Stanislavski Studies

Practice, Legacy, and Contemporary Theater

ISSN: 2056-7790 (Print) 2054-4170 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfst20

Vsevolod Meyerhold: actor as the texture of

theatre

Anna Shulgat

To cite this article: Anna Shulgat (2016) Vsevolod Meyerhold: actor as the texture of theatre,
Stanislavski Studies, 4:2, 175-184, DOI: 10.1080/20567790.2016.1241553

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/20567790.2016.1241553

Published online: 11 Oct 2016.

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Stanislavski Studies, 2016
VOL. 4, NO. 2, 175–184
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20567790.2016.1241553

Vsevolod Meyerhold: actor as the texture of theatre

Anna Shulgat
The Stanislavski Centre, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, Sidcup, Kent, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Vsevolod Meyerhold’s name has become the synonym of theatricality, Meyerhold; theatre;
the sheer poetry of theatre, totally independent from literature, the performance; director; actor;
perfection of the form and the ultimate expression of the director’s author; audience; spectator;
will and imagination. During his whole career, the director was bridge; training; technique;
method; metaphor; texture;
exploring existing techniques of acting and creating those of his imagination; theatricality;
own in an attempt to keep the texture of his theatre tuned to the action; movement; plasticity;
needs of the time. However, although quite a few modern directors improvisation; pattern;
have appropriated techniques introduced, adopted or reinvented by expressiveness; emploi;
Meyerhold (a non-linear, episodic structure of the performance, free scenario; score; structure;
association, improvisation, a score of the performance similar to that non-linear; theatre-triangle;
of the musical score, etc.), they often do not have a Meyerholdian actor theatre of the straight line;
to implement these techniques. In this article, we are going to analyse style; genre; formalist;
selected metaphors used by Meyerhold throughout his career, such realism; symbolism;
stylized theatre; creative
as “actor as the texture of theatre,” “the pattern of movement,” “the theatre; traditionalism;
scenario of action,” “Theatre of the Straight Line,” “a bridge between new drama; constructivism;
the actor and the spectator,” in order to see how, irrespective of the biomechanics; grotesque
styles he worked in and the techniques he employed, Meyerhold
was always concerned about increasing the productivity of acting so
that the actor could fully express the spirit of the play, using his body
and the structure provided by the director to engage the audience’s
imagination.

“For some people the sight of a chasm evokes the thought of an abyss, for others – a
bridge. I belong to the second group.”1 This statement, made by Meyerhold and written
down by one of his most faithful disciples, the playwright and essayist Alexander Gladkov,
sounds so characteristic of the Master that it could be a motto inscribed on his coat of
arms, if he had one. Actor, director, teacher and thinker, a prominent student of Vladimir
Nemirovich-Danchenko and a founding member of Konstantin Stanislavski’s and
Nemirovich-Danchenko’s Moscow Art Theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold was one of the major
builders in the history of theatre, constructing bridges between different trends, styles,
genres of theatre – old and new, Western and Eastern, classical and avant-garde, tragedy
and farce – in order to create a theatre of his dreams.
It goes without saying that Meyerhold’s “ideal actor” was sine qua non of such a theatre.
Collaborating with the innovative Moscow Art Theatre and conservative Imperial Theatres
in St. Petersburg, experimenting with symbolism and constructivism, evolving from the

