4

From Naturalism to Symbolism:
Meyerhold’s Theater of the Future

Theater played a crucial role in Soviet cultural life in the 1920s, and Vsevolod Meyerhold was the most exciting experimental director of the age. He embraced the revolution almost immediately, joining the Communist Party in 1918, and established his reputation as a revolutionary director with the production of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe. In 1920 Lunacharsky named him to head the Theater Section of Narkompros. In his productions of the 1920s Meyerhold introduced a number of innovations on stage, including audience participation, the sending of actors into the audience, the use of abstract wooden sets and of machines on stage: cars, machine guns, cameras, movie projectors, wheels, and movable screens. For Fernand Crommelynck’s The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922), Meyerhold employed sparse backdrops and ramps on which his actors moved in accordance with his “biomechanics” gymnastic exercises. For Ilya Ehrenburg’s Trust D. E. (1924), he placed an entire jazz band on stage. Even when performing the Russian classics, such as Ostrovsky’s The Forest (1924), Gogol’s Inspector General (1926), or Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (1928), Meyerhold experimented with movable sets, workers’ coveralls for eighteenth-century characters, flashing neon lights, and other novelties. The circus, the music hall, and vaudeville all provided Meyerhold with new methods to show his audience that what they were watching was not reality but artifice.¹

Meyerhold’s work in the 1920s was part of the larger “constructivist” element in early Soviet culture. The deliberately artificial conventions of his stage were no mere escape from the real world, but an example of man’s power to dominate it. His workers’ choruses were suggestive of early Soviet “collectivism,” his biomechanics of the techniques of agitation. Yet in the 1920s Meyerhold only brought to fruition a revolution in theater that he had effected long before 1917. “By 1905,” one scholar has written, “Meyerhold had actually done very little that could be considered revolutionary”; yet by the end of 1906, in his staging of the poet Alexander Blok’s Balaganchik at the theater of Vera Komissar- zhevskaya, Meyerhold had arrived at the “quintessential production of his pre-Bolshevik years,” which “permanently influenced his ideas about theater.”² Balaganchik was a symbolist drama with commedia dell’arte characters; the audience was deliberately made aware of the artificiality and theatricality of the production by the use of a stage-within-a-stage, masks, a chorus, and cardboard figures through which the actors placed their heads. Later Meyerhold would turn quite naturally to revolutionary and constructivist themes and methods, but would retain the principle of theater as convention which he established in 1906. Meyerhold’s conversion from naturalism to symbolism around 1905 anticipated his revolutionary theater of the 1920s.

One can therefore talk fairly precisely about a moment of innovation in the case of Meyerhold. Balaganchik, or The Fairground Booth, is generally considered to be the first Russian “symbolist” play, and Meyerhold’s breakthrough to convention from the naturalism of the Moscow Art Theater. Like Dobuzhinsky, Meyerhold belonged to the generation of the aesthetes, but in 1905 he was seeking a more innovative art by means of simplification and abstraction, in theater rather than in graphic art. Lunacharsky, Dobuzhinsky, and Meyerhold had all just turned thirty in 1905, and undoubtedly all knew each other from the famous Wednesday soirees held at the apartment of the poet Viacheslav Ivanov on the seventh floor of Dobuzhinsky’s apartment building. Both Dobuzhinsky and Meyerhold found the inspiration for innovation in Munich, in Meyerhold’s case, in the theories of a “theater of the future” propounded by the director Georg Fuchs in his book Die Schaubühne der Zukunft, or The Theater of the Future. Inspired by Fuchs’s ideas and supported by the patronage of the radical actress Vera Komis- sarzhevskaya, Meyerhold was able to bring European symbolism into the Russian theater and thereby to establish his reputation as an innovative director.

I

At the turn of the century the European stage was dominated by naturalism.³ Writer and director commented on real life in a believable manner by the use of accurate and detailed sets and realistically costumed actors and actresses. Theater purported to imitate reality, not to transcend it. Like many other intellectual and artistic trends of the time, naturalism originated in the Paris of Emile Zola and moved eastward into Russia in the 1890s. The Theatre Libre, founded in Paris in 1887, became the model for the Berliner Frei Bühne (1889), the Independent Theater Society in London (1891), and the Moscow Art Theater (1898). The latter also copied the methods of the traveling Meiningen Court Theater, which toured Russia in the 1880s. All of these theaters produced meticulously realistic plays in which the characters were not ideals or types, but unique and believable individuals drawn from everyday life. The most popular plays of the day were all social commentaries: Ibsen’s Ghosts, A Doll’s House, and The Wild Duck; Strindberg’s Miss Julie; Hauptmann’s The Weavers; Chekhov’s The Sea Gull, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. For most theatergoers around 1900 the stage was a reflection of their real lives, not an evocation of their dreams, fears, and fantasies.

Symbolist theater was beginning to emerge at the turn of the century, as we have seen in the work of Maeterlinck and Verhaeren. Instead of detailed sets, symbolist drama depended on the creation of a mood through poetry, vision, silences, and gestures, which tapped the emotions of the audience. Instead of imitating real life, symbolist drama sought to conjure a more mysterious world beyond, behind, or beneath apparent reality. Its progenitors were poets and musicians—Baudelaire, Wagner, and Mallarmé, most notably—and its leading proponent in Europe by 1900 was Maeterlinck. From Pelléas et Mélisande (1892) through The Blue Bird (1908), we have seen how Maeterlinck became increasingly concerned with the theme of death, and with evoking a world that lay beyond, but which was still in communication with the living. He conveyed this world on stage through background music, silences, mime, and heavily draped backdrops, creating an atmosphere in which dark forces appeared to manipulate the actors and transform them into puppets. The audience, too, experienced the feeling of spiritual forces beyond its control. Symbolist theater was religious in nature, and it shared religion’s concern with human emotions about love and death.

