Background
Vladimir Alexandrovich Alexandrov was born in 1856. He was the son of a wealthy merchant and the owner of a winery and the uncle of G.I. Chulkov.
Vladimir Alexandrovich Alexandrov was born in 1856. He was the son of a wealthy merchant and the owner of a winery and the uncle of G.I. Chulkov.
Vladimir Alexandrovich graduated from the Oryol public school and the Military Law School in Saint Petersburg (1874-1877).
After graduation from the Military Law School Alexandrov Vladimir Alexandrovich Alexandrov was in military service (in the cavalry). Since 1883 he was the attorney-at-law of the Moscow judicial district (in the 1880-1890s he was known as Alexandrov the 2nd), by 1917 he was a rather large lawyer (had 14 assistants). In his Krasivka estate owned a distillery.
Alexandrov’s first play "A guiding Star" (1881), a melodrama reminiscent of the "The Lady of the Camellias" by A. Dumas, was saved from failure in the Maly Theater by the playing of the best actors. Recognition of the public came to Alexandrov in 1891 with the premiere of his sixth play "In an Unequal Struggle" at the Maly Theater.
In the 1890s Alexandrov became an experienced playwright who knows the laws of the stage, knows how to "create roles", he is known to the public as the author of the plays "a la these", posing "burning questions".
At the end of the century together with V. Krylov, I.V. Shpazhinsky; P.M. Nevezhin, M.I. Tchaikovsky, A.I. Sumbatov-Yuzhin, V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko Vladimir Alexandrovich defined the face of the Maly Theater with his works.Drawing stories from the law practice, he tried to raise topical issues of family law: civil and legal marriage, legal and illegal family, divorce, which made these plays very successful.
In criticism, Vladimir Alexandrovich gained a reputation of a craftsman, even a graphomaniac. Although it was believed that he, such as Nevezhin and Shpazhinsky, "enjoyed the support of the Moscow office of the imperial theaters and places for his plays were reserved in the Maly Theater’s repertoire", many of his works were rejected by the repertoire committee, which in the late 1890s prompted Vladimir Alexandrovich to leave literature.
However, after 15 years devoted exclusively to law practice, by that time the forgotten playwright had written the play "The Story of a Marriage" (1913), the staging of which at the Maly Theater became a real sensation. But if some people spoke with enthusiasm about the theater "revival" of the 1880-1890s, others saw in it a "flash of artistic reaction" and found in it all the flaws typical of Aleksandrov’s old creations.
In 1889 Vladimir Alexandrovich was elected a member of the committee of the Society of Russian Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers, but a year later he withdrew from it.
Vladimir Alexandrovich Alexandrov was a person who would rather blame his failure on the machinations of enemies than admit that he is not very good at something. For that reason, in April 1917, he defiantly refused to celebrate the 35th anniversary of his playwriting activities at the Maly Theater as an "offensive charity".