⁶⁾

Benedetti finds in Belinski the rationale for Stanislavsky's decision to become part of the professional theatre as well as the foundation for the social and political values that Stanislavsky held for the remainder of his life:

"In Belinski's philosophy Stanislavsky found a moral justification for his own passion to perform and ideas that were consonant with his family's sense of social responsibility and the ethical standards by which he had been brought up. The humanitarian and libertarian values to which he was now committed went beyond his father's notions of philanthropy but stopped well short of a revolutionary ideology." ⁽⁷⁾

Through Fedotov, Stanislavsky came to accept the ideals of the Russian intelligentsia - that artistically, intellectually and socially aware cultural elite, who viewed their task as modernizing and liberalizing the stagnant and repressive society of tzarist nineteenth century Russia. With almost religious fervor they felt the obligation to raise the cultural level of poorer classes,an idea later taken up by the Bolsheviks. One of Fedotov's ideas that impressed Stanislavsky was his idea of a "peoples theatre" with seats at prices that could be afforded by all classes. In 1870 Fedotov had formed such a theatre, and Stanislavsky was to be under the influence of this idea until the time of the Revolution and beyond. In fact, Stanislavsky was later to view the Revolution as an opportunity to turn this ideal into fact.

Meyerhold's upbringing offers contrast to that of Stanislavsky and helps explain the different social and political views they were to hold after the Revolution. Meyerhold, fifteen years younger than Stanislavsky, came of age in the incendiary decade of the 1890's when the advanced progressive and revolutionary thinkers were united in their desire to bring down the existing oppressive rule of the tzarists. He was exposed and attracted to the radical members of the small city where he was raised. He was therefore more easily seduced by the revolutionary rhetoric of the time than Stanislavky who was the product of a more sophisticated,privileged and sheltered environment.

Meyerhold was born into a Lutheran family of German-Jewish background in the town of Penza, about 350 miles southeast of Moscow, a trading center and popular haven for dissident writers and intellectuals expelled from Moscow and St Petersburg. The restless and independent minded young Meyerhold held antagonistic attitudes toward his family, his ethnic background, and the values of the mercantile class of his father. He was the eighth and last child in the family. His father was a distiller and owner of four substantial properties in town and more concerned with his two older sons who were the likely successors to the family business than he was with young Karl-Theodore. Meyerhold grew up under the influence of his mother and came to share her love for music and the theatre. To the dismay of his father, he was on easy terms with the workmen in the distillery and on more than one occasion he fell in with town socialists, contrary to the wishes of his stern Bismarckian father. His father died when he was eighteen and three years later Meyerhold left home, renounced the family's Lutheran religion in favor of the Orthodox faith, became a Russian national and took the name of Vsevolod Emilievich. This allowed him to affirm his perception of himself as essentially Russian, avoid being conscripted into the Prussian army and made his marriage to a local Russian girl easier. Braun, Meyerhold's biographer concludes that he seemed untouched by his father's mercantile values and enjoyed "the typical upbringing of a nineteenth-century middle class Russian liberal". ⁽⁸⁾

He started to study law, but soon abandoned those studies in favor of the theatre. His first venture into the theatre was to join the open-air Popular Theatre in Penza, a company organized for the specific purpose of establishing links between the intelligentsia and the working class. This was an act typical of some young bourgeois people of the 1890's who took to the country areas to bring culture with a tinge of social rebellion to the country side, whether it was welcomed there or not. In 1895, he was accepted as an acting student at the Moscow Philharmonic Society by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko who introduced him to naturalistic acting. Meyerhold was one of the original members of the Moscow Art Theater in 1898 and stayed with them for their first seasons. Braun explains that during this period the intellectually curious Meyerhold was also interested in learning about more than the theatre:

" Meyerhold was all too aware of the limitations of a drama school education, and his notebooks from this period reveal a remarkably wide range of reading embracing political theory, philosophy, aesthetics, art history and psychiatry. Before he left Penza the exiled young Social Democrat and the future symbolist poet, Remiziv, had introduced him to Marxism and he then embarked on a more systematic study of it, together with the theories of the "Legal Marxists" Struve and Kamensky". ⁽⁹⁾

Remiziv was later to become the literary consultant for Meyerhold's troupe "Comrades of the New Drama" in 1902 and 1903, after Meyerhold abandoned the Moscow Art Theatre. Under the influence of Remiziv, Meyerhold presented the works of Hauptmann, Ibsen, Gorky and Chekhov. But these were to represent the last plays dealing with important social themes that Meyerhold produced until after the Revolution. During this period Meyerhold also directed some symbolist plays and experimented with symbolist staging. It was this work that was to catch the imagination of Stanislavsky and the theatrical elite of St Petersburg and allowed him to begin his work in the non-realistic style in his work, first with Stanislavsky's Studio Theatre in 1905 and then at Vera Kommissarzhevakaya's symbolist theatre in St Petersburg in 1906. After 1905, the course of his life was to change as he was drawn into the refined and decadent avant-garde world of pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg,a seemingly incongruent turn given his commitment to the Bolshevik cause in the 1920's.

1898-1905: Failed Attempts at an Open Theatre

In the years before the Bolshevik Revolution, the oppressive influence of the tzar and his administrators on the theatre were felt principally in controlling the repertory and the organization of the Russian theatre. Foremost was the effect of the censors, with whom both Meyerhold and Stanislavsky had battles, Meyerhold in the provinces between 1902 and 1905 and later in the 20's and 30's and Stanislavsky throughout his career with the Moscow Art Theatre. In fact, the first play presented by he Moscow Art Theatre, A. Tolstoy's Tzar Fiodor Ioannovich, ran into censorship problems because of its political implications. Then there was the opposition of the authorities to any attempt to form theatre companies structured along the lines of a "free" or "open" theatre to reach poorer audiences that could not afford the prices of the Imperial and commercial theatres, an idea which interested both Meyerhold and Stanislavsky at the beginning of the century.

In its formative stages Stanislavsky had hoped that the Moscow Art Theatre would be allowed to function as such an open theatre to reach students, workers and other of the poor intelligentsia. ⁽¹⁰⁾ In later years, especially between the time of the World War and the 1917 Revolution, whenever Stanislavsky lost heart over the direction the Moscow Art Theatre was taking under the influence of Nemirovich and its board of directors, he would return to the idea of setting up a series of popularly priced theatres in smaller cities outside of Moscow and St Petersburg to reach a wider audience. None of these schemes came to fruition.

Stanislavsky and Nemirovich in founding the Moscow Art Theatre were mainly concerned with reformation of the aesthetic and artistic aspects of Russian theatre life - acting style, scenic affects, theatrical training and discipline. However, they also shared the desire to create an open theatre to reach a wide audience. Even before his involvement with Nemirovich, Stanislavsky had outlined a scheme to set up touring companies in selected towns that would bring plays of quality to surrounding areas. He would call these "open" theatres hoping the authorities would find this a less subversive term than "popular" theatre. Nemirovich also interested in the idea of a popular theatre had submitted a similar proposal to the government authorities prior to his discussions with Stanislavsky. In their famous eighteen hour discussion, one of their points of agreement was to found an Art Theatre with seats at popular prices. In fact, Stanislavsky's first title in association with the formation of the Moscow At Theatre was Principal Director of the Association for the Establishment of the Moscow Open Theatre. During the early stages of planning of the MAT, Stanislavsky, attempting to use political influence requested of Prince Golitsin, Chairman of the City Council, an annual grant of 15,000 rubles. As the notion was to provide serious theatre at popular prices, the matter was referred to the Moscow's Welfare Committee. It took one year for the proposal to be reviewed and declined. This forced the two to find money from liberal and like-minded backers so that the Theatre could open on schedule and eventually resulted in the Art Theatre being run as a stock company, forced to operate administratively along the more conventional lines of the commercial theatre.

In his application to the Moscow City Council Nemirovich had carefully stated that the theatre was aiming at the middle- or lower middle-class audiences, not stressing that they might be reaching and influencing the more incendiary revolutionary political elements among the poor and the disenfranchised. But the authorities were hostile to even Nemirovich's subtle supplication. During the first season of the "Moscow Art-Open Theatre", a performance of Locandiera was given for a factory workers and Nemirovich was called before Moscow Chief of Police Trepov. It was explained to him that permission of a special fourth censor should have been applied for because the material was to be presented to a working-class audience. He was told in no uncertain terms that for this the theatre could be in serious trouble. Shortly after this the word "open" was deleted from the title of the theatre. It was not until the Soviet period that another opportunity would present itself for the Art theatre to make a case for its mission as a theatre for a people's theatre.

Foiled in its attempt to form an open theatre, the major way in which the MAT expressed its sympathy with the political views of the liberal intelligentsia was through its early repertory. This was most evident in its presentation of the plays of Gorky prior to the repression brought on by the abortive Revolution of 1905. Also early in the century, the Art Theatre's presentations of the plays of Chekhov showing the decay and lack of energy in the Russian upper class could be interpreted as a political statement critical of the status quo of tzarist society. Even the plays of Alexei Tolstoy had their subtle political messages in showing the evils of tzarist oppression in historical settings. This is not to say that Stanislavsky approved of a political theatre. This is an area in which Stanislavsky and Meyerhold had early disagreement. ⁽¹¹⁾

Meyerhold became critical of Stanislavsky during the first season of the Art Theatre when he sensed Stanislavsky's hesitancy to take positions on social issues. Meyerhold wrote to his wife in 1901 during the rehearsal period of a Hedda Gabler that Stanislavsky was directing:

"Are we as actors merely to act? Surely we should be thinking as well. We need to know why we are acting, what we are acting, and whom we are instructing or attacking through our performance. And to do that we need to know the psychological significance of the play, to establish whether a character is positive or negative, to understand which society or section of society the author is for or against." ⁽¹²⁾

But it was to be many years before he lived up to these sentiments in his work.

