Earth Rampant, 1923.

N I K O L APIE S O C H I N S K Y

MEYERHOL
ANDD THE M A R X I SCTR I T I Q U E

35
 MEYERHOLD AND THE MARXIST CRITIQUE

real battle with shots that

his mockery is not complete; he has yet to touch upon t er-

A playwright of traditional melodramas (with some political filling) and an art reporter
before revolution, Anatoly Lunacharsky was principally responsible for the cultural poli-
tics of the Bolshevik Party. His personal tastes leaned toward the conventional, realistic,
pseudoromantic performances of the Maly Theatre in the 1880-90s: this kind of art
seemed to him to most directly shape the communist consciousness in the population. In
a totalitarian society, where only the theaters controlled by the Party could survive, the
politics of culture influenced everything: what should be included in the repertoire, who
could run theaters, who could publish the reviews. All mass media were under hll gov-
ernment control, so public opinion was shaped by Party ideologists. Lunacharsky was the
only arts professional in the Partys top leadership, and he influenced his comrades easily.
Lunacharsky was convinced that realism would become the general tendency of Sovi-
et Russian theater. Unlike moderinst theorists, he thought theater was based in literature,

37
 PESOCHINSKY

rather than being an independent art with roots in Dyonisian festivities and ritual.
Lunacharsky was one of the most consistent opponents of symbolism, abstract art, and all
avant-garde forms, claiming they were anti-social. Nevertheless, he and other Bolshe-
viks had to tolerate the development of non-realistic art in Russia from 1917 to approxi-
mately 1927 because the major representatives of realistic art belonged to the prerevolu-
tionary culture. They simply did not cooperate with the new regime, while left-wing
artists during first years of the revolution used the empty space of Russian culture for
their creative work. The Bolsheviks, headed by Lunacharsky, tried to turn the fbt~rists~
(as Lunacharsky called all avant-gardists) to more politically oriented art. Back to Ostro-
vsky was Lunacharskys slogan, proclaimed in 1923, which meant that theater should return
to staging realistic plays - modern ones, created in the manner of mid 19th century drama.
As far back as 1907, Lunacharsky announced his sharp displeasure with Meyerholds
artistic agenda in his responses to the very first theoretical book of Russian symbolist the-
ater, Meyerhold? Theatre:Its History and Techniques;the following year, he attacked Meyer-
holds article On the History and Technique of Theatre. In On Theatre and Playwriting,
Lunacharsky scorned Meyerhold as narrow minded and infused by cheap ideas.. . as if
he wears blinkers. H e deplored Meyerholds bourgeois instinct - the decadent instinct
of an impotent coward - and described his productions as sophomoric, vague doggerel.
Meyerholds article, he wrote, was a hodge-podge and lifeless: You parade yourself in
cast-off rags, he wrote, Here is your problem, Mr. Meyerhold.
Lunacharsky refused to accept Meyerholds concept of static theater, with its
reworked idea of action and its absence of a traditional protagonist. In opposition to
Meyerholds drama of fate, his Theatre of Synthesis, and his interpretation of Maeter-
linck and Schopenhauer, Lunacharsky presented his own thesis of positivisticaesthetics:

People who dont have active energy -who are weak, timid - are second-rate people. Their
life is only half-lived, they perceive, and then mull over what they have perceived, calling
this process their inner life; envying and hating the active, they proclaim the inner, that is,
the undergrown, the rudimentary, as something more important than the outer, that is,
action. But, there was action in the beginning, action always is and will be, everything
exists for action, through action, and by action, all that is not action is only its shadow.
Your inner theatre is only a shadow of the theatre.

Advocating a theater that calls for an active attitude and struggle, Lunacharsky set the
wilting, anemic, flat productions of Meyerhold against those that approximate the
ideal: these are scenes full of life, poetry, and beauty. The acting is realistic but broad.. . a
lot of passion and movement.
Lunacharskys critique of Meyerhold was solidly based in the Bolshevik approach to
the arts. At the turn of the century, Gorky, Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and other Russian
Marxists created positivistic aesthetics, meaning (in a very simplified formula) that art
 MEYERHOLD AND T H E MARXIST CRITIQUE