CONTACT  Anna Shulgat  anni_vers@yahoo.com, annivers@gmail.com

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
176    A. Shulgat

static theatre of the 1900s into the dynamic theatre of the 1920s, the Master was always
aware of the necessity to train an actor who could be his perfect brother-in-arms. It is very
important to underline how central the actor was for Meyerhold, as there have been so many
misconceptions about this matter, especially in the framework of the tradition of socialist
realism which tried to present Meyerhold as some kind of a director-dictator, mostly con-
cerned about unlimited self-expression and therefore simply exploiting his actors in order
“to mutilate the playwright.”2 While Meyerhold’s idea of the director’s artistic freedom in
relation to the written text of the play could be best defined by his trademark phrase, “The
art of the director is an authorial art, not a performing art. But of course, one must have
the right to do that,”3 his understanding of acting is shrewdly formulated in the following
statement:
There is a lot in common between the laws of composition of different arts, in spite of the
differences between textures. If I start to study the laws of painting, music, novel, I will not
be helpless in the art of directing. Needless to say that one has to know the actor’s nature, i.e.
the texture of theatre.4
During his whole career, Meyerhold was exploring existing techniques of acting and cre-
ating those of his own in an attempt to keep the texture of his theatre tuned to the needs of the
time. He embraced the revolution and became one of the leaders of the Theatrical October,
the post-revolutionary avant-garde movement. However, when in the late 1920s–early 1930s
socialist realism was becoming the only possible trend in Soviet art, storm clouds started to
gather over Meyerhold. A former supporter-turned-enemy, critic Vladimir Blyum labelled
him “apolitical,” “mystical” and “formalistic.”5 Meyerhold’s more faithful supporters were
also forced to use labels: for example, Boris Alpers described his art as “theatre of the social
mask,”6 Pavel Markov referred to his approach as “satirical” and “lyrical.”7 Labels given by
supporters were needed to defend the Master from social and political criticism, to persuade
his opponents that even if his art was not truly realistic, it was still revolutionary in its spirit
(that was a false conception, introduced by the Soviet government, who preferred to deny
the avant-garde nature of the art of the revolutionary period).
Konstantin Rudnitsky, the author of Director Meyerhold (1969), the first major mono-
graph published almost 30 years after the director was murdered by the NKVD in 1940, was
one of the first to raise his voice against labelling Meyerhold and contrasting his art with
that of Stanislavski, whose method for many decades remained the only officially approved
by the Soviet regime:
… The alluring direct Meyerhold-Stanislavski opposition, which once tempted Vakhtangov
and still fascinates many people, as a matter of fact simplifies and schematizes the complicated
processes of renovation and development of realism in Russian and Soviet theatre, leading to
a superficial and deceptive antinomy between “the innovator” Meyerhold and “the tradition-
alist” Stanislavski.8
And yet even Rudnitsky could not avoid speaking about Meyerhold as a realist. Only
after Perestroika did it become possible for Russian historians and critics to talk about
Meyerhold’s aesthetics without having to justify his “formalistic mistakes.” Meyerhold’s
name has become the synonym of theatricality, the sheer poetry of theatre, totally inde-
pendent from literature, the perfection of the form, and the ultimate expression of the
director’s will and imagination. In the last 25 years, new, revised and enlarged editions of
Meyerhold’s writings have been published alongside memoirs about him and records of
his lectures. Among the most important publications on the great director are the books by
 Stanislavski Studies   177

