Vera Komissarzhevskaya - Life and Work

Life and Work

Komissarzhevskaya was born in Saint Petersburg near the end of the Russian Empire. Her father was the celebrated Russian opera singer Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, a leading tenor at the Mariinsky Theatre, and her mother, Mariya Nikolaevna Shulgina, was the daughter of General Nikolai Shulgin, a war hero and officer in the Preobrazhensky regiment. Komissarzhevskaya had a close relationship with her father, and she frequently corresponded with Komissarzhevsky. Towards the end of his life, he wrote to Mariya Nikolaevna, saying:

This committment to his daughter's life and work was a testament to her favor, as her half-brother was Theodore Komisarjevsky, a famous theatrical director in his own right.

At the age of 19, Komissarzhevskaya married Count Mikhail Nikolayevich Muravyov—a Russian statesman best remembered for having initiated the Hague Peace Conference—but preferred to keep her stage name even after the marriage. In 1896, she began working at Saint Petersburg's Alexandrinsky Theatre, where her greatest triumph was the role of Nina Zarechnaya in the premiere of Chekhov's The Seagull (1897).

In 1904, Komissarzhevskaya founded her own theatre in Saint Petersburg, where she appeared in productions of Chekhov's Ivanov and Uncle Vanya, —and as Desdemona in William Shakespeare's Othello, Ophelia in Hamlet, and Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House.

Tiring of the nineteenth-century theatre's routine scenarios and the dominant naturalistic trends of the time, however, Komissarzhevskaya boldly extended an invitation to the young director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Though they found some success with Komissarzhevskaya starring in the title roles of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Maeterlink's Sister Beatrice, the collaboration proved unfruitful. Meyerhold failed to create role to cater to Komissarzhevskaya's acting style, a mixture of intense emotional sensitivity with high theatrical seriousness. She dismissed him after just one year, and spent the remainder of her career touring old productions in the United States and Europe.

Even after her exit from Russian, Komissarzhevskaya's fame was such that when she died of smallpox in 1910, her funeral was attended by vast crowds of mourners, and even occasioned some poignant lyrics from the Russian poet Alexander Blok. One of the major theatres of St. Petersburg still bears her name and, in 1980 there was even a biographical film made about the actress' life and career called, Ya - aktrisa ("I am an actress"), starring Natalia Saiko.