From a technical point of view, symbolist theater reflected a decline in the quality of acting and the appearance of new forms of staging and lighting. Two Swiss admirers of Richard Wagner made important contributions in the latter respect: Adolphe Appia, who sought to achieve stage unity and mood through music integrated closely with sets, plot, and acting; and Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, who created a philosophy and method of body motion known as “eurhythmies.” Both Appia and Dal- croze made use of the new incandescent spotlight, introduced around 1900, to provide a magical combination of color in background and costumes and to free the actor from the tyranny of footlights. In England the flamboyant director Gordon Craig attempted to do away with the actor entirely, transforming him at the director’s will into a Nietzschean “Super-Marionette.” He also utilized doors, steps, and ramps to open up movement for the actors on the stage. All of these experiments led to a new theater of suggestion rather than explication, mood rather than message, gesture and movement rather than speech.

Like naturalism, symbolism originated in Paris and moved eastward across Germany into Russia. In France it dominated the Théâtre d’Art; in Berlin, the Kleines Theater of Max Reinhardt; and in Munich, the Munich Art Theater of Georg Fuchs. Fuchs was especially important as a transmitter of European symbolism to Russia, both because many Russians in Munich saw his productions and because he published several books about his theatrical technique. As a director Fuchs sought to create a mystical experience for his audiences by the use of sight and sound rather than by the spoken word. He had the Munich architect Max Littmann build a small theater auditorium with steeply pitched seats to create greater intimacy and involvement. In addition, he divided the stage into two planes: a proscenium, or forestage, in front of the footlights; and an inner stage, which could be raised or lowered mechanically.

Around 1900 Munich had had two main legitimate theaters: the Residenztheater, which featured a revolving stage and a conventional repertoire of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw, and the Schauspielhaus, which changed its bill almost nightly and produced a more controversial repertoire, including Gorky’s Lower Depths, Ibsen’s Ghosts, and Maeterlinck’s Monna Vanna. To an English visitor from Vienna, both of Munich’s theaters seemed provincial.⁴ But within a few years Munich became more advanced. In 1908 another visitor from Vienna, Georg Fuchs, succeeded in establishing an experimental Munich Art Theater to fulfill his dream of a “stage of the future,” which would transform theater into festival.

Fuchs began recording his ideas on theater in the Wiener Rundschau in 1900 when he was thirty-two.⁵ In 1906 he gathered his essays in Die Schaubühne der Zukunft. According to Fuchs, modern machine civilization was destroying traditional culture and a new generation was emerging that would have to master those machines. A new culture was in the making. Traditional middle-class theater would give way to a new theater of festival, which would draw on medieval mystery plays, primitive rituals, and the classical theater of Dionysus to create a new relationship between theater and audience. The purpose of the “theater of the future,” wrote Fuchs, would be to “stimulate and then discharge an exuberant tension” in the audience through “the suggestion of rhythmic power.” This would create a purifying catharsis in the audience, a sense of psychological release. “Dramatic art,” Fuchs suggested, “is primarily the rhythmic movement of the human body in space”; it should utilize the techniques of carnivals, acrobats, circuses, and the Japanese Kabuki and No theaters to emphasize the non-spoken means of communication: foot stamping, gestures, hand-clapping, finger snapping, and so on.⁶ Mood and movement were the essence of theater.

Fuchs stressed the importance of unity between actor and audience and among the various arts. The stage should become the “festival center of the entire culture,” with outdoor productions. It should combine art, architecture, music, and poetry into a single whole. The stage should be broken down into three separate planes as “relief stages,” actors should use their bodies as much as their voices, and electric spotlights should be used to replace footlights and to bring the action on the proscenium right down to the audience. Side walls should be eliminated to reveal the actual machinery of the theater. These innovations would create a theater whose purpose was not to imitate reality, but to provide “rhythmic play” and the “movement of groups and crowds in front of a stable background.”⁷ Theater would not imitate life, but select certain elements from it and rearrange them to create a mood.

Fuchs was enthusiastic about the great outdoor festivals he observed in Bavaria. These included the Wagner productions at Bayreuth, the passion plays of Oberammergau and Dachau, street Punch-and-Judy shows, church festivals, and the revelry of Oktoberfest and Fasching. As on the indoor stage, festival acting should be a matter of gymnastics, acrobatics, and mime, rather than of words. The sense of a crowd and of audience participation was vital. All of this would create “an enchanted world of make-believe, of joyous vitality, of dreamlike fantasy, and of a drama that has its roots in the body, in the animal instincts, and in the senses.”⁸

Symbolist drama was still a novelty around 1905, but an increasingly popular one. It stressed the unreal over the real, the group over the individual, movement and rhythm over speech, and psychological appeal to the emotions over conformity of mind to reality. It appealed to the dreams and nightmares of a believing audience, thus containing a religious element. These qualities combined to give symbolist drama powerful potential as a psychological weapon for manipulating an audience with a will to believe.

