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V. E. Meyerhold: A Russian Predecessor of Avant-Garde TheaterAuthor(s): Marjorie L. HooverSource: Comparative Literature, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Summer, 1965), pp. 234-250Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1769826Accessed: 28/09/2010 20:08

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MARJORIE L. HOOVER

V. E. Meyerhold: A

Russian Predecessor of

Avant-Garde Theater

"XJOU CAN TEAR pages from the book of history, but history l itself you cannot write anew"-these words from the memoirs

of Ilya Ehrenburgl may serve to point to the recognition once again accorded to V. E. Meyerhold and to the avant-gardism he represents. Neither novelty nor doubt any longer attaches to realism, the estab- lished form of theater in our time. The origins of realism, as it was re- born at the end of the nineteenth century, are clear, and the masters of realist drama-Ibsen, Hauptmann, Chekhov-are acknowledged. The system for realistic experience in the theater, Stanislavsky's Method, has become more or less standard for actors everywhere. Less well de- fined than realism and by no means finally established, the avant-garde movement is still making its way in literature and in the theater. Yet in origin this nonrealistic trend is almost as old as the realistic. "The last years of the [nineteenth] century brought about a dual awaken- ing," Jacques Guicharnaud points out in his Modern French Theatre, "that of the theatrical world in general and that of the playwright. Al- most simultaneously, the attempted reform took two divergent direc- tions: Antoine's Theatre Libre, founded in 1887, became the champion of realism and naturalism, and Paul Fort's Theatre d'Art, 1891, cham- pion of the so-called poetic theatre."2

The Russian theater director, V. E. Meyerhold, taking his departure from the simultaneous renewal of both trends, consistently furthers the second and therefore deserves an important place in the history

1 Liudi, gody, zhizn, Bk. IV, Novyi mir, Apr. 1962, p. 12. 2 Jacques Guicharnaud, Modern French Theatre (New Haven, 1961), p. 6.

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MEYERHOLD AND AVANT-GARDE THEATER

of the nonrealist or avant-garde theater. However, Meyerhold's name was so effectively denigrated and even eradicated in Russia during the Stalinist period that it has been almost forgotten in the West as well. But certain connoisseurs of modern theater have kept it alive. Thus John Gassner includes a specific account of Meyerhold's career in his Form and Idea in Modern Theatre.3 Norris Houghton, in his most re- cent book, assigns to Meyerhold prime importance in the history of the modern theater: "Brecht and Piscator had, for example, learned from Meierhold, and the rest of us had learned from Brecht."4 Brecht's biog- rapher, John Willett, is well aware of Meyerhold's contribution to his subject's achievement.5 In France Nina Gourfinkel published an an- thology of Meyerhold's pronouncements and a descriptive list of his productions, demonstrating his constant advocacy of nonrealist theater, "le theatre theatral."6 This principle of Meyerhold's, condemned in the Soviet Union as "formalism" because it opposed the prescribed "socialist realism," has become mentionable again only since Stalin's death. Now Russian scholars and theater artists may once more exam- ine Meyerhold's achievement.7 One of his productions was immediately

3 John Gassner, Form and Idea in Modern Theatre (New York, n.d.), pp. 192- 198. There are two biographies of Meyerhold in Russian, both published before his recent "rehabilitation": Nikolai Dmitrievich Volkov, Meierkhol'd (Moscow, Len- ingrad, 1929), 2 vols.; this full and well-documented work covers only the period up to 1917, since only two of three projected volumes were published. Juri Jelagin, Dark Genius: A Biography of Vsevolod Meyerhold (New York, 1955); this one-volume Russian biography, published in emigration, depends on Volkov for the period up to 1917 and thereafter on personal recollections of the author, a musician in the orchestra of a rival theater; Jelagin publishes, from his own steno- graphic notes, a bold last speech which Meyerhold supposedly made in defense of his artistic credo and which occasioned his arrest in 1939, followed by his death under unknown circumstances. (This last speech is also published in another book by Jelagin, which has been translated into English-Taming of the Arts (New York, 1951). Two unpublished dissertations have been written: Nora Beate Bee- son, "Vsevolod Meyerhold and the Experimental Prerevolutionary Theater (1900- 1917)" (Columbia University, 1960); Marjorie L. Hoover, "V. E. Meyerhold" (Yale University, 1962), an M.A. thesis in Russian which surveys the whole career. Two histories of Russian theater give descriptions of Meyerhold's produc- tions: Nikolai A. Gorchakov, The Theater in Soviet Russia, trans. Edgar L-hr- man (New York, 1957); Marc Slonim, Russian Theater (Cleveland, New York, 1961). In Italian there is an article by A. M. Ripellino, "Meyerchol'd," Enciclo- pedia dello Spettacolo (Rome, 1960), VII, 375-383.

4Norris Houghton, Return Engagement (New York, 1962), p. 17. 5 John Willett, Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (London, 1957), p. 209. 6 Vsevolod Meyerhold: Le theatre theatral, ed. and trans. Nina Gourfinkel

(Paris, 1963). Two brief series of excerpts, all from Meyerhold's collected volume 0 teatre (St. Petersburg, 1913), have been published in English translation by Nora Beeson: "Farce," Tulane Drama Review, IV, No. 1 (1959), pp. 139-149; "On Theater," TDR, IV, No. 4 (1960), pp. 138-148.

