Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexander Blok as successors of Ludwig Tieck’s theatrical tradition

FINOGENOV V.A.

Junior Researcher of the Department of Literary Studies, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract

The ideas of the German romantic poet and playwright Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), who anticipated some later trends in the development of theater art, influenced the approaches of many outstanding directors. The new forms of conventionality were actively developed by Russian symbolists on the stage of the early twentieth century. The article deals with some ways of adaptation of the stage principles developed in works of Tieck and other German theater directors by Vsevolod Meyerhold, who contributed much to the modernization of the Russian stage. His stage techniques were largely built on principles consonant with Tieck’s ideas about dramaturgy. For example, the play Balaganchik by Alexander Blok used a number of images from Tieck’s dramas, and Meyerhold’s staging of this play was an important step in development of the new theater principles in Russia.

Keywords

Ludwig Tieck; drama; theater; play-within-a-play; romanticism; symbolism; Alexander Blok; Vsevolod Meyerhold; stage conventionality.

DOI: 10.31249/lit/2023.02.01

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