Serge Wolkonsky
Encyclopedia
Prince Serge Wolkonsky (4 May 1860 - 25 October 1937) was an influential Russia
n theatrical worker, one of the first Russian proponents of eurhythmics
, pupil and friend of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze
, and creator of an original system of actor's training that included both expressive gesture and expressive speech.
, Estonia
). His mother was Princess Elizaveta Grigorievna Volkonskaya, daughter of Grigory Petrovich Volkonsky (son of Sophia, a sister of Decembrist Sergei Volkonsky) and Mary (née Countess Benckendorff, daughter of Count Alexander Benckendorff). Princess Volkonskaya profoundly influenced her son Serge, defining many of his interests, including his religious views; among her friends was the well-known Russian philosopher, theologian and poet Vladimir Solovyov
. Wolkonsky's father, Mikhail Sergeevich, was a son of Decembrist Sergei Volkonsky and Mary, née Raevskaya; his godfather was Pushkin's friend Ivan Pushchin, another Decembrist. From his birth, Michael was registered as a serf, and as the son of a deportee wasn't allowed to enter the University, but in 1855, just after the death of Emperor Nicholas I
, he reached Russia from Siberia, and by the 1870s had become a member of the State Council
.
Wolkonsky graduated from the philological faculty of St. Petersburg University in 1884. In the spring of 1893, he attended the World's Columbian Exposition
in Chicago as an official representative of the Department of Public Instruction, and an article by him about it was published later on in Vestnik Evropy
("The European Bulletin"). Later that year he went on a world cruise before returning to Petersburg via Constantinople. In the mid-1890s, he delivered lectures on Russia at Cornell
and Harvard
.
In 1899 Wolkonsky became Director of the Imperial Theaters, the post for which he is most remembered. Although he held the position only until 1902, he achieved a great deal; Serge Diaghilev was his immediate assistant, and Wolkonsky entrusted him with the publication of the Annual of the Imperial Theaters in 1900. New names appeared in the theaters, such as painters Alexandre Benois
, Konstantin Somov
, and Léon Bakst
. Wolkonsky was forced to send in his resignation after the conflict with Mathilde Kschessinskaya.
In 1910 he became acquainted with the theories of eurhythmics
of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze
as well as the Delsarte
method of gestures and movements, and he began to publish articles publicizing them in Russia. These works aroused the interest of Constantin Stanislavski, with whom he briefly collaborated. He set up a school and journal to propagate his ideas, but the advent of World War I
in 1914 put an end to them, and he retired to his estate in Tambov
province until 1918. After the October Revolution
he taught acting technique in Moscow for a time, but in the spring of 1919 he contracted typhus (as a result of which a premature obituary was published), and in August he was arrested by the Cheka
. He was released and continued teaching and giving lectures, working for a time with Proletkult
and Proletcult Theatre
, but eventually he emigrated.
From February 1926 he lived in Paris, where he became a leading theatrical critic; he also continued teaching and giving lectures. “During this period of his life in Paris Wolkonsky became one of the most brilliant members of the Russian Emigration”. During this time he became "a close friend and associate of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva
(who dedicated to him her cycle of poems 'The Disciple' and wrote an essay about his memoirs)." In 1936 he was invited by the Kurt Jooss
ballet school in London, after which he taught in the ballet company of Alicia Markova
and Anton Dolin
. In this city Wolkonsky met the woman he married, Mary Fearn French, daughter of United States diplomat J. Walker Fearn and (by her first marriage) a sister-in-law of the former Mrs. Elsie French Vanderbilt
. After the marriage Prince and Princess Wolkonsky went to the United States
, and there in the town of Hot Springs, Virginia
he died after a brief illness. "His health had been undermined by four years of teaching in Bolshevik schools." On 31 October, a requiem was held in a Russian Catholic church, and "besides relatives there was all Russian Paris." He was buried in Richmond, Virginia
.
(For a full list please see Russian article.)
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n theatrical worker, one of the first Russian proponents of eurhythmics
Eurhythmics
Dalcroze Eurhythmics, also known as the Dalcroze Method or simply Eurhythmics, is one of several developmental approaches including the Kodaly Method, Orff Schulwerk, Simply Music and Suzuki Method used to teach music education to students. Eurhythmics was developed in the early 20th century by...
, pupil and friend of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze
Émile Jaques-Dalcroze
Émile Jaques-Dalcroze , was a Swiss composer, musician and music educator who developed eurhythmics, a method of learning and experiencing music through movement...