7 Three recent mentions by scholars: A. Fevral'skii's note pointing out the need to study "huge stores of material" in the U.S.S.R. Central State Archive of Litera-

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

restaged before audiences curious about his work after the long ban.8 Learned works have been republished, restoring passages previously deleted because they contained his name.9 Most significant, his writings and material on his work may soon be made available.10 Such renewed interest in Meyerhold on both sides of the iron curtain invites an at- tempt to define his "formalism" and to reassess its artistic validity in terms of theater today.

Repeatedly Meyerhold refused to accept the label of any one -ism; indeed, in their number and variety his experiments during nearly forty years in the theater correspond almost to a history of the period's art, as Sloniml1 has pointed out. Yet, despite their diversity, all the phases of Meyerhold's evolution derive from one constant principle to which he always remained true. For several reasons the word "form- alism" should be abandoned to Meyerhold's accusers. It has pejorative overtones in most West European languages as well as in Russian. For Russia the word Formalism, capitalized as Victor Erlich, author of the definitive treatment on Russian Formalism, would have it, has a specific historical meaning quite apart from Meyerhold; it means in Erlich's delimitation a school of Russian criticism and scholarship (1916-30).12

ture and Art precedes Meyerhold's article, "Ob iskusstve teatra," ed. A. Fevral'skii, Teatr, Mar. 1957, p. 112. A. Gladkov's record of oral statements by Meyerhold, "Repliki," ed. A. Gladkov, Teatral'naia zhizn (May 1960), pp. 19-21. A. Gladkov, "Vospominaniia Meierkhol'da," Moskva teatral'naia (Moscow, 1960), pp. 347-376. A. Gladkov, "Vospominaniia, zametki, zapiski o V. E. Meierkhol'de, Tarusskie stranitsy (Kaluga, 1961), pp. 292-307. B. Rostotskii, O reshisserskom tvorchestve V. E. Meierkhol'da (Moscow, 1960). Examples of recent mention by former asso- ciates in the theater: N. Okhlopkov, "Ob uslovnosti," Teatr, Nov. 1959, pp. 58-77; Igor' Il'inskii, Sam o sebe (Moscow, 1962).

8 This revival of N. Erdman's Mandat, first staged by Meyerhold in 1925, is reviewed by Inna Solov'eva, "Radi chego?" Teatr, Mar. 1957, pp. 70-81.

9 For example, the complete edition of Chekhov's works, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XIX (Moscow, 1950), 209, Letter No. 3367, prints [...] instead of mentioning Meyerhold's name; such deletions have recently been made good by explanations in the article of E. A. Polotskaia, "Chekhov i Meierkhol'd," Litera- turnoe nasledstvo (Moscow, 1960), LXVIII, 417-434. Meyerhold's name was alto- gether deleted from the 1940 edition of posthumous memoirs by A. I. Golovin, the artist who in close collaboration with Meyerhold designed the sets for major pro- ductions during Meyerhold's decade as director of the Imperial Theaters, St. Petersburg. The incredible distortion caused by such a major omission was made good in a new edition of Aleksandr Iakovlevich Golovin, Vstrechi i vpechatleniia, Pis'ma, Vospominaniia o Golovine (Leningrad, Moscow, 1960). The Malaia So- vetskaia Entsiklopediia, Vol. V (Moscow, 1959), again includes an article on Meyerhold, and the new Teatral'naia Entsiklopediia, Vol,. III (Moscow, 1964) does likewise.

10 In a letter column of the leading Soviet theater magazine, Teatr, Jan. 1963, p. 89, reference is made to the forthcoming publication of an anthology of Meyer- hold's writings and a volume of recollections concerning him.

11 Slonim, p. 257. 12 Russian Formalism (The Hague, 1955), p. ix.

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MEYERHOLD AND AVANT-GARDE THEATER

Meyerhold himself, reserving "formalist" and "formalism" to counter a reproach uses uslovnyi and uslovnost' to designate the kind of theater which he espoused. Since Okhlopkov entitles his recent article urging a new look at theater "Ob uslovnosti," the term and its related words must still have a sufficiently good ring to deserve currency in Russian today.

A first step in assigning a meaning to these words should be to note the sense of their parent word uslovie: a condition or agreed-upon con- vention. The condition basic to Meyerhold's idea of theater emerges from the nearly statement twice used in his book O teatre: "Theater is uslovnyi when the audience never for a moment forgets that these are actors acting, nor the actors, that they have before them an audience, beneath their feet a stage and on each side a set."13 Meyerhold himself citesl4 a still earlier use of uslovnost' by Chekhov to oppose excesses of realism. He recalls how during rehearsal for the epoch-making Moscow Art Theater production of The Sea: Gull (1898), Chekhov had been dis- tressed to learn that dogs were to bark backstage and frogs croak. Chekhov protested, arguing thus: "Kramskoy did a painting of a genre scene in which the faces are wonderfully depicted. What if you were to cut out the nose on one face and insert a live nose. The nose would be 'real,' but the painting would be spoiled ... The theater, as you know, is based on certain conditions of art [izz'estnaia uslovnost'] The fourth wall is omitted here. Besides, the theater is art. The theater reflects the quintessence of life."'5 Nora Beeson renders izvestnaia uslovnost' quite properly in this context as "a certain convention."'6 The convention meant here is the peepbox stage which faithfully reproduces to scale the living room of real life, all but the fourth wall. Chekhov and the Moscow Art group carried this "conventional" theater, which had been gaining ascendancy since the mid-eighteenth century, to a supremacy from which it still has not been displaced; yet paradoxically by his men- tion of uslovnost' Chekhov also opposed to it his larger awareness of the basic conditions of art. And in The Sea Gull Chekhov gave his young hero, Treplev, lines attacking the convention of realism, lines well known to Meyerhold, who created the role: "But to my thinking her

13 0 teatre (St. Petersburg, 1913), p. 86, in an article on Max Reinhardt, first published in 1907; also pp. 53-54 in an article contributed to the book, Teatr (St. Petersburg, 1908).

