Vera Komissarzhevskaya

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.

In 1896, she began working at Saint Petersburg's Alexandrinsky Theatre, performing in roles such as Rosy in Battle of the Butterflies by Hermann Sudermann and as Larisa in Alexander Ostrovsky's Without a Dowry.

In 1904, Komissarzhevskaya 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, Komissarzhevskaya boldly extended an invitation to the young director Vsevolod Meyerhold.

She dismissed him after just one year, and spent the remainder of her career touring old productions in the United States and Europe, an attempt to raise enough money to pay for the enormous debt she had amassed.

"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.

Reactions to Komissarzhevskaya's death demonstrate the social importance of ideas of sincere emotion and authentic selfhood as part of a larger search for transcendent individuals in the late imperial public sphere.