, and creator of an original system of actor's training that included both expressive gesture and expressive speech.
Biography
Wolkonsky was born on the Fall estate near Revel in Imperial Russia (now TallinnTallinn
Tallinn is the capital and largest city of Estonia. It occupies an area of with a population of 414,940. It is situated on the northern coast of the country, on the banks of the Gulf of Finland, south of Helsinki, east of Stockholm and west of Saint Petersburg. Tallinn's Old Town is in the list...
, Estonia
Estonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
). His mother was Princess Elizaveta Grigorievna Volkonskaya, daughter of Grigory Petrovich Volkonsky (son of Sophia, a sister of Decembrist Sergei Volkonsky) and Mary (née Countess Benckendorff, daughter of Count Alexander Benckendorff). Princess Volkonskaya profoundly influenced her son Serge, defining many of his interests, including his religious views; among her friends was the well-known Russian philosopher, theologian and poet Vladimir Solovyov
Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was a Russian philosopher, poet, pamphleteer, literary critic, who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century...
. Wolkonsky's father, Mikhail Sergeevich, was a son of Decembrist Sergei Volkonsky and Mary, née Raevskaya; his godfather was Pushkin's friend Ivan Pushchin, another Decembrist. From his birth, Michael was registered as a serf, and as the son of a deportee wasn't allowed to enter the University, but in 1855, just after the death of Emperor Nicholas I
Nicholas I of Russia
Nicholas I , was the Emperor of Russia from 1825 until 1855, known as one of the most reactionary of the Russian monarchs. On the eve of his death, the Russian Empire reached its historical zenith spanning over 20 million square kilometers...
, he reached Russia from Siberia, and by the 1870s had become a member of the State Council
State Council of Imperial Russia
The State Council was the supreme state advisory body to the Tsar in Imperial Russia.-18th century:Early Tsars' Councils were small and dealt primarily with the external politics....
.
Wolkonsky graduated from the philological faculty of St. Petersburg University in 1884. In the spring of 1893, he attended the World's Columbian Exposition
World's Columbian Exposition
The World's Columbian Exposition was a World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492. Chicago bested New York City; Washington, D.C.; and St...
in Chicago as an official representative of the Department of Public Instruction, and an article by him about it was published later on in Vestnik Evropy
Vestnik Evropy
Vestnik Evropy was the major liberal magazine of late-nineteenth-century Russia; it lasted from 1866 to 1918....
("The European Bulletin"). Later that year he went on a world cruise before returning to Petersburg via Constantinople. In the mid-1890s, he delivered lectures on Russia at Cornell
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
and Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
.
In 1899 Wolkonsky became Director of the Imperial Theaters, the post for which he is most remembered. Although he held the position only until 1902, he achieved a great deal; Serge Diaghilev was his immediate assistant, and Wolkonsky entrusted him with the publication of the Annual of the Imperial Theaters in 1900. New names appeared in the theaters, such as painters Alexandre Benois
Alexandre Benois
Alexandre Nikolayevich Benois , an influential artist, art critic, historian, preservationist, and founding member of Mir iskusstva , an art movement and magazine...
, Konstantin Somov
Konstantin Somov
Konstantin Andreyevich Somov was a Russian artist associated with the Mir iskusstva. Born into a family of a major art historian and Hermitage Museum curator, he became interested in the 18th century art and music at an early age.Somov studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts under Ilya Repin from...
, and Léon Bakst
Léon Bakst
Léon Samoilovitch Bakst was a Russian painter and scene- and costume designer. He was a member of the Sergei Diaghilev circle and the Ballets Russes, for which he designed exotic, richly coloured sets and costumes...
. Wolkonsky was forced to send in his resignation after the conflict with Mathilde Kschessinskaya.