14 V. E. Meyerhold, "Teatr, k istorii i tekhnike," the leading article of O teatre, was also previously published in the collective volume, Teatr, kniga o novom teatre (St. Petersburg, 1908), pp. 263-289, which also contained articles by A. Luna- charsky, F. Sologub, G. Chulkov, V. Briusov, and A. Belyi, among others.

15 Purportedly from Meyerhold's diary for Sept. 11, 1898; 0 teatre, p. 24. 16 This passage in TDR, IV, No. 1 (1960), pp. 138-139.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

[his actress-mother] theater today is nothing but routine, convention" (Act I). Treplev goes on to point out how great dramatic talents are employed only to enact in a room with three walls "how people drink, make love, move about and wear a suit jacket," and concludes: "New forms are needed."

The search for new forms beyond the "conventional" theater at the turn of the century was greatly furthered by an increased awareness of older forms. Valerii Briusov, later associated with Meyerhold as head of the "Literary Bureau" in the Theater-Studio of 1905, refuted the "conventional" theater's claim to greater realism by comparing its convention to that of the ancient theater. In an article entitled "Un- necessary Truth" (1902) in Diaghilev's World of Art magazine he wrote:

[In the Greek theater] The actor representing a stranger from afar entered from the left, whereas in the Moscow Art Theater the actor arriving from a distance is admitted to a tiny vestibule where he removes fur coat and boots as a sign that he has come from afar. But who in the audience is unaware of the fact that he has come from the wings? How is the convention of removing a fur coat more subtle than the convention that the actor entering from the left comes from afar?

Using the word uslovnost' before Meyerhold, Briusov urges: "Away from the unnecessary truth of the contemporary stage I challenge us to turn to the conscious uslovnost' 'consistency' of classical theater."17 The translation of uslovnost' in this context as "consistency" assigns to the term a wholly abstract meaning: "consistent" with the terms of theater, with the means of representation the theater provides.

Thanks to theater history, a new field at the turn of the century, all the variety of past traditions became available. Not only the classical tradition but also the Elizabethan, Spanish, and baroque theaters and the Italian commedia dell'arte all had their exponents. Acquaintance with foreign theaters also grew, notably the Oriental theater. And finally new forms were devised with the help of modern techniques by such innovators as Appia and Craig. Though "consistent" theater is thus based on awareness of theater as convention, it means a wealth of possible conventions, not just the "conventional" theater as the uniquely valid means of representing reality. Also misleading as an equivalent for "consistency" is the word "theatricality." For, although the anti- naturalist reform of modern theater can, in general, most aptly be termed a "rediscovery of theatricality,"l8 the first step of the reform has often consisted in doing away with elaborate, realistic sets, a delib-

17 Valerii Briusov, "Nenuzhnaia pravda," Mir iskusstva, VII-VIII, Nos. 1-6 (1902), p. 72.

18 Guicharnaud, p. 242.

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MEYERHOLD AND AVANT-GARDE THEATER

erate negation and exposure of "theatricality"; thus "consistent" the- ater need not be theatrical, a misunderstanding inherent also in the coined adjective "theatricalist." Nor does the term "antirealism" alto-

gether render "consistency" of theater. For reality in ever new, more

comprehensive meanings was the goal of presentation which forced the limits of the all too literal naturalist stage-reality as music of the

spheres with Blok or perspectives of the future with Mayakovsky, as

depth of inner feeling with Maeterlinck or the complexity of modern civilization with Tretiakov. A broadly interpreted reality is, of course, the goal to which both Stanislavsky, by his "method" of recreating inner feeling, and Meyerhold, with his "consistent" theater, devoted a lifetime in art. As Meyerhold remarked, "Constantine Sergeyevich and I are like contractors building a tunnel; he works from one side, I from the other."19 Since the mode of reality conveyed and the means of con-

veying it may vary so endlessly within the fortunate vagueness of "con- sistent" theater, a brief review of Meyerhold's experiments may give concrete meaning to the principle and, more important, may show his contribution of "consistent" devices to modern theater.

Stanislavsky put at Meyerhold's disposal his first workshop, the Theater-Studio of 1905, with the charge that "... realism was outlived. The time had come to stage the unreal."20 Several months later Stanis- lavsky closed this first workshop; the outbreak of the First Russian Revolution that fall made the opening of the plays impossible, although they had progressed as far as dress rehearsal. Stanislavsky stamped the experiment a failure.21 Later he even meant to label Meyerhold's entire career disparagingly as "mysticism and Maeterlinckism."22 Meyerhold, for his part, in the article "Teatr" of 1908 gives an inter-

esting account of the venture describing consistent devices. True, his

description of Maeterlinck's Death of Tintagiles must seem ludicrous

today. For instance, the composers R. M. Gliere and I. A. Satz devised music for orchestra and a cappella choir to express the howling of the wind and the interior monologue of the characters. The set designers,

19 Meyerhold, "Repliki," p. 19. 20 Retranslated from K. S. Stanislavsky, Moia xhisn' v iskusstve (Moscow,

1962), p. 344. Actually the English translation is the first published version of these memoirs, begun on tour in America. K. S. Stanislavsky, Mfy Life in Art (Boston, 1924), p. 434: "The time for the unreal on the stage had come."

