Maria Germanova

Maria Germanova, born Maria Bychkova in Moscow in 1884, was a Russian actress, theatre director, and drama reader whose career spanned the stages of Russia, Europe, and the United States. The daughter of a merchant family belonging to the Old Believers, she attended the First Moscow Gymnasium, where Olga Gzovskaya was among her classmates. In 1901 she enrolled in the newly established Moscow Art Theatre Drama School, and within a year had joined the MAT troupe under her stage name, Maria Germanova.

Her debut came in 1903 in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and she quickly accumulated a series of notable roles: Elena in Maxim Gorky's Children of the Sun in 1905, followed in 1906 by Sofya in Griboyedov's Woe from Wit and Agnes in Ibsen's Brand. Director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko drew heavily on Germanova's stage presence for his theatrical experiments, casting her as Marina Mnishek in Pushkin's Boris Godunov in 1907, Rosa in Leonid Andreyev's Anathema in 1909, Grushenka in Dostoyevsky's The Karamazov Brothers in 1910, and Lisa Protasova in Tolstoy's The Living Corpse in 1911. Between 1914 and 1924 she also appeared in five Russian silent films, beginning with the 1914 production of Anna Karenina, directed by Vladimir Gardin and produced by Paul Timan.

In 1919 Germanova departed Moscow, traveling first to Kiev and then to Rostov-on-Don before joining the Kachalov Troupe, with which she toured outside Soviet Russia from 1919 to 1922. During those years she revisited several of her signature roles, including Grushenka in The Karamazov Brothers and Ekaterina Ivanovna in Andreyev's eponymous play, while also taking on new parts such as Olga in Chekhov's Three Sisters and Elena Andreyevna in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. When the tour concluded in 1922, Germanova was among the company members who declined to return to Moscow. The following year she turned down an invitation from Nemirovich-Danchenko to participate in a new musical theatre project.

Germanova settled in Prague, where her husband, archaeologist and art historian Alexander Kalitinsky, was lecturing at the Archeology Institute, of which he became director in 1925. There she co-founded, alongside Nikolai Massalitinov, what became known as the Prague MAT Troupe, serving as its director. Her repertoire with the Prague company expanded to include Ranevskaya in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, the Queen in Rabindranath Tagore's The King of the Dark Chamber, Ellida Wangel in Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea, Katerina in Ostrovsky's The Storm, and the title role in Euripides's Medea. After the Prague Troupe disbanded in 1927, she participated in productions staged by Georges Pitoeff and Gaston Baty and began directing theatre herself.

In 1929 Germanova traveled to the United States, where she succeeded Richard Boleslawski as head of the American Laboratory Theatre, directing a production of Chekhov's Three Sisters there. The institution, which disbanded in 1933, served as a significant conduit between Stanislavski's methods and New York's Group Theatre. It was during this American period that Germanova appeared on Broadway in 1930 in A Glass of Water. She died in Paris on 9 April 1940. Her memoir, My Casket of Treasures, was published posthumously, appearing in its complete form through Russki Put Publishers in Moscow in 2012.