should directly incite its audiences to social activity. Political criteria became absolute.
Georgy Plekhanov wrote in one of his aesthetic papers in 1908, The first task of the art
critic is to translate an idea of the creative work from the language of art to the language
of sociology, and to find what could be called the sociological equivalent of this piece of
art. According to Plekhanov, the weighing of artistic qualities is another, separate task.
The Bolsheviks were fond of Nikolai Chernyshevskys theory of arts utility for everyday
life, and they deeply opposed any type of art which did not deal with social reality,
labelling it individualistic- and this included psychologically realistic art.
Lenins ideas about art were similar to these. In Lenins notes on art published by
Clara Zetkin in 1924, his evaluation of artistic tendencies is clearly stated. A slogan like,
Art belongs to the people in the real context of Lenins words means that proletarian
and peasant masses have no need for the kind of art (which he likened to sweet biscuits)
which is addressed to a few hundred or thousand educated people. Lenin stated clearly: I
do not consider expressionism, hturism, cubism, and other ismsas high developments of
human genius. I do not understand them, I dont feel joy with them. Lenin called for the
creation of art that resembled the simple black bread of life.
This point of view soon became the official one; it was the basis of the Partys cultural
politics. No form of avant-gardist art was suited to the Bolsheviks ideas, therefore Mey-
erholds directing was doomed from the beginning, even during the short period of
October in the Theatre. I n 1920, a concerted effort to destroy hturismwas initiated by
Lenin, Lunacharsky, and others - a Party decree on this issue was adopted - in the letters
on the Proletcult. The 1920s were thus a transitional period, a movement towards the total
manipulation of the popular consciousness through economic means (subsidies and
salaries), selection of artists and repertoire, and brainwashing; yet during this time, art
critics outside orthodox Bolshevism were not yet completely silent. For his part, Lunacharsky
participated in a series of meetings and discussions, and published miscelleneous reviews
outlining the Party point of view (collected in several editions of his Revolution and Theatre).
At that point, these truly were still discussions, not yet trials (as they became in the 30s). But
everyone in arts circles had to pay close attention to Lunacharskys opinions. Lunacharsky,
unsurprisingly, was never criticized by anyone.
Yet even when Lunacharsky might have considered his 1908 comments on Meyerhold
erroneous or dated, he not only reprinted them but bolstered them with these statements,
made in March 1924:

Im afraid that this 18-year-old description is still accurate! And what is [his theater] now?
A non-psychological theater with biomechanics? But even biomechanics is a thing of yes-
terday. Whats next?... Now Meyerhold is scolding Reinhardt, claiming that hes come a
long way from Reinhardt. Alas, hes never been near him. Maybe he will catch up with
him? That would be good for Meyerhold!

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 P E S O C H I N S KY

In this same statement, Lunacharsky characterized the Bolshevik union with the futur-
ists,,, by which he meant all the avant-gardists, as a pragmatic arrangement, as if it were a
marriage of convenience. And the futurists, he pointed out, were willing to hlfill this
social prescription. Lunacharsky, in fact, repeatedly used the term social prescription, to
demonstrate the essential division between those who gave the orders and those who car-
ried them out. The term also reflects the Communist use of art as an ideological product
and explains why leftist artists used red phraseology as part of their packaging.
The artists, however, were not as cynical as the Communist Party bosses: they werent
aware of the plans of the Party, and they trusted it to some extent. Even before the Revo-
lution, the intelligentsia were closer to the Socialist Revolutionary Party than they were to
the Monarchists. Yet the worldview of most artists of that time - though radical - did not
entail political action. Accordingly, the Party was dissatisfied with how the hturists filled
their order. Lunacharsky wrote in an article titled The Theatre of Meyerhold:

The verbal twists, the chasing after form - and moreover, after form which is revolution-
ary, but in a totally different sense - does not comply with the social orders given to poets
and painters. I wouldnt say that the hturists didnt want to fulfill the order, but its very
telling that they emphasized the commercial and technical aspects of the arrangement, as if
saying: We are craftsmen, we are masters, and in the bright colors and words which are
natural to us, we can express everything you want, including revolutionary slogans.But the
essence of this art is not in the revolutionary slogans.