21 K. S. Stanislavsky, Sobranie sochinenii, VII (Moscow, 1960), 413, Letter No. 302.

22 Ibid., VI (Moscow, 1959), 426, MS. No. 629. At work on an introduction to Rabota aktera nad soboi (An Actor Prepares) at the end of the 1920s, Stanislavsky noted under the heading "Three Tendencies in Art": "This chapter is not finished. There will be the theater of Tairov, of Meyerhold (the former Meyerhold of mysticism and Maeterlinckism) and the New Theater (my dream)."

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

S. U. Sudeikin and N. N. Sapunov, broke with the custom of the ma- quette and sketched painted flats instead, against which the actors were grouped in imitation of known works of art. Both devices obviously derive from the French symbolist theater, already tried and found wanting by the end of the 1890s. Yet these pictorial effects gave Meyer- hold the success he achieved the following year with Kommissarzhev- skaia in Maeterlinck's Sister Beatrice. And pictorialism, as used by Meyerhold, shaped the career of the director, A. Tairov. Gorchakov informs us that "Alexander Tairov, then a young actor working with Meyerhold at the Kommissarzhevskaya Theater wrote: 'Meyerhold brought monographs on Botticelli and other artists to the very first rehearsals, as, for example, of Sceur Beatrice. The pictures corre- sponded to various situations, and the performers borrowed their gestures and frequently whole groupings from this art, thus depicting not merely feelings, but even their external manifestation, i.e., the form itself.' "23

Not only Tairov's theater, which featured the decorative, but also Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, which insisted on ideology, recommended using material for the theater drawn from painting. The program for The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1954) reproduces Breughel's "Tolle Grete" as the model for the lead role of Grusche.24 Brecht advises styli- zation in order to represent reality; in the Theater-Studio of 1905 Mey- erhold had used it to achieve comic effect. Meyerhold had described the bedroom scene from Hauptmann's comedy, Schluck and Jau: "Instead of a great quantity of details, one or two broad strokes ... The mood of the royal bedchamber summarized by the grandiose bed of exaggerated dimensions with its improbable baldachins. At once a note of satire was sounded."25 Such gigantism of objects used with satiric purpose is, of course, not new in the theater; one need only recall the enormous syr- inges with which the ballet of doctors threaten Moliere's imaginary in- valid or, in our day, Claire Zachanassian's oversize sedan chair in Diirrenmatt's The Visit (New York, 1958).

Another comic device of consistent theater found in Schluck and Jau in 1905 was the use of group uniformity, rather than the striving for naturalistic individualization among members of a crowd which was in vogue at the time. Thus the curtain rising on the third scene revealed a horizontal row of bowers like beach baskets, in each of which sat court ladies, dressed in identical crinolines, all embroidering the same broad

23 Alexander Tairov, Zapiski rezhissera (Moscow, 1920), as quoted in Gorcha- kov, p. 412.

24 Theater program of the Berliner Ensemble for Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (1954), "Realismus und Stilisierung" (signed b.), p. 6.

25 Meyerhold, "Teatr," pp. 130-131.

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MEYERHOLD AND AVANT-GARDE THEATER

ribbon in unison, as if to music, with identical ivory needles. The comedy implicit in two of a kind is as old as Shakespeare's Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, Gogol's Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, or Lewis Carroll's Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In extending such multiple uniformity to a crowd, Meyerhold not only re-used a traditional comic device, he also restored it in an age so sensitive to loss of individuality that it has become thematic in certain modern plays, e.g., the interchangeability of one soldier for another in Brecht's Man is Man (1926), the regimen- tation of the capitalists marching in a squad in Giraudoux' Madwoman of Chaillot (1945), or the plural anonymity of Toby, Roby, Koby, and Loby, Claire Zachanassian's retinue, in Diirrenmatt's Visit. In sum, though the Theater-Studio never opened its productions, it served as a proving ground of consistent theater; especially its comic devices, the gigantism of things and multiple uniformity, are still fruitful today.

When Houghton, referring to, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, writes, "And so under Meierhold, the Revolution surged into the theater, ripping down the proscenium curtain,"26 he might well have specified instead the earlier revolution of 1905, for it was in 1906 with Ibsen's Ghosts in Poltava that Meyerhold first staged a play without a curtain. True, the turning point of 1906 in Meyerhold's career is no revolution, either in the usual sense of a break with tradition or in the

political sense of a people's movement. Rather, a restoration of earlier traditions and the adaptation of highly sophisticated ideas from abroad enlivened the theories of the new theater which Meyerhold encountered among the leading literary lights of Petersburg during his visit there in the winter (1905-06) of his enforced leisure. Some of these theories found their way into the theater, thanks to the young practitioner now introduced to the Wednesdays at Vyacheslav Ivanov's famous tower

apartment. Balmont adapted Calderon's Devotion to the Cross for a later informal production (1910) by Meyerhold in "The Tower The- ater," as Ivanov's living room was facetiously called for the occasion. V. N. Soloviev furnished Meyerhold with a one-act Harlequinade in the style of commedia dell'arte, staged for the Assembly of Nobles

(1911). And Blok used his awareness of both commedia dell'arte and German romanticism in the one-act play, Farce (Kommissarzhevskaia Theater, 1906-07), which he adapted from his own poem at the sugges- tion of Wednesday habitues, especially G. Chulkov, A. Belyi, and Meyerhold.