major Meyerhold scholar Galina Titova, Tvorchesky teatr i teatralny konstruktivism [Creative
Theatre and Theatre Constructivism] (1995), covering constructivism and biomechanics,
and Meyerhold i Komissarzhevskaya: Modern na puti k uslovnomy teatru [Meyerhold and
Komissarzhevskaya: Modern on Its Path to the Stylized Theatre] (2006), dedicated to the
Master’s collaboration with the great Russian actress and his journey towards the stylized
theatre. David Zolotnitsky’s monograph Meyerhold. Roman s sovetskoi vlastyu [Meyerhold.
The Romance with Soviet Power] (1999) reveals new facts about the director’s career in
the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on his “romance” with the Soviet government that led to his
tragic ending. An impressive collection of Meyerhold’s works and materials dedicated to
the director was published in St. Petersburg in 1998 by renowned St. Petersburg scholar
Nikolai Pesochinsky and his colleagues under the title Meyerhold: K istorii tvorcheskogo
metoda: Publikatsii. Statyi [Meyerhold: Towards the History of the Creative Method:
Publications. Articles]. Among the notable English-language editions on Meyerhold are
Vsevolod Meyerhold (1989) by Robert Leach, Meyerhold. A Revolution in Theatre (1995)
by Edward Braun, Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics (1996) by Alma Law and Mel
Gordon, and Vsevolod Meyerhold (2003) by Jonathan Pitches.
Today Meyerhold’s acting techniques are explored in theatre schools and revived by
theatre practitioners. In the late 1990s, students of Yale School of Drama and St. Petersburg
Theatre Arts Academy under the guidance of their brilliant teachers, David Chambers and
Gennady Trostyanetsky (and with the unfailing support of Nikolai Pesochinsky), made
an attempt to reconstruct The Government Inspector according to Meyerhold’s score and
detailed descriptions given by the spectators. The well-known director Valery Fokin, the
founder of the Meyerhold Centre in Moscow and the Artistic Director of the Alexandrinsky
Theatre in St. Petersburg, creates his own work in dialogue with the Master and cooperates
with other directors, who could be seen as “modern-day Meyerholds.”
However, although quite a few modern directors have appropriated techniques intro-
duced, adopted or reinvented by Meyerhold (a non-linear, episodic structure of the per-
formance, free association, improvisation, a score of the performance similar to that of the
musical score, etc.), they often do not have a Meyerholdian actor to implement them. In
this article, we are going to analyse selected metaphors used by Meyerhold throughout his
career, such as “actor as the texture of theatre,” “the pattern of movement,” “the scenario
of action,” “Theatre of the Straight Line,” “a bridge between the actor and the spectator,” in
order to see how, irrespective of the styles he worked in and the techniques he employed,
Meyerhold was always concerned about increasing the productivity of acting so that the
actor could fully express the spirit of the play, using his body and the structure provided
by the director to engage the audience’s imagination.
In his article from 1906, “The Naturalistic Theatre and the Theatre of Mood,” later
included in his book On Theatre (1912), Meyerhold harshly criticized the naturalistic act-
ing style of the Moscow Art Theatre:
Actors are always made up true to character – which means with faces exactly like those we
see in real life. Clearly, the naturalistic theatre regards the face as the actor’s principal means
of conveying his intentions, ignoring completely the other means at his disposal. It fails to
realize the fascination of plastic movement, and never insists on the actor training his body;
it established as theatre school, yet fails to understand that physical culture must be a basic
subject if one has any hope of staging plays like Antigone or Julius Caesar, plays which by virtue
of their inherent music belong to a different kind of theatre.9
178    A. Shulgat

Although in this article Meyerhold also attacks naturalistic staging, he clearly understands
that the theatre cannot move from naturalism without training the actor in a different way.
“The fascination of plastic movement,” “training of actor’s body,” “physical culture” will
remain his priorities throughout his career. It is fascinating how the young director, a stu-
dent of Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavski and a founding member of the Moscow
Art Theatre, managed to detach himself so quickly from his teachers and colleagues and
started searching for his own path in the theatre.
However, one may ask, what is the connection between “physical culture” and “inherent
music” of the plays, the former being such a material thing and the latter – something ethe-
real? For Meyerhold there is no contradiction here – we already know that when looking at
a chasm he thinks of a bridge, while others may only think of an abyss. As he saw the texture
of theatre in the actor’s nature, the only means to create a theatre other than naturalistic
was to use the actor’s nature in a way other than naturalistic. According to Meyerhold,
the “lifelike” gestures and movements, the “photographic” representation of everyday life
inevitably lead to the situation when the spectator’s imagination is not engaged.
The naturalistic theatre teaches the actor to express himself in a finished, clearly defined man-
ner; there is no room for the play of allusion or for conscious understatement. That is why one
so often sees overacting in the naturalistic theatre; it knows nothing of the power of suggestion
… In the theatre the spectator’s imagination is able to supply that which is left unsaid. It is the
mystery and the desire to solve it which draw so many people to the theatre.10
Speaking about “the power of suggestion” and “the mystery” to be solved, Meyerhold
proposes a kind of relationship between the actor and the audience which is quite different
from that experienced in the naturalistic theatre, where the actor primarily imitates life and
the spectator has nothing to do but observe him. In the theatre, which Meyerhold has in
mind, the spectator should be a part of the process, actively using his/her imagination to
solve the mystery created by the actor.
In another programme article of that period, “First Attempts at a Stylized Theatre” (1907),
Meyerhold continues building upon this relationship and formulates the idea of the “Theatre
of the Straight Line,” as opposed to the “Theatre-Triangle.” While in the “Theatre-Triangle”
the author and the actor communicate with the spectator through the director (this type
of theatre is compared to a symphony orchestra), in the “Theatre of the Straight Line,” “the
actor reveals his soul freely to the spectator, having assimilated the creation of the director,
who, in his turn, has assimilated the creation of the author.”11
The “Theatre of the Straight Line” seems to boost creativity – both in the actor and
spectator – more than the “Theatre-Triangle,” where the actor just executes the director’s
will and the spectator observes him acting. Meyerhold also says that in the “Theatre of the
Straight Line” “the director erects a bridge between actor and spectator.”12
Of course, Meyerhold’s intention to establish a more vibrant contact between actor and
spectator was highly influenced by the Symbolists, especially by Vyacheslav Ivanov and
Andrei Bely, who were dreaming about adding a truly inclusive quality to theatre (they
called it “soborny teatr”) where actors and spectators would meet and subsequently go out
to the square in order to unify in a certain creative and purifying act.13 However, Galina
Titova is right when she brings up the concept formulated by the outstanding theatre scholar
Pavel Gromov in 1976. Gromov suggested that “the destruction of the border between the
auditorium and the stage” was interpreted by Meyerhold from the viewpoint of the ideology
 Stanislavski Studies   179