Lun ach arsky insightfully observed that the revoluti o nar ism of the futurists ,
including Meyerhold, was not of the particular bent that the Bolsheviks desired, and
that, personally, he didnt want to be associated with it: Many of us believed in it. But
personally I never trusted it, and, as a critic, I always opposed it.. . The Central Commit-
tee of our Party even then was absolutely right to emphasize that this noisy, multicolored
art, with its deliberate dismissal of meaningful reflection of reality, doesnt line up with
the true tastes and interests of the proletariat.
Meyerholds productions were abstract and emotional depictions of the ethos of
building a new world, and yet they could not serve as illustrations of specific Bolshevik
campaigns. This explains why Krupskaya, Lenins wife, became indignant over Meyer-
holds 1920 staging of Verhaerens The Dawn, in which she sensed not the Russian prole-
tariat but a Shakespearean crowd (Pravda, November 10,1920). Because Krupskaya rarely
wrote anything without consulting with her husband, we can consider this to be his view
as well. In the Magnanimous Cuckold production of 1922, a significant shift occurred:
Meyerhold realized a constructivist theater system with its own logic, its own theatrical
narrative, its own time and space, a system that rescued theater from its position as a sec-
ondary art, as an interpreter of literature and illustration of text. The immense success of
 MEYERHOLD AND T H E MARXIST CRITIQUE

the production could be traced to the theater of masks, from The FairgroundBooth and
improvisations in the Studio on Borodinskaya Street to Mystery-Boufe, which were the
early signs of a theatrical revolution. Even one of the critics allied with the Moscow Art
Theatre, Yuri Sobolev, asserted in Theater (1992,no. 6 ) that in Cuckold one couldnt help
but acknowledge the indisputable, apparent, glorious victory of the Actor - with a capital
A. But in On Theatre and Playwriting, Lunacharsky pitied Ilyinsky, the leading actor
(overacting, poorly imitating bad clowns) and all the acting youth who were getting
knocked out of the way by all these discoveries.He further criticized the productions
vulgar form and monstrous tastelessness (which when applied to farce seem like inap-
propriate reproaches) but, even more: For theater in general, for theater art, it signals a
decline because in this manner, it is conquered by the eccentricity of the music hall, and
this is not only Meyerholds bent, but a large, rather dirty, and, at the same time, threat-
ening Americanized wave in art.
Lunacharsky also couldnt understand why some people considered Meyerholds 1924
production of Ostrovskys The Forest so revolutionary. I assert that there is not one trend,
not one idea in this production which is acceptable from the revolutionary standpoint, he
wrote in Academic Theatres Weekly. Similarly, in a 1925 speech outlining Party politics in
art, R. Pelshe (the Party leader responsible for ideology) stated that Meyerholds theatre
could be considered left-wing only insofar as it produced revolutionary plays. But very
often, Pelshe went on to say, Meyerhold took an idealistic approach to theater form;
Pelshe sharply criticized The Dawn, Tarelkin?Death, The Forest, and his other non-realis-
tic productions. Yet most of these productions, along with Mayakovslqs Mystery-Boufe,
which Lunacharsky denounced as the new junk of futurism, had been clearly labeled
revoluti0n ary.
In any case, soon after the revolution, the ghosts of death and destruction began to
appear on Meyerholds stage, starting with Tarelkin?Death and Lucrative Position in 1923.
By 1925,beginning with Teacher Bubus, the tempo of stage action in Meyerholds theater
had slowed down considerably. Anxiety began to fill the space, and the sense of the
downfall of high culture became a recurrent theme in his productions. Everyone began to
talk about the return of the director of Tintagiles Death (1905),The Fairground Booth
(1906)and Masquerade (1917).They sensed the frightening chorus in the tragicomic The
Warrant (1925)and the apocalyptic shadows in Inspector General (1926).In Woe t o Wit
(~928) the piano music played by the man of culture set him apart from the devouring
herd of winners. Comandarm 2 (1931)seemed to be a requiem for those who had perished
in legendary times. The Introduction (1933)depicted the collapsing, soulless state and the
helplessness of the creative individual within it; it was ostensibly set in Germany, but why
did the despair seem so vivid? Krechinsky? Wedding (1933)dramatized a prevalent horror:
the characters hid from something, and critics spoke of the demonic figure of the gigan-
tic Krechinsky. The Lady ofthe Camellias (1934)took the impossibility of living according
 PESO C H I N S KY

