Meyerhold and the Revolution: A Reading through Henri Lefebvre's Theories on "Everyday Life"

In the memoirs of his work with Vsevolod Meyerhold, the actor Mikhail Sadovsky wrote how the director "aimed at wrenching the spectator out of the familiarity of everyday existence, attempted to rip off his comfortable house slippers."¹ Ilya Ehrenburg, one of Meyerhold's literary collaborators, writes similarly: "Meyerhold hated stale water, yawning emptiness: he often resorted to masks precisely because he was terrified by them—and what he found terrifying in them was not some mystical fear of nonbeing, but the petrified vulgarity of everyday life."² Signaled in these quotations is "everyday life," a critical area of knowledge that steadily gained importance throughout the twentieth century. Within pertinent critical discourses, everyday life is now treated not as a trivial and undistinguishable domain, what "we routinely consider unremarkable and thus take for granted," but as "the basis of meaningful experience."³ In this understanding of the everyday, daily activities such as walking, eating, and communicating become imbued with a sense of purpose that belies their repetitive and undistinguishable status. A crucial figure within these debates was Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), and the aim of this essay is to apply his theories to an evaluation of Meyerhold's place within the political and theatrical scenarios that developed in the first years after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. This essay draws together for the first time the work of these two personalities, arguing that a Lefebvrian framework makes visible the tension between Meyerhold's support and critique of the emerging political status quo. It also repositions his aesthetic techniques and Biomechanical system as sites of body-based resistance.

The reading of Meyerhold's theatre through Lefebvre's theories qualifies this essay as an example of what Jackie Bratton refers to as "theorized theatre history," that is, an application of critical theory as a historiographical tool to challenge, partner, and ultimately interpret the historical content.⁴ Theoretical framing within historical studies has recently given rise to some constructive debate. For example, Thomas Postlewait is wary of historical studies that are, to his mind, excessively rooted in theory, which becomes an all-too-restrictive channel that binds rather than informs: "There are…scholars who champion a reigning idea, derived from this or that theory. All events are illustrations of the theory, which defines the contexts and controls the interpretation."⁵ Jim Davis, on the other hand, argues that theory is so ingrained in contemporary scholarship that it simply cannot be ignored; consequently, it is "far better to acknowledge the ideas that are influencing one's own opinions…than to assume naively that one is untouched by theoretical positions."⁶

This essay keeps an over-rigorous application of theory in check by identifying both congruencies and conflicts between Lefebvre and Meyerhold. In other words, Meyerhold's work will not always fit neatly within Lefebvre's theories, as the emphasis here will be less on establishing links between the two and more on contributing another layer to our understanding of the Russian director's work. In Lefebvre's theories, everyday life is a complex rather than straightforward phenomenon because it embraces "a wide range of tensions of contradictions."⁷ A similarly complex picture of Meyerhold's encounter with the revolution will emerge here, wherein certain actions of his will be seen as directly supporting the new regime even as others already contained the seeds of confrontation and resistance. This clarification of Meyerhold's complex rather than straightforward placement within the embryonic Bolshevik state is the first result of applying Lefebvre's theories. It will be supported by several sources by Meyerhold that are unavailable in English translations. The English-speaking world has been slow to add to Eduard Braun's Meyerhold on Theatre collection, which remains the most popular source of Meyerhold's texts and therefore deserved a recent reissue. Though traversing the director's whole career, Meyerhold on Theatre collects only some thirty texts, speeches, and rehearsal transcripts, a fraction compared to, for example, the four-volume collection edited in French by Beatrice Picon-Vallin.⁸ The Italian translations of Meyerhold's texts...