Stanislavsky thought that the theatre should take a non-partisan attitude toward politics and political questions and that justice and humanity depicted on the stage would allow the audience to draw its own conclusions. In 1901 on the day that a student demonstration was met by brutal retaliation and bloodshed by the tzar's troops, Stanislavsky was playing Doctor Stockmann in An Enemy of the People in Saint Petersburg. Accounts of the indicate that the academics and students in the audience reacted to Stockman's speeches as though they were political manifestos. But this was Stanislavsky gave his reaction:

"Up on the stage we had no thoughts of politics. On the contrary, the demonstrations provoked by the play took us completely by surprise. For us Stockman was neither a politician nor a public orator; he was simply an honorable idealist, a just man, a friend to his country and his people such as any true and honest citizen should be." ⁽¹³⁾

Meyerhold who was present at the demonstration had quite a different attitude. In a letter to Chekhov he wrote:

" I feel frankly outraged at the police tyranny that I witnesses in St. Petersburg on 4 March,and I am incapable of devoting myself quietly to creative work while blood is flowing and everything is calling me to battle. I want to burn with the spirit of the times. I want all servants of the stage to recognize their lofty destiny. I am disturbed at my comrades' failure to raise above narrow caste interests which are alien to the interests of society at large. Yes, the theatre can play an enormous part in the transformation of the whole of existence." ⁽¹⁴⁾

But their personal attitudes aside, the political situation in Russia after 1905 allowed little opportunity for either Meyerhold or Stanislavsky to represent social or political issues on stage. The concerns of theatre people became more esthetic than political in the yeras before the Revolution.

1905-1917: Symbolist Theatre

When it became apparent after the failed Revolution of 1905, that tzar Nicholas was not serious about granting reforms, the arts were more severely curtailed than before and the work of Meyerhold and Stanislavsky became more concerned with Symbolist and other anti-realistic styles. This was typical of all Russian art after 1905. ⁽¹⁵⁾Some attribute preoccupation with the surreal to the political depression that overtook the country in the wake of the massacre of Russian peasants during the 1905 Revolution, the disillusionment caused by the loss of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and the economic depression at that time. Others attribute the retreat to symbolism as pragmatic reaction to the actions of the tzar and the secret police who were engaged in a desperate attempt to control the revolutionaries and therefore suppressed even the more moderate progressives. Then finally there was the Great War in 1914 which sapped the spirit and the strength from the creative intelligentsia. It was this participation in the modern artistic avant-garde movement, which affected all of the developed countries in Europe at the beginning of the century, that bound the Russian arts to the art of Europe at the time. ⁽¹⁶⁾ This bond to the West was to remain firm during the first decade after the Revolution but was to the weaken by the 1930's.

In the climate of increased repression, the world of the dream and hallucination were safer to depict than the real world and the theatre work of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold from 1905 to 1917 did not reflect the contemporary turbulence and violence that characterized Russian political life. One would not guess from their work that there was a serious socialist movement afoot; that radical writers such as Gorki were forced into exile; that in 1905 peasants naively protesting to the tzar were slaughtered; that feeble attempts to set establish democratic practices were inflaming the passions of both radicals and moderates among the intelligentsia, and that the unpopular Great War was sapping the resources of the country. Because of the severe censorship and excessive watchfulness of the authorities, their work during that period was of necessity confined to involvement with aesthetic theories, controversies and theatrical practices of the day. ⁽¹⁷⁾

The theatre and the other arts in Russia from 1906 to 1925 were heavily influenced by the symbolist movement with its emphasis on aestheticism and mysticism and its prejudice against realism. Because Meyerhold became recognized as the leader of this movement his influence on the talented young directors of this period was to surpass that of Stanislavsky during this period. Meyerhold brought to practice the ideas of symbolists such as Valery Briussov who denounced the Art Theatre for "its unnecessary faithfulness to life". His work also followed the ideas of Georg Fuchs from Munich, Gordon Craig, Appia, and Isadora Duncan with their interest in three dimensional space, dance, body movement, and masks. Meyerhold influenced by this thinking would at times treat the actor as marionette when he thought the human body and face were not the correct medium for reaching the audience on the new level suggested by the symbolists. This new avant-garde movement came directly on the heals of Stanislavsky's early triumphs in realistic theatre. Stanislavsky's realism had scarcely been heralded as revolutionary, before the negative critical reaction to it set in by the followers of the symbolist movement. It was their heady thinking and Meyerhold's personal associations with the people fostering these new vibrant ideas, which were to affect Meyerhold's stage work in St Petersburg during the first decade of the century. Meyerhold took the ideas of the avant-garde and put them into practice in his theatre work during this period and came to be recognized as the leading director in the new anti-realistic style.

As the work of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold became less and less involved with contemporary political and social events and issues, the possibility of creating an open theatre faded. Stanislavsky's work at the MAT in the decade before the Revolution continued to attract the young urban intelligentsia especially students and the educated clerks, while Meyerhold's audience was composed of the cultural elite of St Petersburg enthralled by avant garde. Neither was producing 'open theatre" for the masses. Meyerhold became director of the symbolist theatre of the actress, Vera Komissarzhevskaya, in 1906. After a falling out with her he was unexpectedly asked to became a director at the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg. His contract with the Imperial theatre forbade avant-garde or political work, so used the name "Dr Dapertutto" producing twenty-four presentations in small theatres, assembly rooms, cabarets and even private flats. His concern was in the commedia dell' arte and Harlequin rather than with social or political theatre. At the Imperial Theatre he directed such productions Tristan and Isolde and Moliere's Don Juan. At Vera Komissarzhevskaya's theatre he directed Maeterlink's Sister Beatrice using bas relief staging, a color-coded production of Hedda Gabler, and Blok's The Fairground Booth, where a clown bleeds cranberry juice blood. As Dr Dapertutto, he directed a pantomime version of Schnitzler's Columbine's Scarf.

Stanislavsky also toyed with the non realistic theatre in the period after 1905. After the failure of Meyerhold's directed Studio Theatre, Stanislavsky directed Maeterlink's Blue Bird (1908), Hamsun's The Drama of Life and Andreiev's The Life of Man (1907) and Hamlet with Gordon Craig ( 1909-1911), all in non realistic style. Losing interest in the type of theatre, his major preoccupation after 1909 was in perfecting the acting method which later became the System. He spent much time examining his own acting and trying to record and understand the process of acting and how this process could be taught. In the last years of tzarist rule, he was more interested in self examination than the examination of society or politics.

The productions that Stanislavsky and Meyerhold were working on at the eve of the Revolution are revealing of the non political theatre they were both engaged in. At that time, Meyerhold directed the most lavish production ever produced at the Imperial theatre, Lermontov's romantic drama Masquerade. Stanislavsky was having problems over artistic differences with Nemirovich and was going through one of his "dry" acting periods. Nemirovich relieved Stanislavsky of the role he could not perfect in Tolstoy's The Village of Stepanchikovo. So deeply was he affected by this that he was never to create another original role on the stage. Both were preoccupied with aesthetic and personal considerations while in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg gunshots could be heard echoing inside the theatres where their plays were being performed. But the Revolution was to change the direction of both their lives in unanticipated ways.

II

Political Commitment:

The Search for a Soviet Theatre

1917 to 1928

The period from 1917 to 1928 is considered the hey-day of the modern Russian theatre. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Many thought that the new society required a new theatre. Masses of people came to the theatre for the first time. In the early days of the Revolution, practically all theatres were subsidized and theatres could experiment without worrying about bankruptcy or deficits. Freed for a time from commercial restraints, it can be said that the remarkable development of the Russian theatre from 1917 to 1928 was motivated by the search for a socialist theatre. ⁽¹⁹⁾ At the time it appeared that Meyerhold's innovative approach emanating from his pre-revolutionary work in St Petersburg might be the answer. But as it turned out Stanislavsky's realistic theatre, which appealed to the Bolshevik leaders was to become the accepted style.

Meyerhold embraced the Bolshevik cause from the beginning of the new regime, secure in his belief that theatricality was the style best suited to new society envisaged by the Revolution. But Meyerhold's relationship to Bolsheviks was always uneasy. While he was always a supporter of the Revolution, he frequently was not a supporter of Soviet policy, artistic and otherwise. His basic artistic intent was aesthetic rather than political. He wanted to produce political plays in an anti-realistic style. ⁽²⁰⁾ He was eager to foster a Soviet theatre. Stanislavsky, on the other hand, remained aloof from the Bolsheviks and did not succumb to producing Soviet plays until the middle of the decade when the Bolshevik power was firmly established, and after the Revolution he continued to produce plays in the realistic style, unaffected by the prevailing aesthetic views of the avant-garde. By the end of the twenties the tolerance of the Bolshevik leaders for the "Meyerholdist" avant-garde had ended. With the rise of Stalin and the dogmatic Soviet policy of realism in the arts, Meyerhold's star was to wane as Stanislavsky's star was to raise.

