Meyerhold and the revolution : a reading through Henri Lefebvre's theories on "everyday life"

Abstract

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." 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." 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." 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.