Meyerhold House-museum

The Meyerhold Apartment Museum boasts all manner of personal belongings, correspondence, scripts, set designs and photographs concerning the life and work of Moscow's pioneering avant-garde theatrical director, producer and actor Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold (1874-1940) attended the Moscow Philharmonic School of Drama where he studied under the tutelage of the famous Russian playwright, novelist, theatrical producer and cofounder of the Moscow Art Theater Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. In 1898 Meyerhold joined the Moscow Art Theater and began to explore his theories of symbolic and nonrealistic drama. His radical ideas on dramatic theory and production design ensured him a successful if tumultuous career and a reputation as one of the most exciting and experimental Russian theater directors of this century. Although a loyal supporter of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Meyerhold's willfully individualistic temperament and artistic eccentricity drew criticism from Soviet observers and he was accused of neglecting Socialist Realism in his work. He staunchly defended the right of the artist to experiment and refused to submit to constraining Soviet theories of artistic uniformity. In 1939 Meyerhold was arrested and imprisoned, nothing was known about his death in the West until 1958, when the new edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia claimed he died in 1942, although the year was later changed to 1940.