Mariya Germanova

Maria Nikolayevna Krasovskaya-Kalitinskaya (, née Bychkova , 1884 – 9 April 1940) was a Russian actress, theatre director and reader in drama, better known under her stage name Maria Germanova .

Biography Maria Bychkova was born in Moscow into a family of the staroobryadtsy merchants. She studied at the First Moscow Gymnasium, where Olga Gzovskaya was one of her classmates. In 1901 she enrolled in the just opened Moscow Art Theatre Drama School and a year later joined the MAT troupe, as Maria Germanova.

She debuted in 1903 in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, then garnered positive reviews as Elena in Maxim Gorky's Children of the Sun (1905), Sofya in Griboyedov's Woe from Wit and Agnes in Henrik Ibsen's Brand (both 1906). It was mostly upon Germanova's stage persona that Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko has relied upon in his stage experiments, which included Boris Godunov by Alexander Pushkin (her as Marina Mnishek, 1907), Anathema by Leonid Andreyev (Rosa, 1909), The Karamazov Brothers by Dostoyevsky (Grushenka, 1910), Leo Tolstoy's The Living Corpse (Lisa Protasova, 1911). "The physical beauty, the reverberating nerve beat, the sharp perceptiveness" (according to the biographer Inna Solovyova) as well as her love of modernism ('decadent' was also the word that has been used to describe her close circle of friends) made Germanova one of the rising stars of the early 1900s' Russian theatre scene, and "a promising tragic actress in the vein of Duse". and soon, along with Nikolai Massalitinov, co-founded and became the director of what soon came to be known as the Prague MAT Troupe. Her repertoire now included also the parts of Ranevskaya (Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard), the Queen (The King of the Dark Chamber by Rabindranath Tagore), Ellida Wangel (The Lady from the Sea by Ibsen), Katerina (The Storm by Alexander Ostrovsky) and Medea by Euripides.

Selected parts gallery