to human feelings to its ultimate, tragic end. The protagonist of almost every production
perished, physically or spiritually.
The true nature of Meyerholds art was tragic from the beginning. His personal phi-
losophy and aesthetics were essentially grounded in Romanticism, and therefore he was
always essentially alienated from the political events and personalities of his time. The
essence of his theater (as opposed to his pronouncements in Soviet newspapers) was
metaphysical in a symbolist or surrealist vein. H e had more in common with Dali and
Picasso than with Lenin, Trotsky, or Kirov.
In all of the directors productions, even those labelled revolutionary,the unfolding
action was always conditioned by a theatrical, non-linear logic, and this aspect of his work
was always fiercely opposed by Bolshevik critics. Finally, perhaps inevitably, his theater
was shut down in 1938 after the banning of One L@, which was condemned as pessimistic
libel against what was considered a heroic history. Judging from the rehearsal notes, its
tragic themes were not tidied up and the main characters sense of physical exhaustion
was not relieved by catharsis. Meyerholds theater, which Pravda called an alien theater,
was, indeed, no adherent to Bolshevism.
Ironically, of all of Meyerholds work, Inspector General (Revizor)interested Lunacharsky
the most. It even seems to have inspired in him an impulse to protect it. This seems con-
tradictory: the mystical, ontological, surreal, and tragic elements, which linked the direc-
tors conception with the symbolist worldview, should not have appealed to the Bolshevik
ideologues. But for Lunacharsky, the play was first and foremost the production of a clas-
sic in which all the conventional psychological types were recognizable, in which even
Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky pleased the critic (for the first time in Meyerholds work, I
saw the real, living people).
Lunacharsky explained all the characters metamorphoses according to the logic of
quotidian life. For example, he conceived the character of Khlestakov as a minor official

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 M E Y E R H O L D A N D T H E M A R X I S T CRITIQUE

Khlestakov (Garin) and the Mayor (P. Starkovski) in the episode Over a Fat Bottle, Revizor 1926.
Film stills from the documentary Le siicle Stanislawski.

who almost half-consciouslyhad the idea to puff himself up to exploit the gullibility of
sluggish, provincial officials, but without altering his essential self. H e is simply an
impostor. Lunacharsky interpreted the episode Over a Fat Bottle concretely, as a drunk-
en persons vision of the world: reality was distorted by the alcoholic animation. The
episode The Elephant Topples is the fanciful stylization of a drunken hallucination.
Clearly, for Lunacharsky, the art of directing was simply a kind of external decoration, or
an adding of theatrical texture to the historical scenes created by the author. If Meyerhold
had opened up something about Revizor, it was that Gogol, through satire on the petty
bureaucracy struck deeper, to the essential, gluttonous worldview of the former fat-
reared Russia. Yet for all his positive evaluations, and in spite of his affirmative tone,
Lunacharsky obviously missed what made the production truly innovative.
Others critics, such as A. A. Gvozdez - a prominent theater scholar of the 1920s and
30s associated with the intelligentsia and the formalist movement - noted in Theatre Crit-
icism the sense of catastrophe, Gogols overarching tragic theme, the unusual links of
episodes (nonnarrative but thematic) and the complex and rich symphonic suite on the
themes of Gogol and Revizor. H e saw the characters as united in a synthetic, collective
Chorus, the horrifying Chorus of tragicomedy, and observed that the production was
composed in terms of theatrical, almost musical, phrases. It was Gvozdez who noticed
that there were authentic props, costumes, and seemingly authentic characters: the
officials gathered around the table, as if it were the mise-en-sctne of the Moscow Art The-
atre. But, he asked, was it a depiction of real life? It only seemed to be at first sight, he
wrote in response to Lunacharsky. The pieces of life are put together according to a kind
of musical logic which exists only in the complex composition of a symphony.
A. Piotrovsh, another theater scholar associated with formalism, defined in Ly5 ofArt the
terms of the production as a montage of associations, a montage of objectivized metaphors.
M. E Gnesin, who wrote the original score for Revizor, described in the program for the per-