Pleasing the political powers after the Revolution was not always easy because from 1921 to 1929 the cultural views of the Bolshevik leaders were not always clear or consistent. ⁽²¹⁾

For most of the 1920's, the three greatest influences on cultural policy were the two Party leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, and Lunacharsky, the first Commissar in charge of culture appointed by Lenin. During the period from 1921 to 1924 Lenin and Trotsky expressed conflicting ideas concerning the direction that Soviet culture should be taking and and as a result experimentation was rampant in all the Russian arts, although it was hardly embraced and only reluctantly tolerated by the political leaders. All three believed that Soviet culture should grow organically from the best Russian art of the past, including the works of the bourgeoisie. Influenced by Lunacharsky, Lenin tolerated the avant-garde, even though his tastes were more conservative and he detested all modernistic trends in art. Trotsky was more open to experimentation and encouraged the avant-garde, which he saw as a constructive influence on Soviet culture and attitudes. All three, opposed the radical Bolshevik polemisists

of Proletkult, whose aims were to destroy all old art and only allow those with proletariat credentilas to create this new art. Proletkult was also considered dangerous because it held the artist to be above both Party and government. But with suppression of the Proletkult leaders after 1923, the death of Lenin in 1924, the ouster of Lunacharsky in 1928, and the exile of Trotsky in 1929, the stage was set for Stalin to set a new cultural agenda which favored a proletariat art rewritten to his own specifications. This began the so called Cultural Revolution.

The experimentation of the twenties was partly a result of Lunacharsky's ability to maintain a creative balance between the conservative and radical factions. But in the hard political climate of the late 1920's, Stalin began his campaign to label everyone associated with the economic and cultural experiments of the 1920's as enemies. In the arts they were called "formalist" and branded as followers of "leftist avant-gardism and cosmopolitanism". By the late twenties it was becoming obvious that those who did not follow the Party line by producing new socialist propagandistic plays would suffer dire consequences. Few could foresee the depth of those consequences. During the 1920's, those who could not put up with the emerging oppression, abandoned the country for the West. For those who stayed like Meyerhold and Stanislavsky different fates were in store.

Meyerhold in the 1920's

Meyerhold held a unique position in the Russian theatre in the decade after the Revolution. Even though the content and form of his work were out of favor with the important Communist Party leaders, the power and popularity of his work in the 1920's guaranteed him an important place in the theatre and made him the most important director of the early Soviet period. His work appealed to the youth and the theatrical sophisticates and, in the early twenties, to the proletarian audiences. His work had always stirred controversy and frequently created enemies. Slonim gives some of the factors leading to the unique position Meyerhold had from 1917 to 1928:

In the first Post-Revolutionary decade Meyerhold embodied the new spirit of the Russian theatre. Various factors concurred in placing him at the center of all theatrical events: his past experiences and the discussions they aroused, his consistent and intransigent anti-realistic stand, his relentless energy combined with creative imagination and his privileged position in the Communist Party. He was inventive, daring and powerful. All the innovations of the Soviet stage, all the experiments of the avant-garde either sprang from him or were somewhat linked with his activities. ⁽²²⁾

At the time of the Revolution, Meyerhold's innovative work in St Petersburg was known mostly in Russia where he was considered the most talented director of the avant-garde. It was his work in the decade after the Revolution in Moscow that was to bring him wide international acclaim and national recognition as the country's leading director and most important theatrical influence. But he was to become a victim of this success. It was the imitation of his work by others (Meyerholditis as Meyerhold and others mocking referred to it) that irritated the Bolshevik cultural leaders and was eventually to contribute to his downfall. ⁽²³⁾

In 1917 immediately after the October Revolution, the responsibility for the theatre was assigned to the Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment, headed by Lunacharsky. In late 1917, he invited 120 leading artists to a conference devoted to reorganizing the arts. There was a cautious reply by the artistic community and only five showed up. These included Meyerhold, Alexander Blok (the symbolist poet, dramatist, and critic) and Vladimir Mayakovsky, leader of the Russian Futurists. Lunacharsky was forced to deal with those very members of the avant-garde that were against the views that he and his government held towards conventional realism.

It was suggested that Meyerhold in his early support of the Bolsheviks (he became an early Party member) was exploiting the Revolution to propagate his own reforms. ⁽²⁴⁾ But this same charge could be made of many intellectuals including Pavlov and Stanislavsky who viewed the Revolution as an opportunity for greater creative freedom. From his early background, there is not much doubt that he had genuine belief in the initial aims of the Revolution to improve the lot of the proletarian worker and to end aristocratic privilege. It took Meyerhold little time to shed the clothes of the boulevardaire he wore as director at the Imperial theatre and don the course garb of the Bolshevik administrator he was to become shortly. However at this time, Bolshevik power was not secure and Meyerhold's solidarity with the regime was a risky act of faith. Meyerhold was rewarded for his Bolshevik sympathies. When a Theatre Section was formed by Lunacharsky in early 1918, Meyerhold was appointed its Deputy Head under O.L. Kameneva, Trotsky's sister. For the next two years, Meyerhold continued his post at the State Theatre and also organized courses in production technique in St Petersburg, then called Petrograd, where he was deputy head of the newly formed Theatre Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. He continued this work until ill-health forced him to move to south Russia in May 1919.

In this short period in St Petersburg, Meyerhold exploited to the fullest the opportunities offered by the Bolsheviks. He continued to direct plays at the Imperial theatre for several months, but now did plays previously banned. In 1918 he staged the first Soviet play in honor of the first anniversary of the new government, Mayakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe, a parody of the biblical story of the flood, ending with the arrival of the survivors in a Communist promised land. Lunacharsky feared that the play would not be popular with Party leaders, and he was right. ⁽²⁵⁾ The play done in the Futurist style, with geometric designs painted on a backdrop, and the arc represented by a few cubes and the earth depicted as a huge blue globe. Meyerhold was ahead of government and popular taste. Shortly after this production, he became ill and had to leave St Petersburg for the south. He produced nothing for the next two years for the professional theatre while in southern Russia recuperating from his illness and later fighting with the Red Army. He was wounded during this period and Lunacharsky learning of his plight had him brought back to Moscow in 1920.

During the two years that Meyerhold was away from the theatre fighting in the Crimea, significant changes took place in the structure of the Russian theatre, many contrary to the views of Meyerhold. The most significant was that the theatres were all reclassified and governmental financial support and protection was given to a group of "academic" theatres while all others were required to be self supporting and were forced to submit to close scrutiny from the Party. The favored academic theatres were the five former Imperial Theatres,the Moscow Art Theatre, and Tairov's Kamery Theatre, none of which were strong supporters of the regime and all of which emphasized a classical repertory and except for Tairov's theatre all were committed to realistic production methods. Therefore it came as a surprise when Meyerhold was summoned to return to Moscow and invited by Lunacharsky to become head of the Theatre Section, a position which nominally made him the head of whole of Russian theatre.

Realizing that he was not to be given power to restructure the theatre, he resigned from this position after six months. But for this brief time he let his presence be felt. He used the section's periodical The Theatre Herald as a forum to bitterly attack the academic theatres and wrote many essays supporting the avant-garde. He was in the anomalous position of criticizing the theatre which he ostensibly headed. He created further complications when he then took over a troupe and renamed it the RSFSR Theatre No. 1 and presented Belgium symbolist Emile Verhaerens's ant-imperialist play, The Dawns. While the play ran for over 100 performances and was popular with audiences, it was disliked by the critics and by Lenin's wife in addition to other Party officials. Meyerhold held his position as head of the Theatre Section from the autumn of 1921 until the winter of 1922 when Lunacharsky removed the academic theatres from his jurisdiction and Meyerhold resigned his post. Then his theatre was closed because of overspending.

This setback did not stop Meyerhold. After his dismissal from the Theatre Section in 1921, he was to hold a dazzling series of positions in the Soviet theatre due both to the great appeal of his work to proletarian audiences and to the backing he had within the Communist Party. In 1921 with no theatre, no government appointment and no wife,(he divorced his first wife Olga Munt and with her his "decadent" Petersburg past), he had to start over again. This he did with phoenix-like response. He became head of the State Higher Directing Workshop (1921), the State higher Theatre Workshop (1922), the Free Workshop of Vs. Meyerhold and the Actors Theatre (1922), the State Instate of Theatre Art (1922), the State Experimental Theatre Workshop in the name of Vs. Meyerhold. In 1926 the Meyerhold Theatre was given State subsidy and renamed the State Theatre in the name of Vs. Meyerhold. He was well regarded by his backers in the Communist Party and in 1923 was awarded the title of "People's Artist of the Republic", the first theatre director and the sixth Soviet artist to be so recognized.

Leaving the high national administrative government posts he held between 1918 and 1921, allowed him to again became a theatre practitioner and from 1921 to 1931 he was to do his greatest work. He combined the resources he was given by the government into a three tier structure: a school, a workshop and a theatre, with participants able to go from one organization to another. ⁽²⁶⁾ He had the same pedagogic bent as Stanislavsky, which was another factor that was not to be to his advantage in the 1930's when the government began demanding production at the expense of adequate preparation and attention to quality.

He had great control over the theatre and workshops he directed and had a great deal of artistic freedom at the beginning of the twenties. In his workshops he created his acting system of "biomechanics" and in his productions he was able to work with and develop "constructionist" staging techniques, which reflected the popular ideas of efficiency, economy and practicality inherited from the American Taylor's time and motion studies. He was ready to give up the aesthetic themes he had pursued in his pre-Revolutionary days as well as the symbolist staging techniques to discover new theatrical forms. He transformed his art and made it accessible to political themes and aimed his productions to the new proletarian audiences.

On May 1, 1921, he staged an updated version of Mayakovsky's Mystery Bouffe and began his adventure into Constructivist stage design, dispensing with the proscenium arch replacing it with a series of platforms with different levels and using no front curtain or flown scenery. He repudiated the stage realism of Stanislavsky in acting technique as well. In his early studio and theatre productions in the 1920's his experiments with physical acting techniques in his system of biomechanics, resembled acrobatics and mime rather than life. In Earth Rampant (1923), he used a car, motorcycles, field telephones, machine guns and a mobile army kitchen and combine harvester. He was interested in creating a reality whose base was the theatre rather than real life, and he did this better than the other theatre directors of the time working in similar modes.