No doubt also during this crucial winter Meyerhold read Die Schau- bihne der Zukunft (Berlin,1903) by Georg Fuchs, who also in a later

26 Houghton, p. 93.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

book, Die Revolution des Theaters (Munich, 1906) with the motto "retheatraliser le theatre,"27 retailed ideas of theater reform then being fervently discussed by an elite throughout Europe. According to Fuchs, theater is a festival in which the audience participates; hence the aban- donment of the curtain and the resort to the ritual arts of music and mo- tion. Since theater experience takes place in the mind of the spectator, the action is shifted as far forward as possible and naturalism on stage is replaced by artistic suggestion aimed at the actual center of the the- atrical event, the audience; hence the relief stage and the pictorialism employed in Soeur Beatrice. Meyerhold added a fourth element, the spectator, in the diagrams he made for "Teatr" of the essential elements of the theater: author-director-actor-spectator.28

An opportunity to apply the new ideas came when Meyerhold be- came director (1906-07) for the actress Kommissarzhevskaia, who was also seeking to break away from conventionality.29 None of the productions staged during this year and a half now seem suited to the modern temper, yet significant devices of consistency can be dis- cerned in each. For Hedda Gabler with Komissarzhevskaia in the title role, Meyerhold departed from Ibsen's realistic stage directions and used suggestive settings and a symbolic color for each character; he also prescribed that the lines be spoken in a symbolist monotone. The pro- duction failed; yet the basic pose assigned to each character presaged the "Gestus" advocated in the Brechtian theater today. Thus Brach crouched faun-like at the pedestal of an enormous vase of chrysanthe- mums while Hedda was a green-blue sea serpent on a white-fur throne. The relief stage used in Sister Beatrice is now passe, yet the principle of pictorialism there applied was further developed by Meyerhold and others. The episodic structure of Wedekind's Spring's Awakening, which in the 1920s came almost to dominate the imagination of play- wrights and adapters, imposed a viable technique for staging brief suc- cessive moments. A set prepared in advance was lighted by a strong spotlight now in one area, now in another. Thus, during his directorship with Komissarzhevskaia, Meyerhold introduced significant devices of staging: the stage without a curtain, the "Gestus," pictorialism, episodic structure, area spotting.

27 Jacques Rouche, whose L'Art the'tral moderne (Paris, 1910) is said to give the first complete account of ideas new in the theater of the first decade, and again N. Okhlopkov in the present decade of the twentieth century, have acknowledged the significance of Georg Fuchs' influential and contradictory theories. See the recent abridged translation of Fuchs' second book, Revolution in the Theatre, trans. Constance Connor Kuhn (Ithaca, 1959).

28 Trans. Beeson, TDR, IV, No. 1 (1960), p. 142. 29 Andrei Belyi (B. N. Bugaev), Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 1905-1917 (Lenin-

grad, 1934), p. 67.

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MEYERHOL AD AND AVANT-GARDE THEATER

To none of these successful moments of consistency, however, does Meyerhold himself assign directional significance in his career, but rather to Blok's little one-act play, Farce.30 Here Meyerhold did not need to reinterpret the author's intent, as in Hedda, for Blok himself had incorporated in his play consistent devices which he knowingly attributes to romanticism. Thus the author appears in the play to pro- test the action, and the very title of the play, Farce, depreciates it. Of course, the Russian title alludes literally to a "show booth" and has also been translated "The Punch-and-Judy-Show." As if to answer Fuchs' dictum: "This whole sham world of cardboard, twine, canvas and gilt is ripe for destruction,"3' Meyerhold placed the show booth of the title as far forward as possible on the stage and left the auditorium lights on, revealing the booth's curtain and curtain strings. Here we have the manipulation of stage illusion which characterizes contem- porary theater, "underdistancing" and "overdistancing" as Oscar Biidel puts it,32 the simultaneity of belief and disbelief, as Jacques Guichar- naud terms it,33 the ironic back-and-forth implied by the last two ele- ments of Meyerhold's diagram: author-director-actor-spectator. Like the curtain, the cardboard flats were revealed as make-believe when the clown, thinking to jump out the window, crashed through painted paper and fell on the stage instead. In the end the show-booth set was flown clear of the stage in full view of the audience, and Pierrot, left alone and disconsolate on the stage apron, addressed the audience: "I feel very sad. And you laugh ?"34

Play with stage illusion is also seen in the doll's style of acting, which Meyerhold urged as follows: "When the doll cries, its hand holds the handkerchief without touching its eyes; when the doll kills, it stabs its opponent without touching his chest with the tip of the sword .. and in the embraces of the doll-lover there is so much caution that the spectator, admiring their advances at a respectful distance, does not ask what these embraces may lead to."35 The argument that the doll "show" not "be" the character it portrays foreshadows the "alienation" Brecht demands of his actors. Blok pushed alienation to the point of annihila- tion in Farce's satire of the Mystics; as Meyerhold described the stag-

30 "The first impulse toward determining the direction my art was to take came, however, with the felicitous devising of plans for A. Blok's wonderful Farce." Meyerhold, foreword to O teatre, p. iv.

