In his review of Meyerhold at Work, edited by Paul Schmidt (Applause, 1996), in the November 1998 issue, Dave Williams commented that Meyerhold “wrote little.” Laurence Senelick has responded, pointing out that Meyerhold's writings are, in fact, voluminous. Senelick writes: “When his memory was rehabilitated in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin, a selection of his writings was finally issued in 1968 as Stat'i, pis'ma, rechi, besedy (Articles, letters, speeches, discourses,) in two fat volumes edited by A. V. Fevralskij and B. I. Rostotskij. The two tomes together came to over 1000 tightly printed pages. To serve the continuing interest in Meyerhold, a far from complete collection of his letters appeared in 1976 (463 pp.), followed two years later by a nearly 500-page compendium of fresh matter, Tvorcheskoe nasledie Mejerkhol'da (Meyerhold's Creative Legacy). Thereafter, fugitive pieces came out on a regular basis in Russian periodicals and anthologies, and in 1993 another two-volume collection, this time of the stenographic records of his rehearsals, was pubhshed. The fullest collection of Meyerhold's writing outside of Russia is the French translation published in Lausanne, and it is in four volumes… When Paul Schmidt put together Meyerhold at Work, which was first published by the University of Texas Press in 1980, he was deliberately seeking to include material which had not appeared in Edward Braun's 1969 collection Meyerhold on Theatre. Hence his emphasis on the testimony of collaborators and contemporaries, rather than the master's words themselves… If there is a lesson in this, it is that English-speakers have been poorly served by publishers if the paucity of Meyerhold's utterances in translation can lead to the fallacy that he rarely set pen to paper.”
First person – Victor Palacios