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 PESOCHINSKY

formance the musicality of the production as not an illustration of the action but an example of
briiantly embodied counterpoints between the tempo of music and the tempo of a scene.. .
More important, the actors movements are free, not constrained by each musical beat, but
responsive to an overall musical phrase. This is the highest achievement of the rhythmic.
Meanwhile, almost all the left-wing critics attacked Revizor for mysticism, irrational-
ity, and anti-social tendencies, and for turning away from contemporary life. This was also
Meyerholds first production to be ignored or repudiated by the sociological/construc-
tivist school of criticism (Alpers, Blium, Beskin, Zagorsky) and by the Left Front (Bedny,
Tretyakov, and others) as well as by some formalists, particularly Shklovsky. But
Lunacharsky insisted that there was nothing mystical in the production, that the motives
behind the acting were real, and that the logic of the 19th century drama was still glori-
ously intact. In light of the hostility of most left-wing critics, Lunacharskys support was
of paramount importance, particularly as it came from on high; yet its possible that his
endorsement of Revizor may have represented an attempt to seduce the director away
from the leftist avant-garde.
The cultural politics of Lunacharsky and Lenin - influenced by 19th century art and
later accepted by Stalin - were hotly debated within the nucleus of the Communist Party
until the mid-1920s and Trotsky, more than anyone else, represented the opposition. H e
was more leftist, more radical, even in the domain of art, and despite his ambiguous polit-
ical legacy, he still supported so-called futurism. Trotksy, among other members of the
leftist intellectual elite, reportedly visited Meyerholds salon, and Meyerhold dedicated to
Trotsky his 1923 production of Earth Rampant. When Lunacharsky labeled Meyerholds
theater a pleasure house, Trotsky said something completely different in his Literature
and Revolution:

Even today, it might be said with certainty that much in futurism will serve the renaissance
and further development of art. .. Now, it is hard to deny the futurist achievements in the
domain of art. .. With very minor exceptions, all of our contemporary poetry, directly or
indirectly, was influenced by futurism.. . Constructivism as well made its impact, though
not along the line it set up for itself. More often than not, articles about the absolute infer-
tility of futurism and its counter-revolutionary spirit are published inside a cover made by a
constructivist hand. In the super-official publications, alongside the devastating evaluation
of futurism, futurist poems are published ... It is futile to turn our back on these facts, and
treat futurism as a charlatanic invention by a deteriorating intelligentsia. Even if we dis-
cover tomorrow that the inner resources of futurism are dwindling - and I cant exclude
this possibility - today they are fed by other movements, close to futurism.

This stands in direct opposition to the super-official articles of the Peoples Com-
missar and to the Bolshevik idea of relying on the artistic resourcesof the 19th century.

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 MEYERHOLD A N D T H E ((MARXIST CRITIQUE

Trotskys analysis of futuristic conceptions reveals the influence of the constructivist

worldview. Trotsky differed with Lunacharsky, who intended only a temporary and forced
use of the leftist artists services,in his sincere belief in the possibility of such a union.
Why begin with a split? he puzzled. The Party should not have any ready-made deci-
sions on the issues of verse form, on theater evolution, on the renovation of literary lan-
guage, on architectural style, etc.. .. The active development of art, the fight for its new
and formal achievements does not include the direct concerns and goals of the Party.
There is no one delegated for this work.
Trotskys views were contradictory and politicized. But it was he, not Lunacharsky,
who was inclined to believe that in a few generations grand-scale art would be replaced
by art fused with life, that it was the Left Front for Literature and Art (LEF), and not the
Maly Theatre, which was laying the groundwork for the art of the future. Trotsky saw
Meyerholds acting school not as endless trickery but as an attempt (to pluck from the
future something that might develop as its inseparable part ... as partial anticipation of
the hture on todays - still cold and hungry - boards. But LEF lost its bet on Trotsky.
Stalin defeated Trotskys opposition in the second half of the 1920s and together with
Lunacharsky, who remained in power until 1933, directed the states art politics toward
rigid realism. After 1933, Lunacharskys position - that of the principal ideologist of cul-
ture - was occupied by Maxim Gorky, and Meyerhold, executed in 1939 for being a Trot-
skyist, was the only prominent Russian director who never staged any of Gorkys plays.

(Originally published in St. Petersburg Theatre Magazine, 1995, no. 8. Letter and article
translated by Daria Krizhankaya and Martha Hostetter.)

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