and poetics of “the new drama,” first and foremost, of Chekhov’s plays where “a group of
people,” perceived as complex, constitutes the principal character.14
Modern people, portrayed on stage, are in different relations with each other than it was in
the repertoire of the past, and naturally they are in different relations with the audience. […]
The black box stage of the new European type does not facilitate the exploration of the new
structure of human interrelationships, and therefore should be overcome and transformed.15
Indeed, although Meyerhold as an actor participated in some of the Moscow Art Theatre
productions of Chekhov’s plays, in general he found that the style of those productions did
not meet the demands of Chekhov’s “new drama.” In Meyerhold’s view, the Art Theatre’s con-
cern about “the photographic representation of life” did not allow the actors to bring forth
the poetic, musical, symbolist essence of Chekhov (the director’s detailed observations on
the matter can be found in his article “The Naturalistic Theatre and the Theatre of Mood”).
This discontent with the Moscow Art Theatre’s approach to Chekhov is particularly evident
in Meyerhold’s letter to the playwright about the world premiere of The Cherry Orchard
(1904) directed by Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko:
Your play is as abstract as Tchaikovsky’s symphony. The director should, first of all, perceive it
aurally. In Act Three, against the background of the silly “stomping” – one should be able to
hear this “stomping”, – invisibly for the people enters Horror: “The cherry orchard has been
sold.” Dancing. “Sold.” Dancing. And that happens until the end … Merrymaking, in which the
sounds of death are audible. In this act there is something similar to Maeterlinck, frightening.16
Here, Meyerhold is already thinking about the way to make “the inherent music” of the
play audible – and it is already through the movement, through the action. The fact that the
people are dancing, “stomping” (using this word Meyerhold clearly wants to underline that
this is not a lifelike dance, but some kind of an exaggerated, frightening dance macabre),
although the orchard has been sold, raises the events to the level of the symbolist tragedy.
Horror, so to speak, becomes the principal character of the act. Here we already discern
the seeds of “tragic grotesque” (death amidst merrymaking, juxtaposition of laughter and
grief, beauty and ugliness) and “the musical concept of the drama,” (the idea that the drama
performance should have a score and should be rhythmically organized like a musical
piece – later the Master will say that “if acting is melody, mise-en-scène is harmony”) the
ideas that will become more and more crucial for Meyerhold’s style. The tragedy is not in
the words, but between the lines, in the action, in “the inherent music” of the play.
In his other programme article, “The Fairground Booth” (1912), conceived as an answer
to his opponent, the designer and director Alexander Benois, who was praising the Moscow
Art Theatre’s adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov as “the mystery-play in the Russian
theatre,” Meyerhold talks about the flaws of the modern theatre that has become “the servant
to literature,” praises the pure theatricality of old genres such as the mystery play (which,
of course, has nothing to do with the Dostoevsky adaptation at the Moscow Art Theatre)
and pantomime, and produces a brilliant metaphor which may be considered his credo:
In order to make a dramatist out of a story-teller who writes for the stage, it would be a good
idea to make him write a few pantomimes. The pantomime is a good antidote against excessive
misuse of words. Only let the new author not fear that we want to deprive him altogether of
the right to speak on the stage. He will be permitted to put words into the actors’ mouths, but
first he must produce a scenario of movement. How long will it be before they inscribe in the
theatrical tables the following law: words in the theatre are only embellishments on the design
of movement?17
180    A. Shulgat

