ABSTRACT
The essay discusses Meyerhold’s use of text and dramatic speech, both as ‘literature’ and embodied action, during the decade that ended with the closure of his theatre in 1938, his arrest in 1939, and violent death in 1940. Meyerhold, who had staged classical and contemporary poetic dramas, had never been indifferent to the expressive potential of stage rhetoric but his quintessential focus on rhythm, movement, corporeality reduced the verbal element in his theatre. However, in the 1930s language per se becomes newly prominent in Meyerhold’s conception of dramatic performance and views on acting. Meyerhold’s intense, complex, perhaps poignant interest in the spoken word can be seen as a response to the current social context and Soviet verbal landscape (which also prompts a drastic, albeit different, change in Stanislavsky’s approach to the dramatic text). Meyerhold participated in the general transition from the avant-garde experiments of the 1920s to the normative socialist art of the 1930s and at the same time set his work in counterpoint to official aesthetic prescriptions and rhetorical claims of the social space.