II

Meyerhold belonged to the generation of the aesthetes, although he ultimately achieved fame as the leader of constructivism in the early Soviet theater. In addition, he was a non-Russian raised in the provinces. Penza, where Meyerhold was born in 1874, was a Siberian trading center for grain, timber, and spirits along the route between Moscow and Samara; in 1914 it had a population of 80,000. The Meyerhold family was relatively well-to-do. Meyerhold’s father owned a vodka distillery, an estate with a winery in a nearby village, and four houses in the area. A German citizen, the elder Meyerhold insisted that the family speak German in the home and kept a portrait of Bismarck prominently displayed. Meyerhold’s mother came from a Baltic German family, originally descended from French immigrants. Vsevolod, their eighth child, was baptized a Lutheran as Karl Theodor Kazimir and was raised as a German.

Meyerhold’s provincial origins did not imply an absence of culture. While his father was a businessman, Meyerhold’s mother was both artistic and musical. With her encouragement he attended plays in Penza from an early age and took both violin and piano lessons. Guests in the Meyerhold home often included actors, musicians, and schoolteachers. Meyerhold’s father failed to persuade his children to enter the world of business; two of them left home for the stage, and the eldest married an actress, for which he was banished from the family. Although relations between Meyerhold’s parents appear to have been amicable, their divergent interests expressed a division between art and life that was to haunt Meyerhold throughout his creative work.

A further sense of separation between art and life stemmed from Meyerhold’s cultural ambivalence. At home he spoke German; in the streets and at school he spoke Russian. His piano teacher was a German, his violin instructor a Pole. As a child, his readings included not only the classics of Russian literature but the popular German magazines of the day: the comic Fliegende Blatter, the acerbic Kladderadatsch, and the popular Über Land und Meer. The tales of Baron Munchhausen mixed with the sights and sounds of Russian traveling circuses with their puppet shows and carousels. The ambivalence of being a German in Russia was heightened by the division between the stern expectations of his father and the cultural world of his mother. By the time he reached adolescence, Meyerhold recorded in his diary, he felt he was living “two lives—one real, the other a dream,” and he much preferred the world of the dream and the stage.⁹

Failure at school heightened Meyerhold’s identity problem. At the second Penza gymnasium, which he entered in 1884, Meyerhold was kept back three times and completed the curriculum only at age twenty- one. The russification policies of Alexander III further complicated life for a young German student. A slow learner, Meyerhold was bored with all but his history and mathematics teachers. But there were many intriguing alternatives to school: a young socialist tutor hired by his father who introduced Meyerhold to the writings of Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and Lavrov; a colony of Polish revolutionary exiles who had settled in Penza by order of the Imperial government; and the world of the local stage. By 1892 Meyerhold, at eighteen, was involved with acting and had appeared in a local production of Griboedov’s Woe from Wit. Yet in the eyes of the authorities the theater was no less suspicious than political activity, and Meyerhold often acted under a pseudonym in order to avoid censure at school.

It does not appear extreme to employ the term “identity crisis” to describe Meyerhold’s late adolescence. In 1892-1893 he was uncertain of his own nationality and came to grips with the reality of death. Meyerhold’s father died in February 1892. The son’s reaction was apparently not only personal and psychological, but cultural: actually, his father’s death emancipated him from his German youth and freed him for a Russian adulthood. One day he read a blustery speech by William II and realized that he was a German citizen subject to conscription into the German army. “How can I call Germany my country?” Meyerhold wrote in his diary in the autumn of 1893. “How can I, who was born in a purely Russian city, grew up and was educated among Russians, among people from whose lips I heard nothing about Germany and its state or national interests, how can I not be offended at what someone completely foreign to me has to say?”¹⁰

I am nineteen and for nineteen years I have lived among Russians, become accustomed to the ways of the Russian people. I love them. I was raised on Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, etc., etc.—great Russian poets, writers. I even pray in Russian and suddenly I am supposed to call Germany ‘my country’?

In 1895 Meyerhold finally graduated from the gymnasium. On June 25, 1895, he acquired Russian citizenship and assumed a Russian name, Vsevolod Emelianovich.

The gymnasium degree opened the way to a university education, and his father’s estate provided the financial means. In the autumn of 1895 Meyerhold left Penza to enroll in the Law Faculty of Moscow University. In Moscow he was one of many young students from the southern provinces who streamed into the city in search of schooling, adventure, and work. Again Meyerhold soon became bored with his studies and began attending plays rather than lectures and visiting the Tretiakov Gallery; he was refused admission to the university orchestra as a violinist because he simply stopped practicing. Everything seemed to push him away from school and toward the stage. In January 1896 he dropped out of the university; in April he married Olga Munt, an actress he had known in Penza. He tried once more to enroll in the university, this time in the Medical Faculty, but was rejected. By the spring of 1896 Meyerhold had resolved to make the stage a career.

Meyerhold at twenty-one was thus a talented provincial actor in search of work. He had failed to achieve success within the higher educational system of the country he had recently adopted as his own. He had lost his father and taken on the responsibilities of marriage. And he now sought on stage what had eluded him in life: success in a world he could control.

III

Meyerhold displayed his first interest in radical activity in 1896, while organizing a summer stock company in Penza; here he met the young poet Aleksei Remizov, then an exiled Marxist, who introduced him to the writings of Plekhanov. Meyerhold’s reading of Marx and Plekhanov did not become the catalyst it had been for Lunacharsky, although in later years he found it convenient to emphasize this youthful contact. Instead, he returned to Moscow that autumn to enter the Musical Dramatic School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society, the more avant-garde alternative to the Imperial Dramatic School. Through its director, V. N. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Meyerhold found himself involved in a revolt against traditional theater which would lead to the founding of the Moscow Art Theater. He also became familiar with European modernism through the plays of Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Maeterlinck.