His theatre work during the twenties can be divide into two categories, the restaging of old and old-style plays into new forms, including Ostrovsky's The Forest (1924), Gogol's The Inspector General (1926), Griboedov's Woe from Wit (1928), and the agit-prop derived political productions including Mayakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe (1918,1921), Verhaeren's The Dawns (1920), Tretyakov's Earth Rampant (1923) and Roar,China (1926). He utilized rhythmic movements and acting that was kinetic and reflexive derived from sports, circus acrobatics, Pavlovian association and Taylor type time and motion studies. He wanted to include aspects of the commedia dell' arte and popular entertainment techniques plus the futurist's concerns with energy speed and vitality. His constructionists staging was an attempt to create settings that would act as a "machine for acting" without superfluous details and he argued that the stage should be like the an industrial machine, efficient rather than productive. His ideas and practices were very much in keeping with the modernistic trends and industrial ideology that were part of European avant-garde culture in the 1920's. But this work was to act against him in the 1930's when Taylorism and its aims of rationality and efficiency were to take the backside to loyalty to the Party.

The culmination of his innovative aesthetic was evident in what is considered to be his finest production, a reworking of Gogol's The Inspector General. In this production he brilliantly executed ideas, which represented the very techniques and artistic liberties, which were to be used against him when the cultural conservatives were to gain control under Stalin late in the decade. The text was considerably altered with insertions added from other of Gogol's works, the addition of characters, and the invention of pantomimes and tableaux. He divided the play into fifteen episodes, each with its own title. Characters often spoke and gestured in unison, and he created the memorable moment when eleven hands extended simultaneously from eleven doors to offer bribes to he the bogus inspector. In 1926 this production could hardly be reconciled with the socialist realism that was beginning to be demanded by the Bolshevik bureaucrats. He was accused of destroying Russian culture with his tampering. He was savagely condemned by the conservative critics such as Alexander Kugel for his "barbarism". ⁽²⁷⁾

His satires were also not in the politically correct mode of the times with their merciless treatment of foibles of the benefactors of the New Economic Policy (NEP), he alienated Party officials. In 1921 the Civil War was drawing to a close and it was obvious that if the Bolsheviks were to retain their power they had to begin creating the new society which they had promised. But the state was on the verge of bankruptcy and financial collapse and Lenin sought to encourage greater initiative through his New Economic Policy (NEP), under which many earlier decrees were rescinded and limited private enterprise was reinstated. Many theatres now reverted to private ownership and Western plays found their way onto the boards. All theatres enjoyed considerable freedom of repertory and production style from 1921 until Stalin began his process of assuming complete control of all theatres in 1927. It was in this atmosphere that Meyerhold blossomed.

But ironically the NEP created unforseen problems for Meyerhold. He was fiercely against the crassness and ethics of NEPmen, those businessmen who ran small businesses and flaunted their new wealth. Meyerhold made the habits and fashions of the NEPmen the target of a series of satirical productions such as Lake Lyul (1923) andThe Warrant (1925) which lampooned a group of "internal emigres" who still dream of the restoration of the monarchy. In his harsh criticism of the NEP, he alienated the government by not supporting their economic policy. He also unwittingly helped strengthen the position of the bureaucrats who were rapidly taking over the administration of the theatre as well as all other aspects of Russian commerce and life. Ultimately this proved to be a fatal mistake. By the early thirties these bureaucrats were to become his most dangerous enemies.

Many of Meyerhold's friends and former associates realized that there was no way they could accommodate to the new regime and left Russia during the period of he proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1920's. In 1924 Vyacheslav Ivanov, the St Petersburg symbolist, emigrated as did Alexei Remizov, Meyerhold's, literary mentor, and Nikolai Evreinov, the theatricalistic director of St Petersburg Silver Age. In 1928 Michael Chekhov fled. ⁽²⁸⁾

Meyerhold at this point did not anticipate what was to happen in the 1930's and stayed on confident that he could be a good Communist and a follower of the avant-garde. The times proved him wrong.

By the late twenties, Meyerhold was beset with problems of an artistic, political and financial nature. Meyerhold's decline in the late 1920's was primarily due to his problems with finding suitable repertory and troubles caused by pressures for his theatre to become financially sustaining. As early as 1923, the government started its campaign to control the content of plays. The Twelfth Congress of the Party demanded plays with contemporary themes "using the heroic struggle led by the working class." ⁽²⁹⁾ Meyerhold was able to work within these constraints until 1927. Then it became increasingly difficult for him to find new plays, which he considered artistically acceptable. In the period from 1928 to 1931, the power of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) theorists was increasing as Stalin was increasing his own power. The RAPP's theorists were critical of all theatre that did not have a proletarian base. They thought that the plays loyal to the regime were outweighed by those neutral or hostile to it and that this nonpolitical theatre had no right to exist. The Academic theatres including Stanislavsky's theatre, which produced classics, were accused of "neutralist academism"; and Meyerhold and Tairov, the Communist avant-garde, leaders were as ill regarded as the non-Communist avant-garde. ⁽³⁰⁾

The growth in importance of organizations such as the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (RAPP) and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers were at the expense of the groups bases around the LEF journal, which supported the avant-garde work of Meyerhold and Mayakovsky. When things started to go badly for Meyerhold, the Party ties, which had been so helpful in the past became a liability. ⁽³¹⁾

It was unfortunate for him that he and his theatre were so closely identified with Trotskyism especially at the end of the decade when Trotsky was branded by Stalin as a traitor. In the early Bolshevik days Meyerhold was helped by Boris Malkin, a member of "Kom-Fut" (Communist Futurist) group who had been secretary of the All Russian Congress of Peasant's Deputies and a member of the All Russian Central Executive Committee and head of its Central Press Agency who was closely allied to Trotsky and was arrested because of this in the 1930's. In 1923 Meyerhold's production of Earth Rampant was dedicated "to the Red Army and the first soldier of the RSFSR, Leon Trotsky" ⁽³²⁾ In fact at one performance Trotsky is reported to have unexpectedly appeared on stage and delivered a short speech on stage at one performance regarding the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Red Army that appeared to be part of the action of the play. Also the LEF journal to which Meyerhold was allied had Trotskyite connections.

Aside from these political problems, Meyerhold's theatre suffered financial problems due to the government's new attitude that theatres become self sustaining. When it became apparent after the Civil War that the government had to make the economy work, the government gained greater power by exercising its control over all subsidies in the economy, including the theatre. No longer controlled only by the box office, the demand of the audience took back seat to the desires of the government bureaucrats. By controlling the money available to theatres the next predictable step was control of the repertory, the working conditions and the amount of productive work each theatre was obliged to undertake. This quota system was to place a burden on Meyerhold to present more new theatre at a time when the writing of plays that he thought worthy were not forthcoming. He had little respect for the acceptable Soviet playwrights.

Because it produced so few new plays, Meyerhold's theatre was failing financially. He was continually accused of being a bad manager for not meeting production quotas. ⁽³³⁾ The pressure to produce was greatly increased when in 1928 Artistic Councils were instituted in each theatre to oversee the repertoire and make all theatres receiving state subsidies accountable to the government. While for most companies this may have been a reasonable idea, this was not good for Meyerhold's company which was set up as a pedological institute more than a commercial theatre. The company appeared improvident when its performance was based on box office receipts alone.

After presenting The Warrant in 1925, Meyerhold did not produce another new Soviet play until he directed a play of Mayakovsky in 1929. During the mid and late 1920's as Stalin was coming to power, Stanislavsky at the MAT was producing more plays with Soviet themes than Meyerhold and it was producing them in a style that was more in line with the tastes of Stalin and the other party officials. It was also a style that the proletarian masses appreciated. They preferred conventional stories presented in a realistic manner that were easy to understand. Though Meyerhold was a Communist with a finely attuned aesthetic sense, he was ahead of the masses. The great Meyerhold, recognized by the government as the great Soviet director in 1923 was at the beginning of his decline by the decade's end.

Stanislavsky

1917-1928

From the time of the October Revolution until his tour of America with the MAT in 1921, Stanislavsky had little to do with the new government. Predictably, Stanislavsky's life was abruptly changed in many ways by the Revolution. The family factories were taken into state ownership and converted to the production of steel cables. His private fortune was gone. He was evicted from his apartment, and he found himself suspect as a member of the propertied class. The only income he had was his salary from the theatre. Stanislavsky lost the independence his wealth offered, nevertheless, at the beginning of Bolshevik rule, he optimistically viewed the Revolution as an opportunity to accomplish some of the goals he had set for himself early in his career. It appeared to him that many of the constraints preventing a popular theatre might be overcome. But he had no intention of joining the Bolshevik Party. Benedetti describes Stanislavsky's political position at the time of the Revolution:

"Stanislavsky was not a political sophisticate. He had no conception of the ideological issues involved and no knowledge of Marxist theory. It was not, indeed, until 1926 that he even considered reading the basic texts of Lenin. But as an inheritor of the democratic aspirations of the nineteenth century intelligentsia as a patriot he believed that the revolution was in the best interests of the country and he welcomed it." ⁽³⁴⁾

In a letter to the literary historian, Kotliarevski, he referred to the Revolution as the "the miraculous liberation of Russia". ⁽³⁵⁾

