Alexander Tairov

Aleksandr Tairov was born Aleksandr Yakovlevich Korenblit on July 6, 1885, in Romny, Ukraine. His father, Yakov Korenblit, was the headmaster of a primary school in Berdichev. At the age of 10, young Tairov moved to Kiev and settled with his aunt, a retired actress. She introduced him to theatre. He took part in amateur performances and assumed the name Tairov as a pseudonym.

In 1904 he enrolled in the Law School at Kiev University. That same year Tairov married his cousin, Olga. In 1905 Tairov opposed the pogroms of Jews in Kiev. He was arrested by the Tsar's police and imprisoned. His second arrest led him to a decision to move from Kiev to St. Petersburg.

In 1906 Tairov was invited by the famous Russian actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya and joined her theatre as an actor under directorship of Vsevolod Meyerhold. At the same time Tairov also continued his studies at the Law school of St. Petersburg University. There he started his lifelong friendship with Anatoli Lunacharsky. He collaborated with Vsevolod Meyerhold on a joint production of a play by Paul Claudel. Both directors were creating new experimental models for theatre in Russia. Tairov felt that the work of Meyerhold's actors was dictated by the production concept and that the actors were mere puppets. Soon Tairov left to join Pavel Gaideburov's company where he was asked to direct.

Tairov created a prototype of his Chamber Theatre as "synthetic theatre" with high goals in mind. As director he experimented with staging, acting, individual and group movements, stage and costume designs, and worked with every detail of theatrical performance in order to break away from the traditional theatre. He established ideal discipline at his chamber theatre. Tairov's experimental approach spread to all phases of creating a stage show including even the rehearsals and practice. He used the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Frédéric Chopin as a way of helping his actors achieve a special state of mind and develop a spiritual union in their scenes.

In 1912 Tairov was invited to direct a play in collaboration with the Russian Drama Theatre in Riga. There he was once again attacked by the local anti-Semites and was banned by the local authorities from staying and working in the city of Riga. The conflict took two weeks to resolve. Tairov prevailed, he stayed and completed his work for the Russian Drama Theatre in Riga. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, Tairov converted to Evangelical Lutheranism.

In 1913 Tairov moved to Moscow. There he joined a corporation of attorneys at law and could continue a comfortable career. Instead, Tairov established himself as an important anti-realist director. With his wife, the actress Alisa Koonen,[1] he founded the Kamerny (Chamber) Theatre in 1914; it became the centre of experimental creativity for many Russian actors, artists, writers, and musicians. Tairov was the first director in Russia to stage The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht. He staged classical play of Kalidasa - "Sakuntala", plays of Valery Bryusov, Eugene O'Neill, J.B. Priestley, Oscar Wilde, and other contemporary writers. Tairov collaborated with such artists as Alexandra Exter, Pavel Kuznetsov, Sergei Soudeikin, Mikhail Larionov, Natalya Goncharova, Vladimir Pohl,[2] Inayat Khan[3] and others. Tairov's Acting Studio became extremely popular among aspiring actors such as Vera Karalli, Yevgeni Lebedev, and others. He worked with composers Sergei Prokofiev, A. Aleksandrov, Georgi Sviridov, and Dmitri Kabalevsky.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Tairov continued development of his independent approach to theatre. His early productions of the Soviet era were Salome by Oscar Wilde and Adrienne Lecouvrer, which became a legendary play and ran more than 800 performances. The Chamber Theatre remained very popular and toured across the Soviet Union. The Chamber Theatre's tours of Europe in 1923, and of South America in 1930 were critically acclaimed as "a total victory of the famous Russian innovator and a genius of staging".

In 1929 Tairov produced Bagrovy Ostrov (The Crimson Island) by Mikhail Bulgakov. At that time Joseph Stalin began his total control of culture and labeled the play bourgeois. That was enough to trigger organized attacks on Tairov in the Soviet media. His next production of Vsevolod Vishnevskiy's Optimistic tragedy (1933) was criticized by Vyacheslav Molotov as a slander of Russian history. Tairov tried to defend his theatre, he stated that theatres must be established on the level of research institutes. "Pavlov has an institute on which millions are spent. Stanislavsky must have an institute too", said Tairov. As a punishment, Tairov's Chamber Theatre was sent to work in Siberia. However, unlike many other enemies of the regime, Tairov survived the Great Purges in which millions were imprisoned or executed.

In August 1941, though his theatre company had returned to Siberia, Tairov joined the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow. It was formed by the group of leading intellectuals to campaign against the Nazis during the Second World War. The Committee was headed by Solomon Mikhoels. Along with Tairov other prominent members were Emil Gilels, David Oistrakh, Samuil Marshak, Ilja Ehrenburg, and many other leading intellectuals in the Soviet Union. The main driving force of the Committee was represented by the group of Yiddish writers such as Perets Markish, Lev Kvitko, David Gofstein, Itsik Fefer, David Bergelson, and others. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee provided over 45 million rubles to the Soviet Red Army. After the end of the Second World War it was denounced by Joseph Stalin, and many of its members were executed by the Soviet secret service.

In 1946 the Soviet Communist Party launched attacks on intellectuals in the Soviet Union. Such leading cultural figures as Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturyan, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Zoshchenko and many others suffered from censorship and severe repressions. Tairov's Chamber Theatre was attacked for having little to do with contemporary Soviet life. Tairov tried to make additions to repertoire and invited writer Alexander Galich, and young director Georgi Tovstonogov, but it was too late. In May 1949, the Soviet Committee for Arts issued an official order to close the theatre. Tairov's Chamber Theatre was accused of "Aesthetism and Formalism" and was destroyed by the decision of the Soviet government. Tairov was granted a personal pension and soon was hospitalized with brain cancer. He died on September 5, 1950, in Moscow, and was laid to rest in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, Russia.