31 Fuchs, trans. Kuhn, p. 37. 32 "Contemporary Theater and Aesthetic Distance," PMLA, LXXVI (1961),

281. 33 Guicharnaud, p. 15. 34 Alexander Blok, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1955), I, 550. 35 0 teatre, p. 156.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

ing of it: "... the Mystics so lower their heads that suddenly only busts without heads or hands remain at table ... The actors' hands had been thrust through apertures in the cardboard busts and their heads rested on the cardboard collars."36 A contemporary comment reveals the effect achieved by such irony: "If Maeterlinck recounts in a trembling voice the mysteries of the world, so into his representation Blok infil- trated irony, which frequently assumed the mask of a bitter and evil grimace."'3

Blok himself connected irony with the German romantics as "that condition of which solitary Heine speaks: 'I cannot seize the dividing line at which irony ends and Heaven begins !'" Blok adds: "This, after all, is a cry for salvation," and "Don't listen to our laughter, listen to the pain behind it."38 The split mood of romantic irony determined the con- ception of the characters; thus Columbine is both Pierrot's beloved and death. Meyerhold urged that the actor convey duality of character by his technique: "The two faces of Harlequin are two opposite poles ... The actor will turn the mask so that the spectator will always clearly feel which one he has before him: the foolish simpleton of Bergamo or the devil."39 He called such duality "grotesque," which he defined as 'a means of creating contrasts or increasing them:... Affirmation and negation... the beautiful and horrible; thus the grotesque, devoted to making decorative what is monstrous, does not allow beauty to be- come sentimental."40 The "grotesque" points back to the past of roman- ticism and also forward to the future teatro del grottesco (1916-25), in which Pirandello elevated tragic duality to a principle of life and art. As Meyerhold describes its technical application: "A basic feature of the grotesque is the artist's constant effort to take the audience from one plane scarcely touched upon, only to reach another wholly unexpected one" ;41 it presaged not only the breaking off of mood required by the alienation principle, but also the specifically Meyerholdian device of perekliuchenie, changeover, which he later used so effectively in his pro- duction of Gogol's Revizor (The Inspector General) (1926). Thus in Blok's Farce Meyerhold for the first time produced a play wholly con- ceived from the start as a piece of consistent theater. In his production he applied consistent techniques to both "proscenium" and "mask" in a way calculated to play ironically with the illusion. The irony (Blok)

3 Ibid., p. 172. 37 A. Znosko-Borovskii, Russkii teatr nachalat XX v. (Prague, 1925), p. 283. 38 Blok, II, 84. 39 0 teatre, pp. 168-169. 40 Ibid., pp. 158-159. 41 Ibid., pp. 168-172.

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or grotesque (Meyerhold) of such treatment revealed a spirit peculiar to the period, but certain of the resultant techniques achieved later importance.

During the next decade of his directorship at the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg (1908-17) Meyerhold led a double life. As Meyerhold he staged plays at the Alexandrinskii Theater and a certain number of operas at the Mariinskii before a large public. Under the pseudonym of Dr. Dapertutto42 he experimented in successive cabaret ventures and in his theater school. The techniques of lighted auditorium and stage without a curtain received finished treatment in his memorable pro- duction of Moliere's Don Juan (1910). Lermontov's Masquerade (1917), in many ways the high point of the Imperial Theaters, em- bodied significant techniques such as the "changeover" from crowded to intimate and light to dark scene, and the musical leitmotif used for ironic suggestivity. Dr. Dapertutto's most significant cabaret produc- tion, Sharf Kolumbiny (Columbine's Scarf) (1910),43 concentrated on music and motion, and renounced decor and speech. This musical pan- tomine, while on tour in Moscow, profoundly influenced the young Vakhtangov, and it explains Brecht's idea of Meyerhold as creating "a complete choreography for the drama."44 A major achievement of Col- umbine's Scarf, the use of music as a pacemaker, was later applied not to dance but to drama; thus a better term than "choreography" is "chronometrage," used by Meyerhold specialists. Referring to The Inspector General, staged by Meyerhold in the mid-1920s, Gvozdev speaks of an exact chronometrical notation of each scene,45 and Glad- kov in his recollections of Meyerhold in the 1930s uses chronometrage to mean both a first step in determining the time of performance and also a consistent device for portraying feeling by means of rhythm.46 Besides chronometrage, another concept of Meyerhold's consistent theater can be deduced from Columlbine's Scarf, his notion of "biome- chanics," just as an early occurrence of his "constructivism" can be de- tected in a production by Dr. Dapertutto of Blok's Unknown Lady (1914). Meyerhold's Imperial directorship and Dr. Dapertutto's ex- perimentation had already prepared Meyerhold's use of consistent thea-

42 "Dr. Everywhere" after the Faustus-figure and magician in E. T. A. Hoff- mann's tale, Adventures of a New Year's Eve, a nickname given Meyerhold by Michael Kuzmin, poet and composer of music for Blok's Farce and The Unknown Lady.

43 Adapted from Arthur Schnitzler, Der Schleier der Pierrette (1910). 44 Bertolt Brecht, "On the Experimental Theatre," TDR, VI, No. 1 (1961), p 3. 45 A. A. Gvozdev, "Reviziia 'Revizora,'" 'Revizor' v teatre im. Meierkholda

(Leningrad, 1927), pp. 19-44. 46 Gladkov, "Vospominaniia Meierkhol'da," pp. 351-352.