He viewed the overthrow of the absolutist government as an opportunity to realize his old goals- new plays, new audiences, the enrichment and enlightenment of the common people through art. But the Revolution did not immediately offer Stanislavsky the opportunity to do this. Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre did not play a very active role in the Russian theatre for several years after 1917. The Moscow Art Theatre along with the Alexandrinsky and the Maly Theatres expressed no interest in the experimentation and innovation of the early Soviet theatre nor would they bow to pressures to put on new Soviet plays of inferior quality for the sake of the Revolution. For a time the Moscow Art Theatre depended solely on its pre-revolutionary repertory: Griboedov, Pushkin, Ostrovsky, Tolstoy, Gorky and Chekhov. From 1917 to 1921 Stanislavsky only directed two new productions Byron's Caine in 1920 and The Inspector General in 1921, hardly revolutionary fare. It was during this period that the MAT strengthened its ties with the Maly Theatre, including exchanging artists for individual performances and putting up a common front in defence of realism. In 1921 there was criticism from Meyerhold and others against Stanislavsky and the academic theatres as a "remanent of bourgeois aestheticism and middle-class complacency". ⁽³⁶⁾ In 1922 as in 1917 Lenin's firm support of the Moscow Art Theatre was important in saving the theatre and granting continued financial support without which the theatre could not survive. ⁽³⁷⁾

During the two years after the Revolution Lenin had been a frequent visitor to the MAT, catching up on the plays he had missed while in exile. Of Stanislavsky's performance in an Ostrovsky play he said:

Stanislavsky is a real artist, he transformed himself into the general so completely that he lived his life down to the smallest detail. The audience didn't need any explanations. They can see for themselves what an idiot this important-looking general is. In my opinion this is the direction the theatre should take". ⁽³⁸⁾

Though his theatre had great support at the highest levels, Stanislavsky did not covet Party approval. He clearly satisfied the tastes of the Party leaders and at this stage did not have to bow to their wishes of supporting the regime in his work in the theatre. In the years after the Revolution, Stanislavsky more resolutely hardened into the non-political attitude that he was follow for the rest of his career. He thought that the theatre should be limited to artistic activities. In November of 1917 he opposed a call by some of his colleagues for a token strike against the government. ⁽³⁹⁾ Stanislavsky drafted a plan for the new Union of Moscow Artists in which he expressed the view that all theatres should take a non political stance and that their task was to preserve the Russian cultural heritage and hand it on as a living form to the people. Shortly after the Revolution, the Art Theatre sent a representative to the Moscow Soviet asking how the Theatre could best serve the people and the answer was that they should start back to work as soon as possible. They did just that, and this continued to be their policy throughout the seventy years of Soviet rule.

Though it took his fortune from him, the Revolution did give the Stanislavsky the opportunity to work in the theatre full time. He did not engage in political activity but tried to continue the theatrical activities he had undertaken in pre- Revolutionary times. He continued to play major roles for the new popular audiences, but created no important new roles. He continued to perfect and teach the System. He directed or revived productions both at the Theatre and in the Theatre Studios, launched an Opera Studio and was active in the new Union of Moscow Actors of which he became the chairman. And in its early days, the Revolution had allowed Stanislavsky to fulfill his lifelong dream of presenting the classics to the masses, something the money based pre-Revolutionary theatre had denied him. To his dismay he learned that the bourgeois audience was a more polite and attentive audience than the audience of an open theatre. He had to educate the new audience to be quite and to take of their hats in the theatre and to treat the theatre with respect. A side of the Revolution he found more pleasing was that theatre students were free of economic constraints and he was allowed greater opportunity to teach new generations of actors the continuous system of acting which he traced back to Shchepkin, guaranteeing for future Soviet generations the survival of what Stanislavsky considered to be Realism in its highest form. He inaugurated a series of seminars at the Art Theatre, known as Creative Mondays, where broad issues of aesthetics were discussed and gave a series of lectures on the System in the weeks after the Revolution. But in the Civil War period, he refused to become part of the modernist movement and would not produce patriotic or propagandistic plays.

Through the 1920's, Stanislavsky was unstinting in his opposition to "formalism". He thought the modern experiments were not appropriate to the "spirit of the time" formed by suffering, struggle starvation and catastrophe and said:

.... and this great life of the spirit cannot be rendered by external sharpness of form, it cannot be expressed by acrobatics or by constructivism, or by load luxury of production, or by poster-like painting, or by futuristic daring. Nor do I accept the opposite extreme- the utter simplicity of settings which ends in their complete elimination, or artificial noses and circles painted on their faces, and other exaggerated external devices justified by the fashionable theory of the grotesque. ⁽⁴⁰⁾

Stanislavsky first felt the influence of the government in 1920 when Meyerhold was in charge of the Theatrical Section (TEO) of the Commissariat for Enlightenment and revealed his plans to eliminate the special status of the MAT and the other Academic theatres and replace them with popular, non-professional and Red Army theatres. When Meyerhold was unsuccessful in that attempt and left that post, there were to be other government threats to Stanislavsky's theatre. In 1921 with the NEP calling for market forces to control theatrical activity, Stanislavsky's theatre was in danger of not being able to meet the economic goals set for the theatre. The running budget of the MAT was about 1.5 billion rubles and the box-office takings were just 600 thousand rubles. ⁽⁴¹⁾

One of the schemes for saving the theatre was to have a foreign tour of Europe and America. Nemirovich pressed for this with the government officials who were skeptical that the troupe might defect as had the Kachalov faction of the MAT. But the argument that the tour would bring in foreign currency when the ruble had no value on the international market and that the MAT could enhance Russia's cultural standing with the West were overpowering. The government allowed the MAT to go on a tour which lasted two years, allowing theatre-goers in the capitals of Europe and cities in America to witness Stanislavsky's style. This created the international reputation that the Soviet government was to capitalize on in the 1930's. This saved Stanislavsky and his family from much of the suffering that Russia was to bear during the late Civil War years as well as sheltering him from the political struggles that were occurring in Russia in 1923 and 1924. When Stanislavsky returned to Moscow after the tour, he returned to another world.

In 1924 Stanislavsky was no longer the leading theatrical figure in Russia. Stanislavsky's loyal supporter, Lenin was dead. The years of turmoil were over and the new state was trying to put itself together, and the Soviet Union was formally created beginning the Soviet Empire a world power. In all the arts a pent up energy was generated. There were new ideas in painting, architecture, posters. The theatre was no exception. Constructivism was raised almost to a cult and Meyerhold was its undisputed master. The MAT had grown stale both in acting and staging technique and could not compete with originality of the avant-garde theatre people such as Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Tairov, and Mikhail Chekhov. And the Art Theatre had not yet taken steps to expand its repertory to include new plays dealing with contemporary Soviet life or propagandistic plays in support of Communist doctrine. With its international fame increased, its popularity at home was at a low ebb. The Bolshevik regime had to be reckoned with and by 1924 those theatres that had stood at the sidelines of the Revolution like Stanislavsky's began to make accommodation to the new regime. In 1924 Stanislavsky decided that the MAT should present plays that were in closer touch with Soviet reality than its classic repertory. Nemirovich directed the first play attempting to meet ideological acceptability, Trenyov's The Pugachov Rebellion, dealing with a revolt against the tzar in the eighteenth century. But he left for a foreign tour with the Music Studio and it was left to Stanislavsky to reestablish the theatre along the new lines demanded by the times. Under Stanislavsky's direction from 1925 to 1927 the MAT was presenting Soviet plays such as Bulgakov's The Days of the Turbins (1926) and Ivanov'sArmoured Train 14-69 (1927). Armoured Train No 14-19 was the story of the capture of an armoured train from counter-revolutionary troops by the partisans and the transformation of the central character, Vershinin, from a politically-indifferent peasant farmer into a hero of the Bolshevik cause. There was much trouble getting the more nuanced play Turbins approved by the newly created Central Repertory Committee, Glavrepertkom, and the play remained controversial. The play dealt with the fate of the Turbin family , White Russians who suffered during the early years of the Civil War in Ukraine.It was taken out of the repertory in 1929, only to be restored in 1932 when it was revealed that Stalin had seen it fifteen times and highly approved of its message and did not mind seeing an "intelligent and powerful enemy". Stalin's blessing for this MAT production undoubtedly helped Stanislavsky when he clashed with the authorities over closer control of the MAT in the 1930's. Although these plays were of a higher quality than most of the run of the mill Soviet plays, they helped set the prototypes of socialist realism which was soon to lay claims as the only legitimate theatre of the Revolution.

III

A Political Theatre:

Socialist Realism

(1928-1940)

Late in the 1920's Russia became more isolated from the West and internally the country became more repressive. Life became more difficult in Russia in the last few years of the twenties as the Western countries looked with anxiety at the newly developing socialist society. Germany was almost the only country willing to trade with Russia and it was apparent the awaited Communist world revolution was not to materialize. Economic and cultural contacts with the West were almost non existent. Stalin proposed the new slogan "Socialism in one country" and self reliance of the most stringent kind was pursued. The NEP was ended and Stalin embarked on the First Five Year Plan to develop heavy industry and collectivize agriculture. The entire country was put on a war time footing to achieve these ends and everyone was expected to show dedication to the Party's goals of catching up and surpassing the West.

As part of this movement the pressure to subordinate artistic to ideological ends was intensified. Stalin's strongest support came from young Communists cadres and industrial workers who formed his political base during this period. From 1928 to 1932 it was to be the young generation of Communists who had been brought up under Lenin and Stalin that most strongly supported Stalin's efforts to have the arts under the control of the Party. ⁽⁴²⁾ The Komsomols (young Communist League members) who made up the bulk of the membership of the proletarian arts organizations, firmly believed that all art should serve the Party. For them the Party supplanted the Revolution as the moral guide for their actions. The Komsomols were active in the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and Theatre of Working Young People (TRAM) and they firmly believed that the role of the artist in transforming society was to wage a major campaign against the leftists (avant-garde) and rightist (bourgeois intellectual) cultural tendencies and to wipe out "formalism" in the arts. They declared that apolitical art should not be tolerated and wanted all remnants of bourgeois art eradicated. The Academic theatres were criticized and Meyerhold and Tairov were strongly attacked because of their appeal to "bohemians and symbolists".

