Meyerhold, Vsevolod (fəsyĕ`vəlŭt mē`ûrhōlt), 1874–1940?, Russian theatrical director and producer. Meyerhold led the revolt against naturalism in the Russian theater. Working with the Moscow Art Theatre, he experimented with his own directing ideas until the outbreak of the Revolution. Meyerhold was a member of the Bolshevik party, and as head of theatrical activities for the state he directed the first theater to specialize in Soviet plays. He was among the earliest advocates of the theater of the absurd. In his avant-garde productions he employed various grotesque elements, pantomimes, and acrobatics, emphasizing the plays' visual, nonverbal aspects. He produced Bolshevik propaganda dramas, using bare constructivist settings and formalized scenery, and eliminating the curtain. Meyerhold directed his actors according to his principle of "biomechanics," reducing the actors' individual contributions to a minimum, in the interests of the play as a whole. His work eventually became unprofitable, and the state discontinued his subsidy. He was an outspoken opponent of socialist realism socialist realism, Soviet artistic and literary doctrine. The role of literature and art in Soviet society was redefined in 1932 when the newly created Union of Soviet Writers proclaimed socialist realism as compulsory literary practice.
..... Click the link for more information. . A victim of the Soviet purges, Meyerhold died under circumstances that remain unclear; the date of his death is open to question.

Bibliography

See Meyerhold on Theater, ed. by E. Braun (1969); biography by M. L. Hoover (1974); J. M. Symons, Meyerhold's Theatre of the Grotesque (1971).

Meyerhold, Vsevolod (Yemilyevich)

(born Feb. 9, 1874, Penza, Russia—died Feb. 2, 1940, Moscow) Russian theatrical producer and director. He acted with the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 and formulated his avant-garde theories of symbolic theatre. Opposed to the naturalism of Konstantin Stanislavsky, he directed plays in a nonrepresentational style that became known as biomechanics. After 1908 he staged plays in St. Petersburg that drew from commedia dell'arte and Asian theatre. He was noted for his direction of The Magnificent Cuckold (1920) and for his controversial production of The Queen of Spades (1935). Condemned by Soviet critics for his artistic individuality and opposition to Socialist Realism, he was arrested and imprisoned in 1939 and was probably executed.