Meyerhold entered the theater at a moment when Russian theatrical tradition was under fire. In March 1897 more than a thousand actors, actresses, and directors from across Russia met in Moscow in a national congress to deplore publicly the state of the art. Theater in general, it was said, was in a sad condition in Russia because of the lack of funds; actors and actresses were woefully underpaid; the taste and the repertoire of Russian theaters, both in the capitals and in the provinces, were atrocious. Meyerhold was getting good reviews in the Moscow papers for his performances at the Philharmonic, but few other actors had Meyerhold’s talent, or the income that his father’s estate provided. Many young theater people were unhappy with their art, and they made it clear at the congress that a new kind of theater was needed. In June 1897 Nemirovich-Danchenko and the director Konstantin Stanislavsky met for eighteen hours at a restaurant in the Slaviansky Bazaar Hotel in Moscow and decided to launch a new theatrical enterprise: the Moscow Art Theater.

The artistic reforms of the Moscow Art Theater (MAT) are now established tradition. But in 1898 they were considered radical innovations: the director would dictate to the actor, not vice versa; favoritism on the part of the front office would be eliminated; the public would not be allowed to enter or leave the auditorium during a play, a common practice at the time; sets would be designed by top artists for each individual play, not by decorators as a stock item; actors would contribute from their salaries to a joint fund for shareholders and would undergo rigorous training to submerge themselves psychologically in their roles. None of this was easy to achieve in the face of financial need and church censorship. In fact, the first MAT season (1898-1899) produced a deficit of 45,000 rubles; only a contribution of 200,000 rubles by the rich merchant and sympathizer with radical causes, Savva Morozov, saved the undertaking.¹¹

The Moscow Art Theater provided Meyerhold with his first professional training as an actor and a director. He worked for the MAT off and on until the end of 1905. Even his own troupe, which he formed to tour the provinces, was primarily inspired by the MAT’s repertoire and naturalist methods. Within the MAT Meyerhold was an immediate success. “As an actor,” Nemirovich-Danchenko recalled, “Meyerhold gave no indication of being a pupil. He showed a measure of experience and mastered his roles with unusual quickness.”¹² He was soon one of the best MAT actors, drawing a salary of more than one hundred rubles a month at a time when his own financial situation became desperate; his father’s business had collapsed in the winter of 1897-1898, eliminating a major source of income for Meyerhold. In the MAT Meyerhold played a variety of traditional roles in plays like The Merchant of Venice and Tsar Fedor; he also acted in newer productions by Chekhov and Gorky. By 1900 Meyerhold, at twenty-six, had tasted success as an actor.

Meyerhold soon felt confined by the MAT. His favorite role as Treplev in Chekhov’s The Sea Gull may have represented an omen of impending crisis. Chekhov greatly admired the role when he first saw Meyerhold perform it in 1899 in Yalta. Treplev is a would-be playwright of twenty-five, which was Meyerhold’s age in 1899. “We must have new forms,” cries out Treplev, “New forms we must have, and if we can’t get them we’d better have nothing at all.”¹³ Treplev sees all art as “stale routine” and perceives himself as a great unrecognized talent whose youth is fast disappearing. Ridiculed by friends and family, he also confronts the established talent of an older and highly respected writer, Trigorin, who is the object of affection of the girl Treplev loves. The play ends with Treplev’s suicide. “The tragedy is self-evident,” Stanislavsky observed; “Can the provincial mother understand the complex longings of her talented son?”¹⁴

At the turn of the century Meyerhold, too, appears to have gone through a period of torment and apparent failure. During the 19001901 season Stanislavsky gave him fewer good roles to play; Meyerhold became increasingly outspoken about what he considered the repetitious quality of the MAT repertoire. “The most dangerous thing for the theater,” Meyerhold wrote in his notebook in 1901, “is to serve the bourgeois tastes of the crowd.” By the spring of 1901 he had become frustrated and depressed, particularly after witnessing the bloody repression of a mass student demonstration at the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg while on tour with the MAT. “I am distraught,” he wrote to Chekhov, “and am thinking about suicide.” “My life,” he continued, “seems to me a long, painful crisis, like some terrible protracted disease. I can only wait and wait until this crisis resolves itself one way or another. What lies ahead for me is not terrible, if there were only an end, any kind of end.” And again:

I suffer often because I have a sharply developed self-consciousness. I suffer often because I know that I am not what I should be. I am often distraught with myself, with what is around me. I have constant doubts, I love life, but I run from it. I despise my weak will and I want strength, I need work. I am unhappy more than I am happy.

Such gloomy self-analysis was tempered by optimism. “Ahead lies new creativity,” Meyerhold felt, “because it is a new life. The new wave has already caught hold of me.” Russian theater, he concluded, now had before it a “great mission” to fulfill in an evil and immoral society, the “reconstruction of everything which exists around us.”¹⁵

Meyerhold’s remarks may remind us of the “superfluous man” of nineteenth-century Russian literature, or of the agony of the Russian intelligentsia in general. Rut there were more specific reasons for his crisis. At twenty-seven, he had achieved some success within the MAT, but had also found limits; in the 1901-1902 season there were more disputes, more unhappiness, and still fewer roles. In addition, the old division in his mind between the “real” world around him and the more controllable world of the stage persisted. Sensing the urgent need for social and political change in Russia, he began to think of the theater as a vehicle for such change, although precisely how an innovative theater might help transform society was as yet unclear. In 1902 he left the MAT with several other actors and actresses and organized his own theater, the Society for New Drama (Tovarishchestvo novoi dramy) in the provincial town of Kherson. He was exchanging the role of Hamlet for that of Don Quixote.

