Vsevolod Meyerhold

Born Karl Kasimir Theodor Meierhold in 1874, Meyerhold was the youngest of 8 children. His parents, wine manufacturer Friedrich Emil Meierhold and Elisabeth Alvina Luitgard (née van der Neese), lived in Penza, a city 625 kilometers southeast of Moscow. Upon turning 21, Meyerhold converted from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity and adopted Vsevolod as his new Orthodox Christian name.

Meyerhold married Olga Munt in 1896 and the couple had 3 daughters. However, he later fell in love with one of his students, the actress Zinaida Reich, and he divorced his wife to marry Reich in the early 1920s.

Meyerhold’s experimental, avant-garde style of theatre came under increasing scrutiny from government censors as it was against Joseph Stalin’s desire for socialist realism. Meyerhold correctly guessed that he would become a target of Soviet repression and continued to argue that individual artists must be able to maintain their own artistic identity and beliefs. Meyerhold was subsequently arrested, tortured until he was forced to confess to being a spy (which was not true), and executed by firing squad in February 1940. His wife was killed in 1939 after intruders broke into their home. Meyerhold was posthumously cleared of all charges in 1955 during the first wave of de-Stalinization.

Key Dates & Events

• 1896 - Meyerhold married Olga Munt.
• 1896 - Meyerhold becomes a student at the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School.
• 1902 - Meyerhold withdraws from study at the Moscow Art Theatre.
• 1906 - Meyerhold becomes chief producer at Vera Fyodorovna Komissarzhevskaya’s Dramatic Theatre.
• 1917 - The Bolshevik Revolution.
• 1923 - Meyerhold founds his own theatre, known as the Meyerhold Theatre, in Moscow.
• 1926 - Meyerhold stages a landmark production of Nikolai Gogol’s play The Government Inspector.
• 1938 - Meyerhold’s theatre is forced to close under Stalin’s regime.
• 1940 - Meyerhold is executed by firing squad in Russia.
• 1955 - Meyerhold is posthumously cleared of all charges against him.