Although, in the 1930s, Meyerhold was trying to diminish the importance of this met-
aphor for his work – this attempt must have been, as Alma Law observes, “motivated by a
need to downplay his interest in movement in the aftermath of the introduction of Socialist
Realism”18 – in fact, for him the words always remained secondary to the movement. For
example, staging The Government Inspector in 1926, he virtually rewrote Gogol’s text in
order to make it fit to the “scenario of movement” he had in mind.
Meyerhold employs the ideas of “scenario,” “pattern” and “design” in order to organize
the actor’s existence on the stage. If his actor is not to imitate life, but to produce something
larger than life, “to create an artistic image and not to exploit his personal emotions,”19
he/she needs a structure for doing this. Again, from the point of view of socialist realism,
“patterns” and “designs” suggested by Meyerhold were regarded as something limiting the
creative freedom of the actor, while in fact they were giving him support and encouraging
his creativity. In Meyerhold’s opinion, “it’s essential that the actor find pleasure for himself
in executing a given movement or action pattern [risunok]. If you find that pleasure, then
everything will work out. Victory awaits you.”20
Thus Meyerhold’s pattern should be seen by an actor not as a prison, but rather as a safe
harbour where he/she could feel more confident. The pattern helped the actor to position
him/herself in the space and to remain in harmony with the overall rhythm of the perfor-
mance. Theatre scholars and practitioners remember the famous anecdote about Maria
Babanova, a phenomenal actress and one of Meyerhold’s best students, who had to leave
his company, the Meyerhold Theatre (TIM), because of the conflict with the Master’s wife
and lead actress Zinaida Raikh, but always remained faithful to his methods. While working
many years later with other directors, she would always require an “action pattern,” asking,
for instance, on what stair of the staircase they wanted her to put her foot. When most
of them would answer that they did not really care about tiny details like that and fully
relied upon such a reputed actress as she was, Maria Ivanovna would say: “But Vsevolod
Emilyevich would have told me exactly where to stand.”
The necessity of having the overall control over the performance made the tiniest detail
important for Meyerhold. For instance, he would encourage an actor to get closer to the
door before he exits or to move his eyes in a certain way. As Titova comments on some-
one’s remark that Meyerhold’s drawings and sketches were very bad, worse than those by a
child, “Meyerhold knew how to draw – not with a pencil or brush, but with an actor.”21 If
an actor is your texture, your paint, you should definitely search for the technique to make
this texture last more and this paint look more colourful.
Like a painter, who goes through different periods in his work, Meyerhold worked with
different kinds of texture and in different techniques. In his symbolist period (earlier 1900s),
when he was interested in the concept of “the static theatre,” predominantly Maeterlinck,
he spoke about “a plasticity which does not correspond to the words,” “the plasticity of
the statue.”22 This type of actor, who was modelling his/her movements on sculptures and
medieval paintings, was supposed to embody the spirit of symbolist tragedy.
Collaborating with the actors of the Imperial Theatres during his period of tradition-
alism (1908–1917), the Master worked miracles, not only accommodating the needs of
the famous actors who were at first unwilling to work with the avant-garde director, but
also highlighting their individualities and even turning their personal weaknesses into the
strengths of the production. One of the most famous examples is Meyerhold’s “conquest”
of Konstantin Varlamov, the famous Alexandrinsky Theatre comedian, who played in the
 Stanislavski Studies   181