By 1932 their positions had become extreme. They demanded that RAPP, rather than the government have control over all theatres. Because of these demands RAPP at this time was suppressed by the government and supplanted by the Union of Soviet Writers which was under the control of Communist Central Committee. Unions were formed for all art forms, and the Communist Party was to be in complete control of the arts from that time on. ⁽⁴³⁾ The ideological aims of the Revolution were to become synonymous with the dictates of the Party in the 1930's.

The first truly repressive action came in 1934 when the Union of Soviet Writers proclaimed that "socialist realism" was to be the appropriate style for all writing.:

Socialist realism, being the basic method of Soviet literature and criticism, requires from the artists truthful, historically concrete representations of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, truth and historical completeness of artistic representation must be combined with the task od ideological transformation and education of the working man in the spirit of Socialism. ⁽⁴⁴⁾

Socialist realism was to be the official system until the post Stalinist "thaw" of 1950's. In practice this meant plays were to be in the realistic style and had to reflect contemporary political issues and include a positive hero or heroine who points the way to the triumph of Communism. Both Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, raised under the complex artistic and cultural influences of Russian culture from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, possessors of refined theatrical taste, were expected to continue their theatre work under this crude and simplistic directive.
Stanislavsky

1928-1938

The thirtieth anniversary of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1928 was a turning point in its history. The Art Theatre was beginning to be looked upon as the model Soviet theatre because of its Soviet plays as well as its production of the acceptable classics. It was also a turning point in the life of Stanislavsky who had a heart attack at a gala performance of The Three Sisters and never performed on stage again. He was living on borrowed time. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ He was a semi-invalid for the remaining ten years of his life, only working against the advice of his doctors with an enlarged heart and emphysema, caused by many years of heavy smoking. and arteriosclerosis. But his brain was not affected and he could express his theatrical ideas but did not have the strength to carry them into practice. He was susceptible to colds and flu and he lived in his almost hermetically sealed apartment. His life was also hermetically sealed and he was carefully attended and watched. He had a nurse to take care of his physical needs and a diminutive secretary, Ripsime Karpovna Tamansova, was his main source of contact with the outside world. News of his actions quickly found there way to the Kremlin. He did not go to the theatre until late in the 1930's. He rehearsed plays and operas in his apartment and spent much time at health spas in Germany and in Paris. For the years from 1928 to 1930 the major work he did for the Art Theatre was to write two-thirds of a production plan for Othello. Stanislavsky's interest in his last years were the perfection of his acting method and its use in opera. Stanislavsky's special position and his general lack of vigor excused him from producing what he referred to as "pot boilers" required of the other theatre producers. ⁽⁴⁶⁾

Since Lunacharsky's resignation in 1929, the formation of artistic policy was undertaken by Stalin himself and his son-in-law, Andrei Zhadanov, who was promoted to Party Secretary. ⁽⁴⁷⁾The authorities were beginning to cast their eyes on tighter control of the theatre. For the Art Theatre it meant that a Communist director, Heitz, a manager with no theatrical experience was to be added to the board of management whose job it was to mediate between the government and the company. Stanislavsky did not object to this as much as he did to the new policy that was being forced on the company to produce more productions. Just as the main emphasis on the economy after the first Five Year Plan was the forced collectivization of agriculture and increased production in heavy industry, so the Art Theatre was being pressured to increase its productivity by doing more contemporary plays more quickly. And the only plays to be tolerated were those that dealt in an acceptable manner to the issues of the day. ⁽⁴⁸⁾

By 1931 Stanislavsky's health had improved slightly and he could begin to deal with the Party's agenda concerning artistic policy and subsidies as they affected the Art Theatre. Before the Art Theatre was brought under the control of Stalin in 1931, Stanislavsky and his theatre suffered frequent criticism by Party Members and critics because of the non-proletarian background of its founders and members. Until its suppression in 1932, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writer (RAPP) was given considerable latitude in attacking all non-proletarian art. In 1931 both Stanislavsky's System and Meyerhold's Bio-mechanics were denounced as being idealistic and inimical to proletarian art. Stanislavsky was accused of being "an-historical", dealing in "abstract timelessness" of reducing " multiform social qualities into a few basic laws of the biological behavior of man in general", and of transforming "socio-political problems into the language of ethico-moral concepts", and "complex processes of the actor's perception of reality into primitive childlike credulity, naivete and the Creative If". In the Soviet's eyes they were purveyors of "magic". ⁽⁴⁹⁾

Another source of criticism was the recurring one that the Art Theatre was not producing plays at the same rate as other Soviet theatres. The Art Theatre was being unfavorably compared to both the Blue Blouses, with its predicable format of songs, slogans and sketches, whose propagandistic Living-Newspaper productions could be quickly put together and to that other creation of the Five Year Plan, the Agit-Prop Brigade, which could produce twelve new productions a year. The Art Theatre spent on the average of one year in preparing most of its productions.

In spite of these criticisms, under the new Stalinist system of theatre control Stanislavsky's was to become the favored theatre. Many of the actions of the leaders of the Art Theatre in the early thirties were to hold them in good stead later in the decade. In 1932, both Nemirovich and Stanislavsky denounced formalism on aesthetic grounds and declared realism to be the only healthy approach. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ In that year they also decided that their theatre would be called the House of Gorky and that they would stage a cycle of Gorki's work. Gorky had just been named the head of the Union of Soviet Writers. In 1927 the Moscow Art Theatre was awarded the Order of Lenin. and in 1938 after Stanislavsky's death, his system became the acceptable acting method for training new actors.

In 1931 the Moscow Art Theatre was put directly under the control of Stalin. ⁽⁵¹⁾ At that time, Stanislavsky wrote a long appeal to the government to recognize the Art Theatre as a theatre of classical drama and the best of the contemporary repertoire, to free it from directives based on quantity of productions and to recognize that its comparison to other theatres should take quality into account. His appeal was heeded. By the end of the year Heitz, the Party appointed Administrative Director, was relieved of his duties. The Art Theatre was freed from the control of the Central Executive Committee and made directly accountable to the government with its title changed to the Moscow Art Theatre of the USSR. Control of the theatre by the central government was was then complete, the MAT was under the direct control of Stalin. This was the heavy price Stanislavsky had to pay to be freed from the petty bureaucrats.

During the 1930's, Stanislavsky's position in the Russian theatre was above reproach. His comments and ideas quickly found themselves to the desk of Stalin, but were not always heeded. Stanislavsky at this point was no threat to Stalin and he was allowed to live out his life comfortably in the his apartment near the Opera Theatre and visit spas in Russia, Germany and France during times of illness or recuperation. For the remainder of the 1930's Stanislavsky was to work mostly on operas and engaged in making changes to his theoretical writings on acting technique. In these opera productions he continued working on the System and committed it to writing in his bookAn Actor's Work on Himself. He also worked with Bulgakov as director of Gogol's Dead Souls (1932), andMoliere (1936) and on a production of Ostrovsky's Artists and Admirers (1933). He died in 1938 treated as national hero. His death was met with great official recognition and respectful ceremony.

After his death, as in his lifetime, Stanislavsky's reputation and international respect was used by Stalin to his own advantage. When Stalin was trying to establish Russia of one of the leading nations of the West, it was important to him that Russian culture and artists be taken seriously by the countries of Europe and by America. In his last years, Stanislavsky could no longer tour. However Westerners came to see him throughout the 1930's. ⁽⁵²⁾ Joshua Logan came for advice on how to start a theatre along the lines of the Art Theatre. George Bernard Shaw came in homage. Harold Clurman and Stella Adler came in awe and to learn how they could bring back Stanislavsky's technique to the Group Theatre and the American stage. Stalin could take full advantage of Stanislavsky's reputation and the reputation of the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavsky was not touched by any of the purges of he mid-1930's. His relation to Stalin was such that he could even afford to associate with and help Meyerhold in his last days. One wonders if the fate of Meyerhold would have differed had not Stanislavsky died in 1938.

Meyerhold : Final Days

1928-1940

At the beginning of the 1930's it was probably difficult for Meyerhold to foresee what the decade held for him as the signs coming from the government were conflicting. An ominous sign, was the International Congress of Revolutionary Writers held in Kharkov in 1930, which severely criticized the avant-garde trends of the 1920's and was the harbinger of the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers which endorsed "socialist realism" as the only permissible aesthetic style and condemned both "naturalism" and "formalism". But there were signs in the early 1930's that Meyerhold had the support of those in political power. Meyerhold was allowed to tour in Berlin and Paris in 1930 and his company was allowed to take part in the May Day workers demonstration in Cologne that year. Meyerhold's appeal for subsidy for his theatre was accepted as long as he did more productions and less teaching. His request for better space in which to work was met and he was allowed to design a spectacular new theatre that would meet the demands he required for his staging techniques. The old Sohn Theatre, where Meyerhold had worked for a decade, was closed in October, 1931 for an extensive rebuilding and refurbishing program that would continue until 1938. Meyerhold was never to see the project finished. He continued to work in the tiny Passage Theatre and there did what many consider to be his finest production of the 1930's, The Lady of the Camellias,(1934) with his second wife, Zinaida Raihk. ⁽⁵³⁾

When during the early years of Stalin's first Five Year Plan the desired production goals were not met, mass hysteria was generated and Stalin clamped down heavily on people in all walks of life who could be blamed for the lack of total obedience to the totalitarian regime he was establishing. People in the arts were no exception.

