Vsevolod Meyerhold : modernism, mass culture and the Russian avante garde stage

Abstract

As early as 1907, Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold writes of the need to renovate the theater by "means of new forms and new methods of scenic presentation" predicated on the "collective enterprise" of the author, director, actor and audience. The "new forms and new methods" that Meyerhold refers to undergo an astonishing number of transformations throughout his career as does his understanding of what exactly constitutes a "collective enterprise". While contemporary critics continue to fold Meyerhold's investigation into the modernist paradigm of self-reflexive criticality and autonomy, this thesis claims that Meyerhold's activity, like that of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde, must be considered as nothing less than a willful attempt to constitute fundamentally new modes of theatrical production, dissemination and reception. This thesis tracks the development of Meyerhold's work. First, we will investigate the parallel development of formalist theory in literary criticism and the emergence of high modernism on the Russian stage. Second, we will complicate this formalist description by demonstrating its paradoxical maintenance of the "low". In Meyerhold's work this is manifested in his attempt to reimbue the stage with ritualistic forms of folk experience through the grotesque. Third, we will consider biomechanics, stage constructivism and their impact in transforming the grotesque. The fourth and last section of the thesis will analyze Meyerhold's transformation of audience and author relationships as theorized in the positions of productivism.