1910 production of Moliere’s Don Juan. Playing the important role of Don Juan’s servant
Sganarelle, he was not eager to work with Meyerhold, being too old and overweight to
move around the stage and incapable of learning the role by heart. Meyerhold, together
with the designer Golovin, provided Varlamov with two benches so that he could rest, and
introduced two prompters, wearing the costumes and wigs in the style of Louis XIV (which
was the style of the whole production), so that Varlamov’s lack of confidence with the text
could become a part of the spectacle in itself. Moreover, Meyerhold placed Varlamov by
the proscenium and encouraged him to improvise, addressing the privileged members of
the audience in the boxes and stalls. Thus, Meyerhold greatly enriched the spectacle, given
how popular Varlamov was with the St. Petersburg audience.23
Interestingly, although Meyerhold is always perceived as innovator, he borrowed quite
a few of his ideas from traditional Western and Eastern theatre. In his symbolist and tra-
ditionalist periods, the director employed commedia dell’ arte and other techniques of
European street theatre, combining them with the techniques of traditional Japanese and
Chinese theatre. Unlike Stanislavski, who rejected the traditional system of “emploi,” (the-
atrical types) Meyerhold revived this system, showing how appropriate it can be to most
plays. However, instead of casting the actors according to their emploi, he often deliberately
tried casting them against their initial emploi, which often produced the effect of grotesque,
which to Meyerhold was almost the synonym of theatre art. Even in his famous concept
of pre-acting (the situation that “prepares the spectator’s perception in such a way that he
comprehends the scenic situation fully resolved in advance and so has no need to make any
effort to grasp the underlying message of the scene”) he drew upon such old school Russian
actors as Alexander Lensky.24
In the production of Fernand Crommelynck’s The Magnanimous Cuckold (1923), in
which Meyerhold applied the principles of biomechanics and constructivism, an actor
was supposed to function almost as an acrobat, moving up and down the constructivist
set designed by Lyubov Popova. The movements of the characters’ souls were expressed in
their physical activity and intensified by the movements of the wheels of the set. However,
unlike the wheels that had to be operated by Meyerhold himself and not always turned,
the young actors, his most talented students Igor Ilyinsky, Maria Babanova and Vasily
Zaichikov, created such a great and well-coordinated ensemble that critics coined for them
a nickname  – “Ilbazai” (this word is made of the first syllables of the actors’ names: Il
– Ilyinsky, Ba – Babanova, Zai – Zaichikov) to demonstrate that this trio worked as an
undivided entity.25 According to Boris Alpers, in this production “the actor of Meyerhold’s
theatre was building his house from scratch, was creating his art from simple, expedient
and happy movements of the human body. This art was dynamic as the impetuous life of
the Revolution.”26 Describing Babanova’s performance as Stella, Alexei Gvozdev wrote that
“her movement is filled with unique spirituality, because she is so good at using her body
which is such a rare case with actors in drama.”27
Although Meyerhold’s experiments in biomechanics were quite successful and he man-
aged to apply “the methods of Taylorism” in order to increase the productivity of acting and
to facilitate “the quickest possible realization of the actor’s objective,”28 he never stopped
looking for other acting techniques that could push the actors body to the limits of its
expressiveness. In his notable speech after seeing a performance starring one of the most
famous Peking opera artists Mei Lanfang in 1935, Meyerhold said:
182    A. Shulgat