In 1910 he became acquainted with the theories of eurhythmics
Eurhythmics
Dalcroze Eurhythmics, also known as the Dalcroze Method or simply Eurhythmics, is one of several developmental approaches including the Kodaly Method, Orff Schulwerk, Simply Music and Suzuki Method used to teach music education to students. Eurhythmics was developed in the early 20th century by...
of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze
Émile Jaques-Dalcroze
Émile Jaques-Dalcroze , was a Swiss composer, musician and music educator who developed eurhythmics, a method of learning and experiencing music through movement...
as well as the Delsarte
François Delsarte
François Alexandre Nicolas Chéri Delsarte was a French musician and teacher.Delsarte was born in Solesmes, Nord. He was a pupil of the Paris Conservatory, was for a time tenor singer in the Opéra Comique, and composed a few songs. However, he is chiefly known as a teacher in singing and...
method of gestures and movements, and he began to publish articles publicizing them in Russia. These works aroused the interest of Constantin Stanislavski, with whom he briefly collaborated. He set up a school and journal to propagate his ideas, but the advent of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
in 1914 put an end to them, and he retired to his estate in Tambov
Tambov
Tambov is a city and the administrative center of Tambov Oblast, Russia, located at the confluence of the Tsna and Studenets Rivers southeast of Moscow...
province until 1918. After the October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
he taught acting technique in Moscow for a time, but in the spring of 1919 he contracted typhus (as a result of which a premature obituary was published), and in August he was arrested by the Cheka
Cheka
Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...
. He was released and continued teaching and giving lectures, working for a time with Proletkult
Proletkult
Proletkult was movement which arose in the Russian revolution and was active from 1917 to 1925 which aspired to provide the foundations for what was intended to be a truly proletarian art devoid of bourgeois influence.The name is a portmanteau of "proletarskaya kultura" , which are better-known as...
and Proletcult Theatre
Proletcult Theatre
Proletcult Theatre was the theatrical branch of the Soviet cultural movement Proletcult. It was concerned with the powerful expression of ideological content as political propaganda in the years following the revolution of 1917...
, but eventually he emigrated.
From February 1926 he lived in Paris, where he became a leading theatrical critic; he also continued teaching and giving lectures. “During this period of his life in Paris Wolkonsky became one of the most brilliant members of the Russian Emigration”. During this time he became "a close friend and associate of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian and Soviet poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from...
(who dedicated to him her cycle of poems 'The Disciple' and wrote an essay about his memoirs)." In 1936 he was invited by the Kurt Jooss
Kurt Jooss
Kurt Jooss was a famous ballet dancer and choreographer mixing classical ballet with theatre; he is also widely regarded as the founder of dance theatre or tanztheater...
ballet school in London, after which he taught in the ballet company of Alicia Markova
Alicia Markova
Dame Alicia Markova, DBE, DMus, was an English ballerina and a choreographer, director and teacher of classical ballet. Most noted for her career with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and touring internationally, she was widely considered to be one of the greatest classical ballet dancers of the...
and Anton Dolin
Anton Dolin
Sir Anton Dolin was an English ballet dancer and choreographer.Dolin was born in Slinfold in Sussex as Sydney Francis Patrick Chippendall Healey-Kay but was generally known as Patrick Kay. He joined Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1921, was a principal there from 1924, and was a principal...
. In this city Wolkonsky met the woman he married, Mary Fearn French, daughter of United States diplomat J. Walker Fearn and (by her first marriage) a sister-in-law of the former Mrs. Elsie French Vanderbilt
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I was an extremely wealthy sportsman and a member of the famous Vanderbilt family of philanthropists. He died on the .-Life:...
. After the marriage Prince and Princess Wolkonsky went to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, and there in the town of Hot Springs, Virginia
Hot Springs, Virginia
Hot Springs is a census-designated place in Bath County, Virginia, United States. The population as of the 2010 Census was 738. It is located about 5 miles southwest of Warm Springs on U.S. Route 220. Hot Springs is the site of a number of resorts that make use of the springs.The area is...
he died after a brief illness. "His health had been undermined by four years of teaching in Bolshevik schools." On 31 October, a requiem was held in a Russian Catholic church, and "besides relatives there was all Russian Paris." He was buried in Richmond, Virginia
Richmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...
.
Works
- Pictures of Russian History and Russian Literature. Boston, NY, London; Lamson, Wolffe & Co. 1st ed. 1897; Pictures…, (Lowell lectures), 1898
- Impressions: sketches of American life as observed by a Russian. Chicago, 1893
- My reminiscences (translated by A.E. Chamot). London: Hutchinson & Co, 2 vols, 1924
- "The Decembrists. The first Russian revolutionists," Thought, v.3, 1928
(For a full list please see Russian article.)
See also
- Vera GrinerVera GrinerVera Griner , was a Russian rhythmitician, born 5 April 1890 in Saint Petersburg, died 24 June 1992 in Moscow. Her father, Alexander Alvang, was a well-known barrister. Since 1908 the Alvang family had been living in Munich. It was here that Alvang became acquainted with Rhythmics...