IV

The town of Kherson, Chekhov once wrote to Meyerhold, “is not Russia and it is not Europe”;¹⁶ there would be a public only for the fairground booth (balagan), not for the legitimate stage. But Meyerhold hoped to establish a revolutionary theater in Kherson that would have been impossible in Moscow. Here in the provinces he could be independent, the director of a theater of social action and artistic innovation. In the spring of 1902 Meyerhold traveled to Italy and in the factories of Milan discovered signs of the same ills of industrial society now appearing in Russia. He felt that the theater should somehow cure those ills.

Meyerhold’s first season proved more imitative than innovative. The Society for New Drama was both an artistic and a financial success in Kherson and in other towns where it played. In Tbilisi, where the troupe spent the 1904-1905 season, young people found it far superior to the local productions. But the theater repertoire, according to one of Meyerhold’s actors, was “copying exactly the Art Theater,” emphasizing conventional plays acceptable both to the public and to the Kherson city duma, which provided an auditorium and a subsidy.¹⁷ The dominant tone was naturalism as represented in the works of Ibsen, Chekhov, Hauptmann, and Gorky; a symbolist work such as Maeterlinck’s Monna Vanna or Przybyszewski’s Snow was definitely an exception. Meyerhold was independent of the MAT, but was not yet an innovator.

For Meyerhold, as for Lunacharsky and Dobuzhinsky, the Revolution of 1905 presented new opportunities following initial disruption. In January there were strikes and food riots in Tbilisi and theaters closed down for an entire week. After its final production of Woe from Wit in February, the Society faced an uncertain future. Actors were drafted into the army to fight in the Russo-Japanese War. Chekhov had died the summer before and could no longer lend his moral support to the enterprise. Meyerhold, just turned thirty, now had a wife and a daughter to support. He was thus at another turning point in his life, facing unemployment and failure in the midst of social and political upheaval. At this moment of desperation he received a telegram from Stanislavsky in Moscow inviting him to open an experimental studio theater under the auspices of the MAT.

Stanislavsky’s experimental Studio Theater on Povarskaia Street was intended to help Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko out of financial disaster with the MAT. The theater had had a bad season in 1904-1905, but art patron Savva Mamontov was willing to invest 15,000 rubles in an experimental studio composed of Stanislavsky’s “young enthusiasts” from the MAT along with Meyerhold’s troupe from the provinces.¹⁸ Stanislavsky rented a new building in Moscow, assembled the troupe in May, and gave them the summer to rehearse at his Pushkino estate outside Moscow. Unfortunately, the entire project never got beyond the rehearsal stage. During the turmoil of late 1905, martial law, curfews, street fighting, and a threatened actors’ strike combined to close the MAT and its Studio Theater. That winter Stanislavsky loaded his company into a railroad train and set out on a European tour, following Diaghilev in search of a new public outside Russia.

The Studio Theater did not fail because of political circumstances alone. Meyerhold’s first attempt at a symbolist theater was plagued by artistic problems as well. In Stanislavsky’s words, the Studio Theater was an attempt to produce “the unreal on the stage”; “it was necessary to picture not life itself as it takes place in reality, but as we vaguely feel it in our dreams, our visions, our moments of spiritual uplift.”¹⁹ To evoke such a mood, Meyerhold commissioned the composer Ilya Sats to create the musical effects of wind and waves and hired several excellent young painters to design the sets, among them N. N. Sapunov and S. Yu. Sudeikin, subsequent contributors to the symbolist Blue Rose exhibit. Yet the painters were amateurs at building sets and mock-ups, which had to be constructed to scale for a smaller stage and often came unglued; by autumn they were rebelling against such work with the slogan “Down with the Mock-up!” and would paint only backdrops and twodimensional sketches, rather than the required wooden models.²⁰ The actors were equally unhappy at having their roles restricted to poses, gestures, and body movements, for which they had no training. In addition, salaries were low and the revolutionary mood caught on through whispered intrigue and secret meetings of the dissenters. Thus Meyerhold faced insurgency in his own theater in 1905. Although the Studio mounted an impressive dress rehearsal of Maeterlinck’s Death of Tin- tagiles, its actors and actresses were unprepared for the new demands of a symbolist theater.

The MAT Studio Theater of 1905 thus failed to bring European symbolism onto the Moscow stage. Meyerhold’s ideas were largely improvisations, and they did not inspire the necessary skills in either actors or set painters. In the winter of 1905-1906 Meyerhold, at thirty-one, once again found himself unemployed and left for St. Petersburg with some of his troupe.

Stanislavsky was probably right in observing that Meyerhold had tried to create a theater without actors, a theater of mood, in which the all-powerful director attempted to reach his audience through sight and sound rather than words. “The talented stage director tried to hide the actors with his work, for in his hands they were only clay for the moulding of his interesting groups and mise-en-scène, with the help of which he was realizing his ideas.”²¹ In Moscow in 1905 Meyerhold had learned the difficulty of reducing conventional actors to puppets and creative painters to carpenters. In Petersburg he hoped to create a symbolist theater independent of both.

