The Сreative Legacy of Vsevolod Meyerhold and the Formation of Aesthetics of Jerzy Grotowski

In the article, the author examines the theory of Vsevolod Meyerhold's legacy influence on the work of Jerzy Grotowski. A comparative analysis of theatre methodologies of both masters allows the researcher to conclude that Grotowski, based on Stanislavskiy’s method, starting from Meyerhold’s theories, the aesthetics of Vakhtangov and Artaud, empirically created his own “rules of the game” in the theatre and tried to create his own method. Grotowski used all the possible tools and technologies in his search, so it is impossible to state the special influence of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s work on the formation of Grotowski's system. According to the author of the article, Grotowski’s “Meyerholdization” is mythologized. Overcoming his passion for “Meyerholdisms” and various theatre “systems”, Grotowski spent his life extracting genetic “memory” from “corporeality”, awakening forgotten knowledge of the mankind or recalling it. The cor- porality and overcoming the corporality for Grotowski was one of the theatre instruments of the actor and the elements of utterance and body language. The main technique in his system was the principle of distancing from realism and the creation of a special theatre language, a coded and encrypted one. For Grotowski, encryption in the body is like a body-memory. And according to his idea, it does not matter whether it is an actor or a spectator, in the theatre each person must decipher this coded language as inner genetic memory of the mankind.