In an attempt to be true to his Communist beliefs, in 1928 Meyerhold was still trying to find plays that reelected the ideas and ideals of the 1917 Revolution. Meyerhold pressed Mayakovsky to allow him to produce two of his new plays. Mayakovsky was the only playwright who could met Meyerhold's artistic standards. He looked for these two plays to salvage his theatre. But production of these plays did not turn out to be wise from a political point of view, as these plays were thinly veiled satires of the growing Soviet bureaucracy. Mayakovsky's playsThe Bedbug (1929) and The Bathhouse (1930), caused an explosion of furious argument and denigration. They were bitterly attacked by the Party critics. Meyerhold could find no Soviet plays he thought worthy of production. His lack of new productions was looked upon as a form of dissention and by 1932 it was clear to everyone that dissent was not to be tolerated and more severe pressure was put on Meyerhold to produce Soviet plays. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ Yuri German's Prelude (1932-1933) was the last work by a Soviet writer to be shown at publicly at the Meyerhold Theatre. With the harsh criticism he was receiving from the press and the Party, Meyerhold sought refuge in the classic repertoire while looking for acceptable Soviet plays. Meyerhold tried to work in a production style more acceptable to his critics, but even his apolitical staging of Camille caused an intensification of the campaign against his work. ⁽⁵⁵⁾

In 1934, on Meyerhold's sixtieth birthday there was the usual glowing article on the career of Meyerhold, But the next year his name was ominously left off the inaugural list of People's Artist of the USSR even though he had been awarded the award by the honor of People's Artist of the RSRSR in 1923.

In 1936 an avalanche of devastating events began leading to Meyerhold's arrest in 1939 on the accusation that he was as a foreign spy. In January 1936, Pravda published a fierce denunciation of formalists and aesthetes and Shostakovich, a good fiend of Meyerhold, was savagely berated for his opera Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk. This began a wild intensification of the campaign against any former avant-garde artist who would not recant.

In March 1936, Meyerhold spoke in Leningrad on the theme "Meyerhold against Meyerholditis", but rather than admitting past mistakes he accused his imitators of not understanding his formal devises and accused the critics of not understanding the logical motivation behind his work. He also defended the modernistic work of Shostakovich against the attacks in Pravda, and affirmed the right of any artist to experiment. In the next issue ofSoviet Theatre the journal of the All-Union Committee for Arts Affairs, the editorial stated :

Beginning with his break way from the Art Theatre, Meyerhold in practice has always opposed his method not only to the naturalistic theatre but also to the realistic theatre as well. To this day he has not rid himself of the symbolist and aesthetic theatre, and most important of all, he continues to uphold them. ⁽⁵⁶⁾

In 1937 the attacks became even more personal and on December 17, 1937 the President of the Committee for artistic Affairs, Platon Kerzhentsev, always a severe critic of Meyerhold, published an article in Pravda titled "An Alien Theatre". In that article his criticism of Meyerhold was total:

"Almost his whole theatrical career before the October Revolution amounted to a struggle against the realistic theatre on behalf of the stylized, mystical, formalistic theatre of the aesthetes, that is the theatre that shunned real life..." ⁽⁵⁷⁾

It was noted that his theatre was the only one not to have a special production for the anniversary of the October Revolution. His production of The Dawn was criticized because the hero was a Menshavik and therefore an enemy of the people. Meyerhold's The Government Inspector was criticized for not being done in the realistic style and based on the interpretation of Gogal by "the White emigre Meyerezhensky". His attempts to put on Tretyakov's I Want a Child, a satire on eugenics, were berated because the play "was written by an enemy of the people and was a slur on the Soviet family. "

It ended with the ominous words:

"Systematic deviation from Soviet reality, political distortion of that reality, and hostile slanders against our way of life have brought the theatre to total ideological and artistic ruin, to shameful bankruptcy.

... Do Soviet art and the Soviet public really need such a theatre? " ⁽⁵⁸⁾

After this attack he tried to stage two new Soviet plays in the realistic manner but was unable to complete either one. It was at this time that he started to talk seriously with Stanislavsky. about doing theatre work together ⁽⁵⁹⁾Stanislavsky thought Meyerhold the only one capable of completing the staging of the Rigoletto, he was working on. In October 1938, after Stanislavsky's death Meyerhold was appointed artistic director of the Stanislavsky Opera. But this was not to stop further harassment by the government.

By 1938, Meyerhold must have known what lay in store for him. He spoke at the Director's Conference in June 1939, where he had an opportunity to recant or defend himself. From the reports of his speech, it appears that he had given up. The old spirit was gone.

Until 1991, the content of the speech was a matter of debate. From the best records available it is evident that he did not make the expected speech asking for the opportunity for greater creative freedom in what many thought was to be the new more tolerant climate of opinion, now that the worst of the show trials were over. Braun describes the speech:

"Tactically at least it made sense for him yo apologize for exposing"laboratory experiments" like The Forest and The Government Inspector to a wide audience. ..... Time and again, he approached such burning issues as the reinterpretation of the classics, the commanding role of the artistic director, the need to resist hack work, and the demand for a new heroic drama - only to lose himself in insignificant detail and inconclusive argument." ⁽⁶⁰⁾

The final blow came from the leader of the conference who summed up Meyerhold's defence:

The Party teaches us that it is not enough to merely admit our mistakes; we need to demonstrate their nature and their essence so that others may learn from them, above all our young people.....He said nothing about the nature of his mistakes, whereas he should have revealed those mistakes that led to his theatre becoming a theatre that was hostile towards the Soviet people, a theatre that was closed on the command of the Party. ⁽⁶¹⁾

Shortly after his speech at the Director's Conference, Meyerhold was arrested and tortured over a period of a few weeks. In October,1939, he was indicted. Originally he was accused of being a Japanese and French spy based on the false confessions and accusations of tortured prisoners. Subjected to severe torture he signed confessions to acts he had never committed. His final indictment made the accusation that in 1930 Meyerhold was the head of the anti-Soviet Trotskyite group "Left Front', which coordinated all anti-Soviet elements in the field of the arts. He made appeals to repudiate his forced confessions concerning his links to foreign intelligence and with Trotskyite elements. In January 1940 he wrote a last appeal to Molotov concluding "I repudiate the confessions that were beaten out of me this way, and I beg you as Head of Government to save me and return me my freedom. I have my motherland and I will serve it with all my strength in the remaining years of my life. ⁽⁶²⁾

He pleaded not guilty to the charges but was sentenced to death on February 1. He was shot the following day in the cellars of the Military Collegium. It is reported that his last words were,"I am sixty-six. I want my daughter and my friends to know one day that I remained an honest Communist to the end." ⁽⁶³⁾His wife was found slaughtered by knife wounds in July 1939. He was officially declared a "non person". In 1955 he was rehabilitated, and since then his work has influenced a new generation of Russian directors.

Why did Meyerhold die an official "non-person" and Stanislavsky a "Peoples Artist". Given the irrationality of the Soviet era, searching for a rational explanation is futile and dispiriting. The despair under which these great artists were forced to live can only be compared to the control and oppression of the McCarthy era in Eisenhower America and the Nazi period in Hitler Germany, other times in which a perverted political logic prevailed. There were, of course, many reasons why Stanislavsky and Meyerhold were viewed so differently by the Soviet leaders in the 1930's. The most ostensible explanation is found in the different traditions they represented to the Communist aesthetic theorists. Stanislavsky was looked upon as the last disciple of the Russian realistic movement of the eighteenth century, which the Communist Party claimed as its own link to Russia's cultural past. On the other hand, Meyerhold represented the decadence of the detested bourgeois avant-garde and the Silver Age of St Petersburg. But this could hardly be the only reason for making an example of Meyerhold, and taking his life. Other practitioners of the avant-garde such as Tairov were allowed to recant and were spared. One could speculate on some of the darker subterranean reasons underlying Meyerhold's unpopularity. There was the always present and sometimes overtly expressed prejudice against his Jewish background. Then there was the animosity he created among his theatrical colleagues who deserted him in the end. Their lack of loyalty could be explained by his dictatorial manner, his frequently articulated attitude about the secondary place of the actor as opposed to the director, his arbitrariness and his favoritism in awarding roles to his wife, Zinaida. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ Part of the reason undoubtedly had to do with his uncompromising and difficult nature. He left the Moscow Art Theatre because of difficulties with the management; he sued Vera Komissarzhevskaya after he was forced to leave her troupe over artistic differences; he resigned from his post at the Theatre Section under Lunacharsky; and his relationship to the personnel at his own theatre in its last days were very strained. Stanislavsky, on the other hand, was expert at adjusting to the organizations he was involved with. He stayed on with the family firm after entering the Moscow Art Theatre. He weathered many arguments with Nemirovich while at the Art Theatre. He behaved civilly to, Heitz, the Communist imposed director of the Art Theatre during the late twenties and even could engage in civilized correspondence with Stalin.