V

When Meyerhold arrived in St. Petersburg in early 1906 he found to his surprise that he was not unknown. His poet friend from Penza days, Aleksei Remizov, wrote for the symbolist journal Vesy ( Scales) and had followed Meyerhold’s work in both the Society for New Drama and the Moscow Studio. Remizov also belonged to a circle of symbolist poets in St. Petersburg who were interested in theater. Vesy complained that at the time there was “neither a repertoire, nor actors, nor a public” there, except for the theater of Vera Komissarzhevskaya.²² Komissar- zhevskaya was an actress, a political radical and friend of the Bolshevik leader Leonid Krasin, and an innovator who had been looking for a new director for her own theater, opened in Petersburg in 1904. Since the autumn of 1903 she had been interested in Meyerhold for the post.

Unlike Moscow, Petersburg had already discovered European symbolism. The symbolists were mainly poets and artists who gathered at the apartment of Viacheslav Ivanov on Wednesdays to discuss their work. In January 1906 Meyerhold reported to them about his own experiments; the group included the poets Alexander Blok and Georgy Chulkov, Gorky; the Zhupel artists Dobuzhinsky, Lanseray, and Bilibin; and a number of other intellectuals. For several months Dobuzhinsky and the Zhupel circle had talked of extending their political satire from journalism into theater; the symbolists, too, were interested in a “theater of Dionysus” to be called Fakely (Torches). Both graphic artists and symbolist poets welcomed Meyerhold to their group. In fact, by the end of the evening Chulkov had persuaded Blok to turn his poem “Balaganchik” into a play which could be the basis for a symbolist theater.²³

Meyerhold was enthusiastic about his new opportunities in Petersburg. It was just as well, he wrote his wife, that the Studio had failed; “It was my salvation because it was neither fish nor fowl.” Even his imminent departure for the provinces for another season with the Society for New Drama did not seem to depress him. The sun and frost of wintry Petersburg, he noted, brought back memories of his youth in Penza. In addition, he was relieved to have survived the terrible events in revolutionary Moscow in late 1905, where he had fearfully walked the streets at night with a revolver in his pocket. More than once he had brushed close to death. “Having lived through so much,” he wrote, “I feel young, still young.”²⁴ At thirty-one, Meyerhold was ready to begin again. Although Fakely fell through for lack of money, in February Meyerhold received a telegram from Komissarzhevskaya offering him the directorship of her theater for 1906-1907.²⁵ In May they met to sign a contract for 4,500 rubles. Having found a theater, a patron, and a play, Meyerhold was about to produce his first truly innovative, symbolist work.

Symbolism at the time was a movement in poetry that sought to transcend the apparent world through the magic power of words, rather than to change it through action. Many of the metaphors and themes of Russian symbolism derived from the peculiarities of the Russian language and the theosophical doctrines of the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. But its roots as an intellectual movement lay as much in Europe as in Russia. The myth-making power of words integrated with color and sound was embedded in the writings of Goethe and Mallarmé, and of Nietzsche and Wagner. Baudelaire’s notion that there exist “correspondences” between colors and sounds was enormously important to the symbolists. Andrei Belyi observed that “colors are the substance of a poet’s soul”;²⁶ Chulkov, who was now calling himself a “mystical anarchist,” expressed the synaesthetic power of the moment of symbolic perception of the true reality behind the veil:

There are instants when the human soul, having rejected the bonds of logical consciousness, enters into a direct communication with the beyond. Then all these earthly sounds, colors, and scents assume another significance; objects are lit from within; their radiance reflects in our soul like a multicolored rainbow . . . another world opens before us; we hear the sound of color, we see the sounds.²⁷

The symbol was the key to the true reality, a reality beyond language, a reality of the soul, a spiritual reality. It suggested mysticism, an escape into the world of personal experience, emotion, and fantasy popular in Russia after the shock of 1905. In works such as Prometheus, Poem of Ecstasy, and Poem of Fire, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin sought to create a mood and to unify the senses through a color organ whose visual projections would correspond to the music. Symbolism in Russia was a kind of esoteric religion which sought to synthesize and unify all the senses and the arts into a single whole capable of providing an elite of seers with visions of the true world behind the apparent material one. The artist thus became a kind of priest; in Blok’s words, he was “the sole possessor of a hidden treasure; but there are others around him who know about the treasure. . . . Consequently, we, the few who know, are the Symbolists.”²⁸ The symbol revealed one world in the apparent terms of another, but only the few would recognize that revelation.

The central figure among the Petersburg symbolists in 1906 was the poet Viacheslav Ivanov. At forty, Ivanov had just returned from thirteen years in Berlin, Rome, Athens, and Paris, where he had studied the classics. His European model was Nietzsche, who greatly influenced his views on what ancient Greek culture was like. Ivanov established a cult of the Greek god of wine, Dionysus, whom Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), had seen as the central figure in the creative drive of all art, especially theater, and through whose festivals the audience could find personal ecstasy and social catharsis. Ivanov had studied Dionysian cults and mystery religions in Greece and in 1905 was writing a book on The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God. In Ivanov’s view, Dionysus became a symbol of “self-forgetting” and “ecstasy” by which one could return to the unconscious, the original unity of one’s childhood, and the life-giving force of eros, the suggestive title of a cycle of poems he wrote in 1907.²⁹ For Ivanov poetry thus came close to being a form of therapy, as did theater. He disseminated his ideas at his “Wednesdays,” which were as important for Petersburg intellectual life in 1906 as Mallarmé’s “Tuesdays” had been in Paris a few decades earlier.

