Meyerhold and Zinaida on tour in Germany
Zinaida’s final madness probably began on the day of Sergei’s funeral. The signs at first were negligible. She insisted on lifting up Tanya and little Kostya to look into their dead father’s coffin. She made Tanya recite a Pushkin poem to him. Others found her behaviour histrionic. She cried and fainted.
After the burial, she took to her bed and didn’t work for months. When Meyerhold put other actresses in her roles, she yelled at him. Writing fifty years later, Tatiana would remember how her mother could flip from affection to extreme anger.
She would behave normally – her physical health was good, and for the most part she was positive in her outlook – but it took only a minor setback to destroy her equilibrium. Without warning, she would be seized by uncontrollable fear or grief, anxiety and agitation. One minute, she would be telling us children that Meyerhold was ‘a god’ whom we must love and to whom we owe everything; the next, she would be cursing him in the most terrible way. Such scenes happen in all marriages, but this was more. One day she looked at him and said, ‘Seva, do you know your feet are sticking out of your heart?’ The doctors said youthful bouts of cerebral typhus had affected her brain. They said she was suffering from several different manias. Meyerhold said the real reason was that she had been terribly wounded in her soul.
Zinaida took a long time to recover from the breakdown of 1925. She began to act again and the years between 1930 and 1934 were relatively stable. Her confidence returned. She learned to sing. To vary the diet of tragic heroines, she took on slighter roles in operettas.
Meyerhold had been asking permission to take the theatre on tour abroad and in the 1930s they were twice allowed to go to Germany. The first visit, a six-week tour of Berlin, Breslau and Cologne drew big audiences but got mixed reviews. The exception was Zinaida, who was praised for all her roles.
Meyerhold and Zinaida on tour in Germany
The manner of Galina’s death resonated with the melodrama of the Russian imagination. It had sacrifice and madness, worthy of an operatic heroine from Mussorgsky, Wagner or Puccini.
She was buried in the same plot as Yesenin; the Russian people demanded it. Benislavskaya had given everything for love; it was Russia’s duty to reunite them in – and, possibly, beyond – the grave. An enamelled plaque was attached to the now-shared railings, ‘Here lies Faithful Galya.’
Her death had another effect. It was perceived as legitimising – glamorising – the sacrifice offered for love. There were copycat suicides. Young girls who thought they loved the cruel, beautiful man called Yesenin. Others who thought they loved Ivan Ivanovich from the next village.
The authorities were alarmed. ‘Yeseninism’ had already been blamed for melancholia and teenage suicides. His baleful influence was reaching out again. Stalin ordered all but the most optimistic of his poems to be banned.