Comrades, if after his performance you visit any of our theatres, you will say: why cannot we
cut off the hands of our actors, as they are absolutely useless? Let us cut off their hands, as we
only see them sticking from their cuffs, but not expressing anything or expressing something
else, which should not be expressed.29
This speech certainly confirmed Meyerhold’s reputation as a “formalist” and probably
became one of the many steps that led to the destruction of Meyerhold’s theatre and his
subsequent arrest and murder. The Stalinist regime could not tolerate a director who, even
ironically, suggested cutting the hands of the Soviet actors, while directing productions
of such bourgeois plays as Dumas’s La Dame aux Camellias. Meyerhold’s search for the
ultimate expressiveness of the actor’s body and the perfect balance between the parts of
the performance was considered alien to the ideology and aesthetics of socialist realism.
However, those of his actors – Maria Babanova, Igor Ilyinsky, Erast Garin – who were
spared by the regime, had long and successful careers in theatre and cinema. Their experi-
ence of work with Meyerhold, their training in biomechanics made their creative organisms
almost universal, vibrant, sensitive and able to adjust to different aesthetics. They became
the bridge between Meyerhold’s theatre and contemporary theatre. Today it is absolutely
obvious that “Meyerhold discovered certain objective laws of stagecraft, which could not
be avoided by those whose will and talent are directed towards the understanding of the
phenomenon of theatricality.”30

Notes
 1. Gladkov, Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses, 98.
 2. Meyerhold v russkoi teatralnoi kritike, 220.
 3. Gladkov, Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses, 118.
 4. Quoted in Titova, Tvorchesky teatr i teatralny konstruktivism, 153. Quotations from the Russian
editions are translated by the author.
 5. Meyerhold v russkoi teatralnoi kritike, 224.
 6. Alpers, Teatr sotsialnoi maski, 78.
 7. Markov, Pismo o Meyerholde, 22.
 8. Rudnitsky, Rezhisser Meyerhold, 488.
 9. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre, 24.
10. Ibid., 25.
11. Ibid., 50.
12. Ibid., 56.
13. Rudnitsky, Rezhisser Meyerhold, 77.
14. Titova, Tvorchesky teatr i teatralny konstruktivism, 10.
15. Quoted in Titova, Tvorchesky teatr i teatralny konstruktivism, 10.
16. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Statyi, pisma, rechi, besedi, vol. 1, 85.
17. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre, 124.
This translation is by Edward Braun. There is another, later one, by Alma Law: “How long
will it be before they inscribe in the theatrical tables the following law: words in the theatre
are only a pattern on the canvas of movement?”.
18. Gladkov, Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses, 96.
19. Titova, Tvorchesky teatr i teatralny konstruktivism, 161.
20. Gladkov, Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses, 103.
21. Titova, Tvorchesky teatr i teatralny konstruktivism, 154.
22. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre, 54–7.
23. Rudnitsky, Rezhisser Meyerhold, 134–5.
24. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre, 206.
 Stanislavski Studies   183

25. Rudnitsky, Rezhisser Meyerhold, 269.

26. Alpers, Teatr sotsialnoi maski, 28.
27. Quoted in Rudnitsky, Rezhisser Meyerhold, 271.
28. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre, 198.
“The actor embodies in himself both the organizer and that which is organized (i.e. the
artist and his material). The formula for acting may be expressed as follows: N = A1 + A2
(where N = the actor; A1 = the artist who conceives the idea and issues the instructions
necessary for its execution; A2 = the executant who executes the conception of A1). The actor
must train his material (the body), so that it is capable of executing simultaneously those
tasks which are dictated externally (by the actor, the director).”
29. Quoted in Titova, Tvorchesky teatr i teatralny konstruktivism, 199.
30. Ibid., 177.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Anna Shulgat is a theatre scholar and translator. She graduated from St. Petersburg State Theatre
Arts Academy with a degree in Theatre Studies. She was also a Fulbright visiting scholar and got
an MFA in Dramaturgy from the State University of New York. Anna is a research associate at the
Stanislavski Centre and Consultant Translator for Stanislavski Studies journal. She is a member of the
Writers' Union of St. Petersburg and Advisor for the programme Cultural Fellowships in St. Petersburg
(The Likhachev Foundation). She has published over a hundred articles and essays on theatre and
translation as well as 18 translated books.

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