By the spring of 1906 Meyerhold had found an environment favorable to innovation in the theater in Russia. The final stimulus for that innovation came not from Russia, but from Europe.

VI

Georg Fuchs’s Theater of the Future was a revelation for Meyerhold when he first read his little book in the spring of 1906. What Meyerhold discovered in Fuchs was a sense that movement and body motion were more important than words on the stage, and that music and color could be employed to create mood and suggestion for the psyche of the audience. Fuchs helped Meyerhold by giving him a theoretical justification for what he was already attempting to do. Fuchs’s book encouraged him in considering the stage a world apart from the real world, a world of game and artifice which should not imitate reality but which could tap the emotional recesses of the audience in far more powerful ways.³⁰

Throughout 1906 Meyerhold experimented with Fuchs’s ideas. In Poltava that summer he had his actors treat their movements as dance steps in a Japanese manner and on several occasions utilized violet lighting for mood. In his first productions for Komissarzhevskaya he continued these experiments. In Hedda Gabler (November 10) he arranged costumed actors as color masses, utilized a relief stage only twelve feet deep, with overhead lighting to bring the actors onto the proscenium, and introduced long silences. In Maeterlinck’s Sister Beatrice he had the Sisters speak in unison, move as a group, and act as a chorus, again bringing the backdrops forward and utilizing extended pauses and gestures. But all of these experiments were preliminary attempts to employ new techniques. Meyerhold’s first completely innovative work along the lines of Fuchs’s theories was Alexander Blok’s Balaganchik, first performed in St. Petersburg on December 30, 1906.

Blok himself had been moving toward symbolism in the theater, as well as in his own poetry. As a former actor, he was increasingly critical of the MAT for its attempt to imitate reality rather than to transcend it. Theater, like poetry and the spoken word, he felt, should provide a reflection of deep-rooted popular myths and collective desires in the manner of the theater of Dionysus. It should employ all means necessary to create a proper mood in the audience and a sense that what it was seeing was game and artifice, not reality. Thus when the “Fakels and Zhupels,” as Blok called them, asked him to transform a poem into a play for a new Russian symbolist theater, he agreed.³¹

Blok’s play Balaganchik confuses the real and the unreal, and is especially concerned with death. It is more of a playlet than a play, a short farce based on the stock commedia dell’arte characters that had populated Blok’s poetry since about 1902: Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine. It consists of a single rather short act and was written in about three weeks. By using the theatrical setting of a fairground booth, puppet-show characters, and masks for the actors, Blok made explicit the artificiality of the play. The audience was familiar with the theme, since the Petroushka puppet shows were a traditional part of the St. Petersburg Lenten carnival season. But Blok exaggerated his game elements further by having the booth become a stage upon a stage and by employing an “Author” to provide constant explanations to the audience. In addition to the old triangle of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine, he placed a Maeterlinck-like chorus of “Mystics” at a table parallel to the front of the stage.

Balaganchik opens with the Mystics seated at the table awaiting the coming of “Death,” a character in whom Pierrot believes he sees his loved one, Columbine. But Pierrot’s rival Harlequin arrives to take her away to a carnival at the fairground, from which she returns in the person of “Death.” Now Pierrot does not know what is real and what is not, nor does the audience. In the end reality dissolves completely when Harlequin leaps through a window on stage, which he discovers is made of paper, and then tears it to pieces in anger. Other characters “die” bleeding cranberry juice. The entire play interlaces the real and the imaginary in a game that the audience must observe but cannot resolve. Death is real. But who is Death and when will he choose to come?

Balaganchik epitomized the symbolist perception of the world on two levels: the importance of nonverbal communication and the mystery of death, so important to Maeterlinck. Blok’s play, received with a mixture of “Bravo!” and boos on opening night, fit perfectly with Meyer- hold’s experiments and the theories of Georg Fuchs. This is not surprising, since Blok was immersed in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, attending Ivanov’s “Wednesdays,” and copying aphorisms by Nietzsche into his notebooks at the time he wrote Balaganchik.³² Meyerhold’s innovations concerned the staging itself. He hung blue drapes at the rear and the side of the stage but eliminated the conventional border so that the audience could see clearly the exposed ropes, flies, and wires of the stage machinery. He announced the action by the rhythmic beating of a drum. He also employed the relief stage principle of Fuchs, with both the drapes and the table of the Mystics on one plane in midstage and the Author speaking at another forward plane from the proscenium. The set was strikingly sparse: a window, the booth, a round table with a pot of geraniums, and a chair for Pierrot. Finally, to overcome the poor acting that had plagued the Studio, Meyerhold himself took the role of Pierrot and the gifted future director Alexander Tairov played the “Blue Mask.” Few of the other characters had individual speaking parts. The actors who played the Mystics spoke in chorus, their bodies hidden by cardboard costumes.

Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1905. From N. Volkhov, Meierkhol’d (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929).

Meyerhold dressed as Pierrot for production of Balaganchik, 1906. Portrait by N. N. Ulianov. From N. Volkhov, Meierkhol’d (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929).

N. N. Sapunov, “The Mystics,” stage design for Meyerhold’s production of Balaganchik, 1906. From M. N. Pozharskaia, Russkoe teatral’no-dekoratsionnoe iskusstvo kontsa XIX nachala XX veka (Moscow, 1970).

