The Magical Chorus

and in 1918 that was the most important thing: for us both, the October revolution had been a way out of the intellectual dead end.”¹⁷ At that point, Meyerhold was forty-four, one of the most prominent people in Russian theater, reaching dizzying heights via a very zigzagged path. The son of a provincial Lutheran vodka distillery owner and a convert to Russian Orthodoxy, he had become one of the stars of the Moscow Art Theater from the moment Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko founded it in 1898. But after an argument with Stanislavsky he left to become a notorious leader of Symbolist theater and in 1908 was offered the position, to everyone’s surprise, of director of the Imperial theaters—the Alexandrinsky and Maryinsky—only to perform an even more unexpected somersault in 1918, when he joined the Bolshevik party.

Like all geniuses, Meyerhold was a complex and contradictory personality. With all the qualities of a theater leader—self-confidence, independence, persistence, and unflagging energy—Meyerhold, paradoxically, always sought a powerful ally, an authority figure on whom he could depend. Chekhov was such a surrogate father for Meyerhold, who was fourteen years his junior. They began a correspondence in 1899, when he was an actor at the Art Theater, and some eighteen months later he wrote to Chekhov: “I think of you always. When I read you, when I perform your plays, when I ponder the meaning of life, when I am at odds with my surroundings and myself, when I am suffering loneliness…. I am irritable, picky, and suspicious, and everyone considers me an unpleasant man. But I suffer and contemplate suicide.”¹⁸

In that same, extremely frank letter to Chekhov dated April 18, 1901, Meyerhold expressed outrage over the police suppression of a student demonstration by the Cathedral of Kazan in St. Petersburg, which he had witnessed on March 4, when “on the square and in the church, those young people were beaten with whips and sabers, ruthlessly, cynically.” Meyerhold complained to the playwright that he could not “engage calmly in artistic matters when my blood is boiling and everything calls for struggle,” and yet exclaimed, “Yes, the theater can play a tremendous role in the reshaping of everything that exists!”¹⁹ (A curious detail: Meyerhold’s correspondence—or was it Chekhov’s?—was read by the tsarist police and an extract from the seditious letter by the future director was placed in the “File of the Police Department on Actor of the Art Theater Vsevolod Meyerhold.”)

Later, Meyerhold would insist: “Chekhov loved me. That is the pride of my life, one of my most treasured memories.”²⁰ He claimed that it was Chekhov who had raised doubts in him about the validity of Stanislavsky’s “realistic” Method and encouraged him to search for new Symbolist ways in theater.

In any case, after Chekhov’s death in 1904, Meyerhold found a new guiding star, the poet Alexander Blok. In 1906 in St. Petersburg, he staged the twenty-six-year-old’s Balaganchik [Fair Show Booth], which brilliantly combined a declaration of mystical Symbolism and a vicious parody of it. Preceding the Stravinsky-Benois-Fokine Petrouchka by five years, Meyerhold appeared onstage in Fair Show Booth as a suffering Pierrot, at the end of the performance crying to the audience: “Help me! I’m bleeding cranberry juice!”

The following apt description of the scandal provoked by the premiere of Fair Show Booth can be compared to the similar reaction to Sacre du printemps in 1913: “The fierce whistling down of the foes and the thunder of friendly applause mixed with shouts and cries. That was fame.”²¹ Blok and Meyerhold came out together for bows, a contrasting couple—the stony poet, whose Apollonic ashen mask of restraint hid the gloom in his steel-gray eyes, and the Dionysian director and actor, moving and swaying as if boneless, waving the long sleeves of his white Pierrot costume.

This was a memorable moment for both. Meyerhold always considered the premiere of Fair Show Booth the real start of his life as a director. Four years before his death, Blok described Fair Show Booth enigmatically as “a work that came out of the depths of the police department of my own soul.”²²

Unlike Chekhov’s mysteriously missing letters to Meyerhold, Blok’s diary notes about the director have survived; they serve as a guide to the “very difficult”(in Meyerhold’s words) relationship. In the archives of the Institute of Russian Literature in St. Petersburg, there is a photograph of the young Meyerhold—dandified hat, his famous aquiline nose, the meaty lips—with an inscription to the poet: “I came to love Alexander Alexandrovich Blok before I ever met him. When we part, I will take away a steady love for him forever. I love his poetry, I love his eyes. Yet he does not know me.”²³

Blok admitted that Meyerhold’s production of Fair Show Booth was ideal, but by 1913 he referred to another of Meyerhold’s stagings as “Mediocre Hue and Cry.”²⁴ The director would come to the poet for advice on whether or not to get a divorce, while Blok noted in his diary his “distrust for Meyerhold.”²⁵ The director later recalled Blok: “We argued rarely. Blok did not know how to argue. He would say his piece, which had been building up, and then be quiet. But he had a marvelous ability to listen—a rare trait.”²⁶

With the other founders of the ArtTheater, Meyerhold was at the source of the defining interpretations of Chekhov’s plays using the Stanislavsky Method. Another person might have exploited this for the rest of his life. But just four years later, Meyerhold made a sharp turn to Symbolist theater with his production of Blok’s Fair Show Booth. Then followed a period of extravagantly lavish productions in the Imperial theaters, which many contemporaries considered opulent requiems for the fading tsarist regime: Moliere’s Don Juan, Richard Strauss’s Elektra, and Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade.

They called Meyerhold’s Masquerade the “last play of tsarist Russia.” This is apt both metaphorically and factually: the premiere took place in the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater on February 25, 1917, and the Romanov dynasty fell a day later. By 1918, Meyerhold was doing the first production of the first truly Soviet play, Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe.

Unceasingly inventive and experimental, in 1920 Meyerhold proclaimed “October for the theater,” a revolutionary slogan: “No pauses, psychology, or ‘emotions’ on stage…. The public should be involved in the stage action and create the play collectively—that is our theatrical program.”²⁷

In realizing this manifesto, Meyerhold staged the play The Dawn, by the Belgian Symbolist poet Emile Verhaeren, as a mass rally. Ramps connected the stage with the hall, where the lights were left on for the performance. The actors, without makeup or wigs, spoke directly to the audience, which had plants who provoked viewers into discussion with the actors.

The most memorable example of this new approach was seen on November 18, 1920, when during a performance a telegram was delivered to Meyerhold about a decisive victory in the Civil War: the advancing Red Army forced the broken remains of the White Army to flee to Turkey. Meyerhold had the actor playing The Messenger read the historic telegram from the stage. An eyewitness described the audience reaction: “I had never heard such an explosion of shouts, cries, and clapping, such a fierce howl within theater walls…. I never saw a greater merging of art and reality either before that performance or afterward.”²⁸

Inspired by this experiment, Meyerhold decided to stage a new adaptation of Hamlet, with the graveyard scene an up-to-date political review, the text to be written by Mayakovsky. Marina Tsvetaeva was commissioned to render the verse translation of the tragedy, but this project fell through: Tsvetaeva fled to Berlin in May 1922.

Meyerhold continued bursting with innovations that changed the landscape of theater: he got rid of the curtain; he used constructions by the avant-garde artist Lubov Popova instead of traditional sets; he introduced a new