Meyerhold’s female collaborators

Abstract

In his introduction to the fourth edition of Edward Braun’s Meyerhold on Theatre, Jonathan Pitches suggested an expansion of the field of Meyerhold studies through an application of a range of contemporary theories, such as those appertaining to the fields of audience research, material culture, and cultural transmission. He gives one example of such application, namely feminism, underlining that a reappraisal of Meyerhold’s work relationships with female artists like Vera Komissarzhevskaya, Zinaida Raikh, Maria Babanova, Lyubov Popova, and Varvara Stepanova ‘would bring out the extent to which Meyerhold was operating first in the shadow of, and then alongside, a number of significant Russian and Soviet female artists’ (in Braun 2016: 12–13). Pitches also makes reference to Meyerhold’s daughter, Irina and granddaughter, Masha Valentei, as two curators of Meyerhold’s heritage. Given that his intention was to introduce Braun’s collection, especially the political difficulties encountered in its original assembling, Pitches closes this short interlude on Meyerhold’s female collaborators by acknowledging that more needs to be done to construct what he called ‘a feminist critique’ (12) of the Russian director’s work. This chapter takes up this challenge by focusing (though not exclusively so) on some of Meyerhold’s pre-Revolution female collaborators, namely Ekaterina Munt, Valentina Verigina, and Alexandra Smirnova. They will be discussed here as case-studies of performers and students who collaborated with Meyerhold on an artistic level while also turning into important chroniclers of his work,