Balaganchik was not immediately a widely recognized success, nor was it a significant departure from the European symbolist theater of the day. But as the first attempt at symbolist drama on the Russian stage, it was extremely innovative, standing in sharp contrast to the naturalism of the MAT. Most important, Balaganchik anticipated Meyerhold’s future development as a director by establishing the principle of the theater as artifice. The actor was now superseded in importance by the director, the writer, the painter, and the stage itself. The audience would participate emotionally and intellectually in the experience of pure theater. Balaganchik constituted a “moment of innovation” for Meyerhold. With the help of Georg Fuchs he had found his way to a theater of the game, the mask, and the grotesque.

Balaganchik also marks the beginning of Meyerhold’s rise to success, which had so long eluded him. Although many Petersburg actors and actresses left Komissarzhevskaya after the 1906-1907 season in protest against the new drama, Meyerhold was able to replace them with a number of loyal young followers from the Society for New Drama and the Moscow Studio.³³ When Komissarzhevskaya finally rebelled against Meyerhold’s deemphasis on acting and fired him, he went on to further successes with the Imperial theaters. Employing the best actors, actresses, and set designers of Russia, he staged lavish productions of Molière’s Don Juan (1910), Richard Strauss’s Elektra (1913), and Lermontov’s Masquerade (1917). Long before the Revolution of 1917, Meyerhold had established himself as one of Russia’s foremost directors.

A European source of inspiration certainly facilitated Meyerhold’s moment of innovation. Fuchs’s book set down theoretically what Meyerhold had been striving for in practice; it opened the way to success in the capital by justifying and clarifying Meyerhold’s ideas. In later years Meyerhold constantly cited Die Schaubühne der Zukunft and other books by Fuchs in his own writings on theater. He also employed Fuchs’s terminology concerning a “revolution in the theater,” “theater as festival,” and a “theater of the future.” In his productions, too, Meyerhold continued to employ mime, gesture, and motion, the relief stage and the proscenium, and the symbolist emphasis on mood, music, and lighting. He contrasted the excellent work of the Munich Art Theater under Fuchs after 1908 with the limited theatrical resources of Russia, the absence of a Russian “national repertoire,” the “apathy of the actor,” and the great need for “national myth-making.”³⁴ Fuchs and symbolism helped make Meyerhold an innovator. But only after 1917 would he find the opportunity to bring his ideas to ultimate fruition through street theater, festivals, revolutionary plays, constructivist sets, and the gymnastic motions of biomechanics. “If one wishes to understand the history of the Russian theater over the last twenty-five years,” Meyerhold’s biographer and close friend N. N. Volkhov later wrote, “one might say that we returned to the first decade of our century and again encountered for the first time the book of Georg Fuchs on the theater of the future.”³⁵

VII

Meyerhold’s moment of innovation occurred in 1906 with the production of Balaganchik under the strong influence of Georg Fuchs. Revolution, patronage, and a Western source of inspiration combined to make him a successful director at age thirty-one. There is also evidence that Meyerhold needed that success in a psychological sense, that he had reached a point of despair in his own life from which he now emerged with a sense of renewal. When he dropped out of the university in 1896, he later wrote, “I left to find my salvation in art.”³⁶ But art had not been any easier than life. His early success with the MAT had led to frustration and to his departure to form his own theater. That theater had proved imitative rather than innovative. Ultimately, the 1905 Revolution opened the way for him, first at the Studio and later with Komis- sarzhevskaya.

Many Russian intellectuals reacted to the 1905 Revolution in apocalyptic terms, anticipating either the end of the world or the dawn of a new age, or both. Many flirted with mysticism and found in the Bible omens of that end, or of a new beginning. “We saw the glow of a new dawn,” wrote the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, “and the end of an old age seemed to coincide with a new era which would bring about a complete transfiguration of life.”³⁷ There was often a strong sense of having survived a cataclysm, of having been reborn, with a chance to start anew. Meyerhold wrote: “I am happy about the revolution. It overthrew the theater from above in a day. And only now can one begin to work on the creation of a new altar.”³⁸

Meyerhold played no political role in the Revolution of 1905. For him, revolution would come through art rather than politics. His lifelong sense of a duality between the world around him and the dream world of the stage was resolved, through symbolism, in favor of the stage. Like Treplev in The Sea Gull, Meyerhold thought of suicide in his late twenties out of a sense of personal failure and lost youth. But in Balaganchik neither Pierrot nor the audience can accept the reality of Death, which comes disguised in life and turns out to be a joke. On the stage one can die and live again.

Lunacharsky contributed to early Soviet culture a powerful vision of revolutionary immortality whereby the individual survived death through the memory of the proletarian collective. Dobuzhinsky and Moor contributed a sense of antagonism through simplification, dividing the world into we and they. Meyerhold, also of the generation of the aesthetes and a thoroughly westernized non-Russian, shared the avant- garde sense of tension between art and politics. His vision of a revolution was at first artistic, rather than political, a vision of Nietzschean transcendence in keeping with symbolism. In the 1920s his theater work became more political with its revolutionary slogans, anticapitalist plays, and workers’ choruses. But although the symbols were by then revolutionary rather than religious, the division between the unreal and the real remained. The utopian goals of the revolution could be idealized and symbolized on the stage even though they could not immediately be realized in the towns and villages decimated by years of war, revolution, and civil war. In Balaganchik death was an unreal visitor who appeared in many guises; in revolutionary Russia he was a familiar figure. Only on the stage could he be made to vanish, along with remnants of the capitalist world, in celebration of a new society that was being born.