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ter, which then seemed indeed revolutionary in his Soviet period. Unfortunately, Meyerhold's own writings cannot be quoted in sup-

port of his practice in the Soviet period, since we have for this period nothing comparable to the prerevolutionary volume, O teatre. True, he continued after the Revolution to write and to speak frequently, but except for a couple of slender pamphlets his numerous pronouncements are available only in Nina Gourfinkel's French excerpts. Though Meyerhold's own theoretical writings cannot be cited in evidence of a new spirit after 1917, connections exist between Meyerhold and the Western theater which might justify drawing upon Apollinaire47 or Cocteau or Pitoeff48 to bear witness to the new climate in the theater after World War I. But the change can be seen if we contrast Blok and Mayakovsky. Farce and The Unkown Lady, the prerevolu- tionary plays of Blok produced by Meyerhold, were suffused with whimsical sadness and a consciousness of doom, whereas Mayakovsky's pageant, Mysteria-Bouffe (1918, 1921), and his plays, Klop (The Bed- bug) (1929) and Bania (The Bathhouse) (1930), also produced by Meyerhold, are full of vulgar ebullience and comic satire. Especially in the early 1920s the new spirit gave rise to extremes which were later repudiated. Thus, after presenting the stage completely bare, Meyer- hold wrote a pamphlet in which he suggested that the slogan favoring the bare stage, "Down with beauty," might require revision after all.49 Like the tricks which are today contemptuously dismissed as Piscator's "fireworks," some of Meyerhold's devices in the new spirit now seem the product of youthful exuberance, or a deliberate attempt to defy the bourgeois.

Still, from two slogans of the immediately postrevolutionary years, "constructivism" and "biomechanics," certain lasting techniques of consistency emerge. Particularly the earlier uses of constructivism seem still acceptable. "The first experiment with the use of stage space in the spirit of 'constructivism' was the bridge built for Part II of Blok's Unknown Lady."50 The play requires that a star be shown falling and coming to earth as the poet's vision of a beautiful woman. In Meyer-

47 Meyerhold spent considerable time with Guillaume Apollinaire during his 1913 sojourn in Paris; there are striking parallels between Meyerhold's theories and pronouncements by Apollinaire.

48 Jean Cocteau was a familiar of Diaghilev's Russian seasons in Paris before the end of World War I (1907-17). Georges Pitoeff was a member of Komis- sarzhevskaia's company the year after Meyerhold left it; Meyerhold's production of Farce, which remained in the company's repertoire, must surely, therefore, have influenced Pitoeff's first staging of this play in Geneva in 1916.

49 Vs. Meierkhol'd, Rekonstruktsiia teatra (Moscow, 1930), p. 23. 50 Teatr irn. Vs. Meierkhol'da. Muzei. Katalog vystavki 5 let (1920-1925)

(Moscow, 1926), p. 5.

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hold's consistent realization the sky was represented by a spangled net extended on poles by two stage attendants while a third attendant de- scribed with a pole lighted like a torch an arc denoting the star's fall; as the lighted torch was extinguished in a pail, the Unkown Lady ad- vanced from on high across a slender arched bridge to meet the poet. Obviously the bridge had the decorative function of completing the

stage picture in height and the symbolic function of signifying trans-

cendency, from which the Lady descends to everyday reality. Both the decorative and the symbolic functions are, of course, still evident in such a construction today, e.g., in Genet's Blacks (New York, 1960) the elevated horseshoe ramp on which the Whites are enthroned, ruling over their underlings, the Blacks. Gorchakov defines a third function of the bridge "construction": "It was an apparatus for acting with no realistic resemblance to a bridge."51 In its extreme exploitation as bio- mechanics this last function disappeared; acrobatics by the actor on circuslike apparatus were soon abandoned.

Both constructivism and biomechanics owed their theory in part to Revolutionary thinking. According to constructivism the actor was to be provided with machines like any other worker, and according to biomechanics he was to learn a science of body movements like any other craftsman. V. Shklovskii has shown that the assumption of a

parallel between the actor and a closely related craftsman, the circus

performer, is aesthetically untenable except for the clown, since he alone among circus performers excercises an art, not a physical skill.52 But, if the machine for acting has disappeared, at least constructivist

"object play" has continued to serve the actor. Such play with the thing served as ironic comment in Meyerhold's constructivist version of the classic Forest by Ostrovsky (1924)-for instance, when the heroine Aksiusha heard a declaration of love without interrupting the blows of her rollingpin. Surely it is the consistent device of object play, not mere "stage business," which has become central to the theme of Beckett's play, Krapp's Last Tape (New York, 1960), for the hero's

expert handling of the tape recorder and apish enjoyment of his banana denote a contrast essential to the play's conception of man. Likewise the clowning which biomechanics restored to consistent theater art has not only kept its place but has at times become thematic. With Beckett the juggling manipulation of hats between the two tramps in Waiting

51 Gorchakov, p. 72. 52 Viktor Shklovskii, Khod konia (Moscow, Berlin, 1923), p. 140. In his anal-

ysis of the three categories of circus performance, clownery, acrobatism, and ani- mal training, Shklovskii makes clear that only the first partakes of art, whereas the second and third are mere skills which consist in overcoming physical difficulty.

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for Godot (1952) alludes to human anonymity; the farcical falls of tramps and others suggest the incorrigibility of failure in the human condition. So constructivism and biomechanics, though overly drastic in their radical applications during the early Soviet period, neverthe- less contributed important consistent techniques to the contemporary theater.

