Pyotr Andreyevich Karatygin (, 11 July 1805,

Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...

– 6 October 1879, Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire) was a Russian

dramatist A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays, which are a form of drama that primarily consists of dialogue between characters and is intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. Ben Jonson coined the term "playwri ...

and

actor An actor (masculine/gender-neutral), or actress (feminine), is a person who portrays a character in a production. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. ...

. The tragic actor

Vasily Karatygin Vasily Andreevich Karatygin () (–-) was a leading actor of Russian Romanticism. Karatygin joined the Bolshoi Theatre in St Petersburg in 1820 and moved to the Alexandrine Theatre in 1832. He particularly excelled in the numerous productions of ...

(1802–1853) was his brother. Karatygin debuted on stage in 1823 and rose to fame performing in

Alexander Griboyedov Alexander Sergeyevich Griboyedov (; 15 January 179511 February 1829) was a Russian diplomat, playwright, poet, and composer. His one notable work is the 1823 verse comedy '' Woe from Wit''. He was Russia's ambassador to Qajar Persia, where he and ...

's ''

Woe from Wit ''Woe from Wit'' (, also translated as "The Woes of Wit", "Wit Works Woe", ''Wit's End'', and so forth) is Alexander Griboyedov's comedy in verse, satirizing the society of post-Napoleonic Moscow, or, as a high official in the play styled it, "a ...

'' (the parts of Zagoretsky, Repetilov and Chatsky). From 1832 to 1838 he was head of the Drama department in the Saint Petersburg Theatre College, where he discovered and tutored several future Russian stage stars, including . Pyotr Karatygin wrote 68 plays, 53 of them

vaudeville Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment which began in France in the middle of the 19th century. A ''vaudeville'' was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a drama ...

s, mostly elaborate variations on foreign plays and Russian novels. In the 1860s and 1870s he wrote a series of short memoirs on the history of the Russian theatre. Edited and previewed by his son, Pyotr Karatygin's ''Notes'' were serialized by ''

Russkaya Starina ''Russkaia Starina'' (, , ) was a Russian history journal published monthly in St. Petersburg by amateur historian Mikhail Semevsky and his successors between 1870 and 1916. Its authors included Ivan Zabelin, Dmitry Ilovaysky, Nikolai Karlovi ...

'' in 1872–1879, to much critical acclaim.

References

Literature

* Belyaev, M. The History of the Old Russian Vaudeville. The Jubilee Collection, Leningrad, 1925. * Uspensky, V. The Classic Russian Vaudeville. 1959. * Smirnov-Sokolsky, N
Pyotr Karatygin's Notebook
Kniga Publishers, 1983. Male actors from Saint Petersburg 19th-century dramatists and playwrights from the Russian Empire 1805 births 1879 deaths Writers from Saint Petersburg 19th-century male actors from the Russian Empire Burials at Tikhvin Cemetery {{playwright-stub