Синкопированный Гоголь. О фонографных записях Ревизора в постановке Вс. Мейерхольда

The article provides commentary and background information on the audio recording of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Inspector General” directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold (1926). This performance was appreciated by contemporaries as one of the most significant works by the director and a striking achievement of 1920s Soviet theatre. The wax cylinder captured a dialogue between Khlestakov (Erast Garin) and Anna Andreevna (Zinaida Reich, the only voice recording of the actress) from Act III, Scene 6, where Khlestakov is boasting about the life he leads in St Petersburg. It provides us with rare examples of Meyerhold’s approach to Gogol characters’ speech, which was influenced by the experiments of modern music like jazz, and conformed with the general principles of Meyerhold’s biomechanics. The article contributes to knowledge about approaches to documenting twentieth-century theatre and Meyerhold performances in particular. It focuses on the research projects of the Institute for Artistic Speech Research (Leningrad), which initiated the sound recordings of this and other Meyerhold productions in 1927.