On January 26, a stamp dedicated to the 150th Birth Anniversary of Vsevolod Meyerhold, a stage director and a tutor, was put into postal circulation

Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) was a Russian theatre director, an actor and a tutor. He was a theorist and practitioner of the theatrical grotesque, the author of the Theatrical October program and the developer of the dramatic system referred to as "biomechanics".

Vsevolod Meyerhold was born on January 28 (February 9) of 1874 in the city of Penza. In 1895, he graduated from the Penza Second Men's Gymnasium. Then he entered the Faculty of Law of the Moscow University. In 1898, he graduated from the Theatre and Music School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society (class of V. Nemirovich-Danchenko) and joined in the company of the originating Artistic and Public Theatre.

In 1902, Meyerhold began the independent stage directing activity, taking the lead, together with A. Kosheverov, of a company in the city of Kherson. From its second season, the company took the name of the New Drama (New Drama Association). In 1902-1905, about 200 performances were staged, touring performances were held in Tbilisi, Sevastopol, Nikolayev, and other cities.

From 1906, he was the chief director of the Vera Komissarzhevskaya Drama Theatre. At the Alexandrinsky Theatre, Meyerhold staged such plays as At the Tsar's Gate by K. Hamsun (1908), Don Juan by Moliere (1910), Thunderstorm by A. Ostrovsky (1916) and others. In 1920, he began to introduce actively the Theatrical October program into the theatre.

In 1920, the Vsevolod Meyerhold State Theatre (GosTiM) was founded in Moscow. Simultaneously, V. Meyerhold directed the Theatre of the Revolution in 1922-1924.

In May of 1938, K. Stanislavsky offered him the position of a stage director at the opera theatre he was leading. After the Stanislavsky’s death, V. Meyerhold became the Chief Director of the Stanislavsky State Opera Theatre and worked on opera Rigoletto.

On June 20, 1939, Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested in Leningrad, and on February 2, 1940, he was executed by shooting under sentence of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. In 1955, he was posthumously rehabilitated.

The postage stamp provides a portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold against the background of a scene from play Banya (The Bathhouse) at the Meyerhold State Theatre.

In addition to the issue of the postage stamp, JSC Marka produced First Day Covers and special cancels for Moscow, St. Petersburg and Penza.


Design Artist: Kh. Betredinova.
Face value: 50 rubles.
Stamp size: 42×30 mm, sheet size: 142×174 mm.
Emission form: a sheet with formatted margins with 15 (3×5) stamps.
Quantity: 105 thousand stamps (7 thousand sheets).

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