Sofiya Pilyavskaya

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.