Vera Komissarzhevskaya
Vera Komissarzhevskaya on a postcard
Vera Fyodorovna Komissarzhevskaya was born on January 8, 1864 in Saint Petersburg City, Russian Federation into a wealthy and distinguished family. 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.
Vera Fyodorovna Komissarzhevskaya received stage education from her father.
In 1896, Vera Fyodorovna 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, she 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, Vera Fyodorovna boldly extended an invitation to the young director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Though they found some success with Vera Fyodorovna starring in the title roles of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Maeterlink's Sister Beatrice, the collaboration proved unfruitful. Meyerhold failed to create a role that catered 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 Russia, 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 Saint Petersburg still bears her name.
At the age of 19, Vera Fyodorovna married the painter Count Vladimir Leonidovich Muravyov, but preferred to keep her stage name even after the marriage. Some years later, she was broken-hearted to discover that her sister was pregnant with Muravyov's child, and she left him, throwing herself into her acting career.
