Elar digitized rare portraits of Meyerhold and his wife

2021: Digitization of more than 2,000 glass photonegatives of the All Meyerhold Theater

Another stage of Elar's cooperation with the A.A. Bakhrushin Museum was a project to digitize more than 2,000 glass photonegatives from the collection of the State Theater named after Vs. Meyerhold. Copies of previously unpublished photos will be available to users on the museum's website. Elar announced this on March 17, 2021.

In the GTMC named after A.A. Bakhrushin, the GosTIM Foundation stores more than 3,000 original negatives that captured scenes from Meyerhold's performances, rehearsals, episodes from the life of the theater. Not all photographs from these negatives have been published, and a very significant part of them remains unknown to researchers until March 2021, the museum notes. According to experts, negatives of performances - "Generous Cuckold", "Wood" (photographers Ya.M. Tolchan and A.A. Temerin), "Tarelkin's Death" are the most valuable, "The earth on end" (photographer Tolchan), "Teacher Bubus", "Mandate", "Growl, China!", "Auditor", "Grief to mind", "Commander 2", "The last resolute" (photographer Temerin) and also photonegatives of other performances of GosTIMa. Among the digitized negatives are portraits of theater actors, Vsevolod Meyerhold himself and his wife actress Zinaida Reich.

As far as I know, the pictures of none of these series have yet been published in full, and even more so - the pictures of the actors in the roles, "comments Natalia Zaitseva, keeper of the foundation, senior researcher at the A.A. Bakhrushin State Theater Museum. - Meanwhile time is coming, and historical value of photographic images of the past is steadily increasing. It already seems strange that for many years almost no pictures were used that captured the life of the theater, the life of the actors during tour trips. And it is extremely important to have time to digitize these fragile negatives - after all, the glass beats, and the film breaks down over time.

Scanning was carried out on the ElarSKAN planetary scanner, delivered to the A.A. Bakhrushin Museum in 2020. A professional planetary scanner allows you to digitize carefully and in high quality even fragile historical documents such as film and glass negatives. The obtained electronic copies will be used for inclusion in the museum database of KAMIS, for uploading to the State Catalog of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation, as well as for publications on the museum's website in the Online Collections section.

2020: Digitization of glass negatives of the VSE Meyerhold Theater

Rare glass negatives of the first half of the twentieth century are digitized in the Bakhrushinsky Museum. This was announced on November 19, 2020 by Elar.

With the help of the ElarSKAN scanner, electronic copies of about 6,000 negatives will be created from the collection of the Vsevolod Meyerhold State Theater, a significant part of which has never been published.

The A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theater Museum, whose funds today hold more than 1.5 million exhibits, will digitize collections of photonegatives. First of all, the negatives of GosTIM (VsMeyerhold State Theater) will be scanned.

Most of the negatives are made on glass, the smaller part is on old combustible film, "says Natalia Zaitseva, senior researcher at the museum. - Therefore, it is essential to create electronic copies of these valuable historical documents in order to avoid their possible loss. Also, scanning directly from negatives, and not from photographs, allows you to obtain images of better quality and with a large number of details that disappear when printing on a photo paper due to insufficient photographic latitude of the material. It was for these purposes that we chose ElarScan as a professional equipment that would allow us to scan negatives quickly, contactlessly and qualitatively.

The collection has a large number of photographs of Meyerhold himself and his theater staff - actors, directors, stage workers, as well as artists who creatively collaborated with the theater - composers, artists, playwrights. There are negatives of the theater troupe on tour, demonstrations and various events, "says Natalia Zaitseva.

Among the digitized negatives there are those that are of special historical interest, noted in the museum. For example, the negative of the photo portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold by the photographer Miron Sherling. This picture was taken even before the revolution and then published in the journal The Sun of Russia. Known charge on Meyerhold, taken from this photo. It is worth mentioning two negatives of the young Dmitry Shostakovich, made by the photographer and actor of GosTIM Alexei Temerin in 1929.

The materials of the GosTIM Foundation are often used at exhibitions and published in books. Digitization of negatives will expand the range of materials available for publication, and will introduce previously unknown photo documents into scientific use, "adds Natalia Zaitseva.

2019: Digitization of the poster collection of the VSE Meyerhold Theater

On October 2, 2019, ELAR announced that it had digitized the collection of posters of the VS.E. Meyerhold Theater for the A.A. Bakhrushin Theater Museum. As of October 2019, 1.5 million theatrical items are in the funds of the Theater Museum. These are sketches of costumes and scenery of outstanding masters of scenography, photographs and portraits of theater figures, stage costumes of great actors, programs and posters of performances, rare editions of books on theater art, objects of decorative and applied art, archival documents and much more. ELAR Corporation digitized a collection of A0/A0 + posters that had varying degrees of preservation, up to dilapidated documents.

Poster of the VSE Meyerhold Theater

Posters are factual material, it contains a lot of information that reflects not only the history of a particular theater, but also the history of the country. The repertoire of theaters is very dependent on the political and economic situation in the country. In this project, the ELAR Corporation digitized a special collection of posters of the now defunct VSE Theater. Meyerhold, says Lyudmila Filippova, head of the electronic databases sector of the A.A. Bakhrushina Theater Museum

The Theater of the RSFSR-1 was created by Vsevolod Meyerhold in Moscow in 1920 (Meyerhold Theater since 1923). Director, innovator, actor - he tried different approaches: the cancellation of all curtains, the "stripped" scene - moving shields - sounding design with bamboo poles - garments - historically accurate costume and scenery.

{{quote 'author = tells Lyudmila Filippova' He was accurate and categorical in his productions, chose the most expressive elements. So, he transmitted the rhythm of the civil war through the crack of a car and a motorcycle rushing around the auditorium. During the years of the NEP, he fought against philistine, ridiculing adaptability, careerism and callousness. He staged plays by Mayakovsky, Erdman, Selvinsky, Vishnevsky, Fayko, German, Olesha. He also set classics, while he could arbitrarily mount the text, trying to create stage works that ridicule the bourgeois-capitalist way of life, }}

In 1938, the theater was closed. Items from his collection were transferred to the GTsTM named after A.A. Bakhrushin on the basis of the Order of the Theater Department of the Committee for the Arts of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of 20.01.1938. The posters from the theater's collection were digitized at contactless complexes of high-quality scanning ElarSKAN AN, which ensured the safety of historical documents during scanning, excluded the ingress of harmful radiation and allowed to get the highest quality and accurate copies.

The obtained images will be entered in the State catalog, and will also provide an opportunity to study posters by researchers without referring to the original, publications in various print media and on the Internet, explains Lyudmila Filippova