Vsevolod+Emilevich+Meyerhold

Biography Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold was born with the name Karl Kasimir Theodor Meyerhold in Penza Russia on the 10th of Feburary 1874. He was born into the family of a Russian-German wine manufacturer Emil Meyerhold. He studied law at Moscow university in 1895 but never completed his degree. On his 21st birthday Meyerhold converted from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodox, and accepted Vsevolod as his orthodox name. He began acting in 1896 at the Moscow art theatre (MAT) and this is where he became the pupil of Vladimir Nemirovich-Dachenko. After leaving the MAT in 1902 Meyerhold enrolled in a number of theatrical projects, as a director and an actor. Each project served as an experiment for new staging methods. Meyerhold was a entroprenour of symbolism in theatre. He was invited back to the MAT around this time that he had pursued his experimental ideas. Meyerhold continued to search for his innovation, during the time of 1907-1917 he worked with imperial theatres in St.Petersburg introducing classical plays in an innovative manner. He staged works of controversial contemporary authors like Fydor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius, and Alexander Blok. In these plays Meyerhold tried to return the acting traditions of Comedia dellarte. The Russian Revolution of 1917 made Meyerhold one of the most enthusiastic soviet playwrites of his time. Meyerhold founded his own theater in 1922, it was called the Meyerhold theatre until 1938. Meyerhold confronted the principles of theatrical academics, he claimed that they are incapable of finding a common language with the new reality. His methods of scenic constructivism and circus style effects were used in his most successful and controversial works. Meyerhold was opposed to socialist realism, and in the early 1930s around the time when Joseph Stalin clamped down on all avant-garde art and experimentation his works were claimed to be antagonistic to the Soviet people. His theatre was closed down in January 1938. He was arrested in Leningrad on June 20th 1939, his wife was an actress named Zinaida Raikh, she was found ded in their Moscow apartment on the 15th of July 1939. Later that year Meyerhold was brutally tortured and forced to make confessions that he worked for Japanese and British intelligence agencies. Meyerhold was later sentenced to death by a firing squad on February 1st 1940 but the date of his death is unclear.