Career
Karatygin debuted on stage in 1823 and rose to fame performing in Alexander Griboyedov"s Woe from Wit (the parts of Zagoretsky, Repetilov and, since 1831, Chatsky). In 1832-1838, as a head of the Drama department in the Saint St. Petersburg"s Theatre College, he discovered and tutored several of the future Russian stage stars, including Alexander Martynov. Pyotr Karatygin wrote 68 plays, 53 of them vaudevilles, mostly elaborate variations on foreign plays and Russian novels.
In the 1860s and 1870s he wrote a series of short memoirs on the history of the Russian theatre.