In bringing back to the theater such long-neglected devices as deco- ration, music, motion, and clowning, did Meyerhold push aside litera- ture itself ?53 Even in the acrobatically constructivist Siert' Tarelkina (Death of Tarelkin) by Sukhovo-Kobylin (1922), Okhlopkov testi- fies that the actors spoke their lines unexceptionably.54 Still the fact that Meyerhold constructivistically mounted a play from the Russian repertoire raises the question of his relation to literature. At his best, he interpreted literature in a highly sophisticated, often controversial, always interesting manner. Thus in the much-discussed Inspector Gen- eral of 1926 he included moments from other works by the same author, from The Gamblers and Dead Souls, in order to render the whole world of Gogol. Harking back to Merezhkovsky's views in "Gogol and the Devil" (1903), he also added a silent role, the impostor-inspector Khlestakov's romantic double. Further, he transferred the place of action from a small town to the capital, thus transforming a comedy of mceurs into a satire with universally symbolic overtones. Finally, he tailored the play to suit consistent theater techniques: episodic struc- ture, multiple uniformity, gigantism of things, the change-over, music as leitmotif, the doll's style of acting. The magnitude of the changes in the Inspector General adaptation show at least the Meyerhold of the 1920s as very close to Brecht, who finds it necessary to rewrite the classics for our time.55 Not only Meyerhold's strong hand but also his flair for literary quality show in his choice of plays and in his collabora- tion with writers. With others he helped extract Farce from the author, in Blok's expression, as "with the surgeon's knife."56 He pressed Maya- kovsky too for The Bedbug57 and also installed him as assistant direc- tor in the creation of the play in the theater.58 Obviously then, Meyer- hold's use of literature was directed toward the creation of consistent

53 In his article, "Farce" (1912), Meyerhold had posed the question whether the statement might soon become axiomatic: "Words in the theater are but embroidery on the canvas of motion," O teatre, p. 149.

54 Okhlopkov, p. 75. 55 Guicharnaud, p. 261. Guicharnaud summarizes succinctly this question of the

"director as creator" in the modern theater. 56 Blok, II, 562. 57 Jelagin, p. 312. 58 Vladimir Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XI (Moscow, 1958), 663.

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theater in which the word is employed as only one among several ele- ments. The word so used need not be viewed as devalued, though doubt- less the increased importance of other elements of spectacle denotes a step toward the theater of today, sometimes called inarticulate and "non-literary."59

What place, then, must be assigned Meyerhold in the modern theater? To base Meyerhold's claim to greatness only on his actual achievement as a director does not entirely do him justice. For one reason, though Meyerhold indeed created a number of finished productions, superb in their time-Moliere's Don Juan, Lermontov's Masquerade, Gogol's Inspector General-the director's creation by its very complexity is probably more evanescent than any other form of art, incapable of total re-creation and thus unusually difficult to assess. For another reason, the romantic strain in some of Meyerhold's best productions-Blok's Farce, for example-justifies the title of Jelagin's biography, Dark Genius, and limits them to an earlier time. Nor can Meyerhold be considered, above all, a director's director. True, along with Stanislavsky he inaugurated a new era of great directors, instituted the first courses ever given in directing,60 and influenced chiefly directors, both those who have acknowledged indebtedness to him, like Tairov, Vakhtangov, Eisen- stein, and Okhlopkov, and those for whom direct connections are still to be substantiated, like Cocteau, Pitoeff,61 Piscator, and Brecht. Clearly his work offers inspiration to the director. As Vakhtangov is said to have remarked: "The ideas for staging which Meyerhold dreams

up but does not always completely exploit would suffice other directors for producing innumerable plays."62 But Meyerhold left no handbook of a method to compete with Stanislavsky's, however much Gladkov

seemingly promises the possibility of recreating one from uncollected and unpublished writings.63 Nor can Meyerhold's name be paired with that of a single author as the creator in the theater of a great writer's canon, like Stanislavsky's with Chekhov, or Jouvet's with Giraudoux.

Though Meyerhold showed great taste in choosing his collaborators among gifted writers, artists, and musicians, he did not "make" the reputation of any truly great dramatist. Nor did he stamp any one style of staging as his own, though his name has been unjustly pre-

59 Leonard Cabell Pronko, Avant-Garde: The Experimental Theater in France (Los Angeles, 1962), p. 198.

60 N. Oulianoff, Novyi zhurnal (No. 44, 1956), p. 279. 61 Guicharnaud, p. 250. Surely Guicharnaud's note on Pitoeff requires the ad-

dition of Meyerhold's name: "Trained in Russia at the time of Stanislavsky"- and Meyerhold.

62 Volkov, II, 220. 63 Gladkov, Moskva teatral'naia, p. 348.

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empted for single -isms like mysticism or constructivism. Rather, in the end, his claim to significance rests on the principle of consistency, the term he preferred to the "formalism" of which he was accused and to which he devoted his long and impressive career. Soon after the turn of the century Meyerhold, rather than Stanislavsky, showed himself aware of the nature of theater art. By advocating the exposure of the illusion, activation of the audience, play with the mask, the restoration of a wealth of devices from the past as well as the innovation of con-

temporary techniques, Meyerhold helped to end the century-and-a- half predominance of the realistic convention and to inaugurate the contemporary era in theater. He should be further studied for his inventive conception of consistent theater and restored to the place he deserves in the history of twentieth-century literature and theater.

Oberlin College

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