Yelena Polevitskaya

Biography

Polevitskaya was basically a stage actress, a very famous and talented stage star. (She is even mentioned in the memoirs of the Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky, who saw her on the stage when he was a lad.) Polevitskaya was educated and trained for a stage acting career in St. Petersburg (1900-08), and apprenticed in the Kommisarzhevsky Theater. She then moved to the Ukraine and played many celebrated stage roles there, 1910-18. Polevitskaya was cast as the young leading lady in such plays as Camille, Nobleman's Nest (adapted from Turgenev), The Storm (Ostrovsky), He Who Gets Slapped (Andreyev), and The Idiot (adapt. from Dostoevsky). Polevitskaya acquired another spelling of her name ("Polewitzkaja") when in 1920 she emigrated from the poverty-stricken USSR shortly after the Russian Revolution. For the next 35 years, she lived and acted in such nations as Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Latvia, sometimes acting in Russian-language plays for a Russian-speaking (emigre) audience, sometimes speaking German, in 5 German-language films and a number of German-language stage plays. In her mature years, she also taught acting classes in Vienna, 1943-55. Polevitskaya did a surprising thing in her mid-seventies: she decided to return to the USSR after 1955, and lived out her final decades there, acting in 3 Russian films and teaching drama classes at the Shchukin School. She died at the age of 92, after a very full and dramatic life.