Polish aristocrat of Soviet cinema: how the daughter of the "enemy of the people" Sophia Pilyavskaya was saved from repression

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Actress Sophia Pilyavskaya most viewers remember the role of the aunt of the protagonist Alisa Vitalievna in the film "The Pokrovsky Gate" … And in adulthood, she amazed with her non-Soviet beauty, noble bearing and aristocratic profile. And only close actresses knew that she really had a noble origin, her father was shot, and she herself was called the daughter of an "enemy of the people." She narrowly escaped repression, but many other trials fell to her lot.

Sophia was born on May 17, 1911 in the family of the Polish nobleman Stanislav Pilyavsky, who was exiled to Krasnoyarsk for participating in a Marxist circle. According to the traditions of Catholic noble families, the girl was baptized with three names: Sophia Adelaide Antoinette, but later all her relatives called her Zosia. Being a like-minded person of Lenin, in 1917 his father went to Petrograd to help him prepare for the revolution, and later the family followed him. He became a major party official, and for a time their life was comfortable.

Zosia became interested in theater in the 4th grade: she staged performances at school, and later wondered how she was transferred from class to class - after all, she was not interested in anything but theater. She studied in a circle with Zinaida Sokolova, Stanislavsky's sister, and since then her whole life has been devoted to the Moscow Art Theater.

In the Studio at the Moscow Art Theater, Sophia met the actor Nikolai Dorokhin, who soon became her husband. She did not have time to introduce him to her father. On the appointed day, the father simply disappeared, and the next day she learned that he had been arrested. Upon learning of this, the theater director advised her to write a letter of resignation of her own free will. But Stanislavsky tore up this statement and did not allow the girl to leave, thereby protecting her from repression. “Obviously, they left me in the theater, not wanting to argue with Stanislavsky,” she said.

In her memoirs, entitled simply - “Sad Book” - the actress later recalled: “The attitude of others was different: the majority avoided, some sympathized openly (there were few of them), and some only with a glance, a nod, hastily. They were in no hurry to dismiss (it turned out that Stanislavsky did not endorse my statement), but when the government came to the performance, it was crowded backstage from strangers and the “civilians” were holding their hands on my sides before I went on stage (are there any weapons?)”.

Only many years later, the actress learned that her father had been shot two months after his arrest. Her brother was fired from his job, her father's daughter from her second marriage was expelled from the Komsomol. If not for Stanislavsky, Sophia Pilyavskaya as “the daughter of an enemy of the people” could have been left without work. Her husband was repeatedly summoned to the NKVD and forced to cooperate. Because of this, at the age of 33, he suffered the first heart attack, and from the last at the age of 48, he died.

Sophia Pilyavskaya lost loved ones one after another. During the war, a brother and sister died, then her husband died, then my mother passed away. The actress outlived her husband by 46 years, but she never married again, explaining that “no one can compare with her Kolya”.

The actress devoted her life to the theater and rarely acted in films. But on the offer of Mikhail Kozakov to play in his film "The Pokrovskie Vorota" she answered with consent. The director said: “I have chosen Sofia Stanislavovna for the role of Kostik's aunt. Kostik is an intellectual who came to Moscow, and his aunt is a real Moscow intellectual. Well, who could play this role better than Sophia Stanislavovna Pilyavskaya, with her beauty (and she was beautiful until the end of her life), with her impeccable manners, with her charm? She didn't just play it later. If this picture exists at all, we must thank me and all of us Sophia Stanislavovna Pilyavskaya. When the situation became completely critical … I know the good attitude of the then head of the State Television and Radio Fund, Sergei Lapin, an all-powerful official, a friend of Brezhnev, an educated man, I must say, smart, but very tough. He had a flair for what can and cannot be put on and shown … In general, knowing his good attitude towards the old people of Moscow Art Theater, I say: “Sofya Stanislavovna, save me, ask Sergei Georgievich for an appointment, he will not refuse you, talk to him, persuade ". As they say now, "talk it over". " And she did it."

In the last years of her life, she felt very lonely and forgotten by everyone. In 1998, the actress said: “I didn't want to live to see the century of the Moscow Art Theater. But she survived. I'm so lonely. She died in 2000. She gave almost 70 years of her life to the Moscow Art Theater.

The fate of the actress, who played along with Pilyavskaya in Kozakov's film, was also dramatic: addictions and unused chances of the "Pokrovskie Vorota" star Elizaveta Nikishchina