Sofiya Pilyavskaya(1911-2000)
- Actress
Sofya Stanislavovna Pilyavskaya spent practically all of her life, from
1928 to 2000, working in the famed Moscow Artistic Academic Theatre.
There she met her husband, the actor Nikolai Dorohin who died in 1954
of a heart attack. She never remarried. A student of K.S. Stanislavsky
and V.E. Nemirovich-Danchenko, she brought to stage and screen her
inimitable skill mingled with a completely "un-soviet", elegant,
aristocratic beauty. This is what made her totally unsuitable for
Soviet theatre and film, and made her career a mingling of a few famous
roles, and long periods of silence. The increasingly plebeian culture
of the USSR was repugnant to her. Possibly that was the reason she
brought her memoirs ("A Sad Book") to an end in 1970, not caring any
longer to speak of a life which was becoming increasingly difficult and
distasteful to her. Even though this was the time when fame finally
found her--in 1970 Oleg Efremov took over M.H.A.T. and found a large
number of roles for the great actress. Her life ended on her 89th year
in a Kremlin hospital where she received visits from fellow actors from
many Moscow theatres, the wife of the Russian President and many
neighbours from her prestigious "Stalin era" house. The Metropolitan
Pitirim himself presided over the funeral service. Newspapers, radio,
television programs all spoke of her orbituary, and she received a
grand funeral. One would, at a first glance, think that she had a long
and successful life. However, as time went on it was a life of
increasing loneliness and sorrow. On her deathbed she remembered not
her successes, nor her many years of teaching in the M.H.A.T.
theatrical school--but her father's arrest and disappearance in the
terrible year 1937, her fellow actor Kol'tsov who spent 17 years in the
camps, and she kept returning to the theme of terror which haunted her,
for her entire life. She was a woman of courage, of great artistic
talent and skill which, alas, were not well known nor well loved by the
majority of her countrymen. A woman of astonishing beauty and grace
which she brought to the fore in even the smallest and most unimportant
roles. Born under the Russian Empire she lived through the long and
terrible 20th century in the USSR, and in the difficult and confusing
days of the new Russia finally went to her rest. A great actress, and a
great lady.