Some of the reasons for their respective treatments by the Soviets are of a more pragmatic and partisan political nature. There were the mistakes Meyerhold made in forging early connections with the Trotskyite element of the Bolshevik Party as opposed to Stanislavsky's lack of partisan connection to the Party; Meyerhold's steadfast commitment during the 1920's to his anti-realistic theatrical style as the style of the Revolution as opposed to Stanislavsky's malleability in adapting his naturalistic realistic style with roots in the realistic Golden Age of literature and art in the eighteenth century to the approved Soviet repertory of the 1930's; Meyerhold's untiring energy and stubbornness that would not allow him to recant or go back on principle as he saw it, until it was too late, as compared to Stanislavsky's weakened condition late in life that sapped him of his energy and put him in a position where he was under constant surveillance and in the end under complete control of Stalin by 1932; and, finally, Stanislavsky's ability to create a theatre organization and a method of training actors and directors that could be easily taught and made into a tradition capable of supporting socialist realism opposed to Meyerhold's creative methods that were uniquely individualistic and defied easy codification. From the Party's point of view, if there were to be a Soviet style it would more naturally be Stanislavsky's realism, and if there was a theatrical person whose relationship to the Party was to be emulated it was Stanislavsky. Under the twisted logic and extreme paranoia of Stalin and the Communist Party late in the 1930's Meyerhold was indeed "an enemy of the People". Even if he lived up to his last minute promises to change, he could not be used by the Party to further its goals of cultural and economic subservience. He was more valuable to Stalin as a terrible example of what could happen if the Communist Party was not blindly obeyed. He was a perfect illustration of the spirit of freedom of the 1920's, which Stalin was trying to eradicate by force and intimidation. Stanislavsky and his theatre were totally under the government's control in Stanislavsky's last years, the control that Stalin would like to have had over all of Russian society. Stanislavsky and his methods could be manipulated by Stalin and the Party. From the government's point of view he was valuable asset and could be set up as an example for others in the arts, a true "An Artist of the People. Giving Meyerhold the new theatre, which was being constructed for him and allowing him to rebuild his reputation would not have been in the best interest of the Party, unless they could be sure he could be controlled. Given Meyerhold's past history this was extremely unlikely.

When Stanislavsky died tributes flowed in from all over the world. His acting method was made the catechism for the Russian theatre. His grave is in the cemetery of the Novodevichy Monastery where the Russian great are buried, near Chekhov's grave in that corner of the graveyard reserved now for members of the original Moscow Art company. But Meyerhold is not buried there. His ashes were deposited in the cemetery of the Don Monastery, together with those of almost 500 other victims of the Soviet purge era in "Common Grave No.1" which bears the inscription: HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF INNOCENT VICTIMS OF POLITICAL REPRESSION WHO WERE TORTURED AND SHOT IN THE YEARS 1930-1942 TO THEIR ETERNAL MEMORY.

IV

Conclusion: Repression in the Russian Theatre

Repression and political control have long been part Russian theatrical life. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ The control by the Soviets of theatre for most of the twentieth century may be looked on as part of a continuing Russian tradition, not a aberration. In the 1670's when Alexia Mikhailovich, the second tzar of the Romanov dynasty, brought German actors to the Russian court to train Russian performers, the tradition of political control of the theatre was established. Later Peter the Great used the theatre to educate and refine the crude Russian princes of his court. Catherine the Great wrote plays to communicate her ideas of the ideal social order. The lesser monarchs of the nineteenth century, who had to deal with a theatre catering to the middle class, more crudely controlled the theatre through the power of censorship. Control was always from a central authority and repression was part of theatrical life, in both the aristocratic court theatre and the theatre of the middle class. The serf theatre, the only theatre not under state control flourished from the end of the eighteenth century to 1861 also existed in a climate of repression. Even when Alexander as part of his liberal reforms allowed commercial theatres to be formed in 1882, the theatre was closely watched by his censors for their political and ideological content. Such was the climate until the October Revolution of 1917. The decade after the revolution, was rare, a period when experimentation was tolerated. But in 1928 with the coming of Stalin's five year plans, repression again became the order of the day. By 1936 the repression had hardened into the orthodoxy of "socialist realism". The period from the beginning of the century until the mid-nineteen thirties with the lifting of oppression, the Revolution and the Civil War, and the post war experimental policies of Lenin, saw a powerful outburst of artistic, political and social energy resulting in unprecedented change in Russian society and the flowering of a Golden Age of Russian theatre, whose vitality and accomplishment were to affect the Western theatre for the remainder of the century. And Stanislavsky and Meyerhold were both victims caught in the cross fire of opposing forces which characterize this period. How ironic it is that these two men driven primarily by artistic concerns were to have their fates decided primarily by political forces.

Stanislavsky was the great innovator of the pre-Revolutionary era. His work as a director and acting theorist may be considered the theatrical culmination of the Russia's Golden Age of Art begun in the mid-nineteenth century, combining realism with a progressive social message. He was a descendent of Gogal, Ostrovsky, Shchepkin, and Tolstoy - an artistic heritage manipulated,distorted and made grotesque by the socialist realists in the 1930's. He was able to achieve great artistic heights in an era of alternating lifting and pressing of tzarist oppression at the beginning of the century. His art was an art of subtlety and nuance. He and his artistic theories were able to survive under the Imperial,the Revolutionary and the Soviet systems.

Meyerhold, the great innovator of the 1920's, brought to fruition the goals of the Russian aesthetic movement begun in the 1890's, Russia's Silver Age of Art. An aesthetic movement begun in mysticism and comfortable with theatricality. The tradition of the poet and critic Merezzhovsky of the in the early 1890's, Briussov and other early Russian Symbolists, and Diaghilev and the World of Art Movement in the late 1890's. He carried the St Petersburg aesthetic of the first decade of the century into the Soviet period.

Meyerhold thrived in the brief NEP period in the early 1920's when economic,social and artistic innovation were encouraged, albeit within an the emerging repressive Communist political system. And Meyerhold's approach to life and art was bold. This was his period of greatest success. The times promised to reward boldness, but finally did not.

In the Soviet theatre of the 1930's, commitment to the ideals of the Revolution was not enough to guarantee success or even survival. Total devotion and slavish adherence to the Party was demanded in artistic as in all other aspects of life. Meyerhold embraced the Revolution and Stanislavsky adapted to it, with ironic results.

Stanislavsky and his artistic theories based on the aesthetically conservative tradition of Russian realism were manipulated by the Stalinists - his theatrical theories corrupted. In its pure form Stanislavsky's realism attempted to allow the audience to get to the "inner reality" beyond the stage action. In its Soviet socialist form, realism heavy- handedly presented and propagated a distorted and limited reality. The Soviet theatre was a conservative theatre posing as a revolutionary theatre.

Meyerhold's theatre, based on twentieth century thought and theories of art, looked to a new future and was truly revolutionary. It looked to old theatrical forms for its inspiration, and in execution created new theatrical forms. Traces of Meyerhold's spirit is still to be found in the avant-garde theatre of the 1990's in Russia and throughout the West. Because it required a social system permitting complete freedom of expression, this theatre could not survive the Soviet totalitarian regime. It was a director based theatre encouraging innovation in style and content. Distortion of an author's intention or of reality itself was permitted and encouraged. His theatre demanded freedom to create a theatrical reality representing the personal and unique vision of the director. Theatre which would allow the audience to see reality anew and perhaps create its own reality. This was a freedom which the Soviets could not allow. The Soviets could not manipulate Meyerhold's ideas for their own purposes.

In the end, Meyerhold who embraced the Revolution became, a victim of it. Stanislavsky who never became a Party member became its theatrical patron saint.

Stanislavsky and Meyerhold:

Chronology of Theatrical Work

I

The Late Imperial Era

Stanislavsky: Innovator in the Realistic Theatre

(1888-1917)

The perfection of realism

(1898) Formed the Moscow Art Theatre as a reaction against practices of the Imperial and commercial theatre in matters of acting, staging, directing, theatre administration and repertoire.

Unsuccessful attempt at having MAT classified as a "free" or "people's" theatre rather than an "art" theatre.

Reacted against repressive censorship of the tzar by presenting progressive repertoire for the intelligentsia. MAT as the Theatre of Chekhov and Gorki. Proponent of new drama of Ibsen, Strindberg and Hamsun.

(1906-1911) Entered period of study, observation,introspection and self examination leading to the creation and codification of his "scientific" system of realistic acting. This determines the direction of his professional life for the next 30 years and affected Russian and Western theatre for the rest of the century.

Use of the system on stage after his first successful attempt in 1910 in Turgenev's A Month in the Country.

Flirted with non-realistic theatre (Studio Theatre with Meyerhold and Hamlet with Craig).

Concluded that: realism is the way to get to "truth" in the theatre; the actor is of central importance in bringing truth to the stage (psychological approach to acting); the theatre has a social, moral and educational function but should never be overtly political. Holds to these tenets after the Revolution.

His work and acclaim would ignite theatrical debate for the ensuing three decades.

Meyerhold - From Realism to Theatricality

(1898-1902) Early acting career at MAT.

(1903-1904) Realistic directing in the provinces. Developed an interest in avant garde experimental staging.

(1905) Asked by Stanislavsky to run the Studio Theatre of MAT as an experimental theatre.

(1906) Became director of Vera Komissarzhevskaya's theatre in St Petersburg. Continues his theatrical experimentation.

(1906-1911) Came under the influence of Ivanov and other Russian Symbolists, Georg Fuchs, the Symbolists "theatre temple", Craig's marionettes, Maeterlinck's abstractions.

(1911-1917) Director of Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg and worked simultaneously in the fringe theatre and cabarets as "Dr. Dapertutto". Increasingly influenced by writings of Wagner, Craig and Appia. Use of techniques from "commedia dell' arte", circus , music hall. Breakdown of audience - actor barrier. Less interest in words, more interest in pantomime,gesture rhythm, in Columbine's Scarf in 1910. Produces one of the most lavish Russian theatrical productions on the eve of the Revolution, Lermontov's The Masquerade.

His work has influence on other avant garde directors such as Alexander Tairov, Evgeny Vakhtangov, and Nikolai Okhlopkov.

Provoked scandal and hatred. Critic Kugel called him a monster for tampering with classics; artists at Imperial Theatre reluctant to work with him; Davydov called him "an enraged kangaroo escaped rom the zoo."

II The First decade After the Revolution

Meyerhold: The search for a Socialist Theatre

(1917-1928)

Stanislavsky - adapts to the Soviet system

Early 1920's

Sidesteps the Revolution: 1923-1924 Toured with MAT in America

Wrote first version of My Life in Art on American tour.

Directs opera at the Bolshoi

Teaches his system at Opera

Late 1920's: