Piano by Nina Kirsanova

A little over a year ago, when I wrote an article about the three waves of Russians in Novi Sad ("Vreme" No. 1669-70), it was in the first year of the war in Ukraine, when refugees from Russia had just begun to arrive in Serbia en masse. In the meantime, they are, as Andraš Urban joked in the play Once upon a time in Novi Sad, became "the largest national minority in the city", overtaking the most numerous Hungarians.

It seems that every second passenger of the "Soko" train speaks in Russian or Ukrainian, that the same language is spoken at every other table in the gardens of cafes and restaurants in Zmaj Jovina street... Karaoke parties and pub quizzes in Russian have become a common occurrence in the city , our new fellow citizens are opening their own restaurants, cocktail bars (in which there is no smoking!), cultural centers, kindergartens... On the other hand, they are very inclusive when it comes to the consumption of cultural content. In the Synagogue, at the concert of "Hashira", the choir of the Jewish Municipality of Novi Sad, Russian families sat to my left and right and enjoyed the music in Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino. At the Christmas concert in Novi Sad's Church of the Name of Mary (cathedral), it was evident that every third visitor was Russian. The audience at the Ballet and Opera in Novi Sad and Belgrade is now almost in the majority - Russian and Ukrainian.

In such an atmosphere, an exhibition was opened on February 2 at the Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad The White Russians and the renaissance of Serbian theater which speaks about the significant influence of this community on all segments of theater in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the interwar period - ballet, opera, drama, costume design, scenography...

Konstantin Mukhanov is a young Russian IT expert who at one point started directing. Since two years ago, with his wife, who is an illustrator, and two small children, he has been part of the large Russian community in Novi Sad. This season, the Novi Sad Youth Theater is staging a children's play Tin soldier and thus, a century after the events that the aforementioned exhibition talks about, the tradition of the influence of Russian migrants on Serbian theater continues. While we drink tea, he shows me the Telegram social network groups through which Russians here communicate. "Those who came 10 years ago, when the conflict in Ukraine started, are on Facebook groups, while those of us who arrived in the past two years gather exclusively through Telegram!", explains Konstantin.

And who were Constantine's famous predecessors 100 years ago and what were their merits?

The founding of the ballet, a major contribution to the development of opera, the professionalization of scenography and costume design, influence on direction - all of this, among other things, is due to Russian immigrants. They bring the experience of the Moscow Art Theater, the Bolshoi Theater and the Petrograd Alexandrinsky and Mariinsky Theaters, as well as other institutions where they created, coming after collaboration with Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Meyerhold, Anna Pavlov, Fyodor Shalyapin and many other legendary creators.

photo: promo

Their biographies presented at the exhibition, organized by Petrovaradin Media and Color Media Communications in cooperation with the Museum of Theater Arts of Serbia, are truly impressive. Their lives and careers begin in Moscow, Petrograd or Warsaw, and end in places like Boston, Chile, San Francisco...

Few of them stayed and died in Serbia like the ballerina Nina Vasiljevna Kirsanova (Moscow, 1898 – Belgrade, 1989). From early childhood, Nina attended the theater and ballet performances, attended a ballet school and was a student of the famous Alexander Gorski. Already in 1916, she started performing as a ballerina. He spent the period after the October Revolution and the Civil War in Poland and performed in Polish theaters together with the famous ballet dancer Alexander Fortunat, a Pole who was educated in Moscow and together with him in 1923 accepted an engagement in Bucharest.

photo: promo

Kirsanova and Fortunato presented themselves to the Belgrade audience for the first time on November 7, 1923. The great success during the tour led to the National Theater management offering them an engagement, which the artists accepted, probably because of their excellent relationship with Jelena Poljakova, then the only prima ballerina in the Belgrade theater. Aleksandar Fortunato was hired as the first dancer, director and director of the Ballet of the National Theater in Belgrade. In 1926, Nina left Belgrade and performed with great success in Europe and the world with various ballet troupes, of which the involvement in Anna Pavlova's troupe is particularly important. She will be engaged three more times at the National Theater in Belgrade.

Today, Princess Danica Karađorđević owns Nina's piano. She received it as a gift from her father, the painter Cilet Marinković, and he bought it from Nina's much younger partner who outlived her.

The aforementioned Jelena Dimitrijevna Polyakova (Rybinsk, Russia, 1884 - Santiago, Chile, 1972), ballerina, choreographer and pedagogue, is certainly one of the most deserving people for the establishment of the Ballet of the National Theater in Belgrade and its development. She was a member of the famous Mariinsky Theater from Petrograd, where she was also a soloist. On European tours, she performed with the great ballet star Anna Pavlova, as well as with the famous troupe of Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev in Paris. Internship at the National Theater in Belgrade began in 1922/1923. She was a prima ballerina for five seasons, and she made a huge contribution with her teaching work at the National Theater Acting and Ballet School and in her private ballet school, training almost all important ballet artists in Serbia between the two world wars. King Alexander awarded her the Order of Saint Sava V Order. She left Belgrade in 1943 and settled in Chile in 1949, where she remained for the rest of her life.

photo: promo

The Froman artistic family also left a significant mark on the theater in this area: Margarita Petrovna Froman – ballerina, choreographer, pedagogue; Maximilian Max Petrovich Froman, ballet dancer; Pavle Petrovich Froman, painter, scenographer and costume designer and Valentin Petrovich Froman, ballet dancer.

The Froman family moved to the Kingdom of SHS in 1921. The most famous of them, Margarita and Max Froman, were soloists at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, and then members of the Diaghilev Russian Ballet. Margarita was the head of the ballet, prima ballerina and director of the National Theater Ballet, and Max was the first dancer and they mostly performed together. After World War II, they went to the USA.

Yuri Ljvovič Rakitin (his real surname is Jonin) was born in Kharkiv in 1882 and died in Novi Sad in 1952. He became a lover of the theater very early. After graduation, he organized dilettante plays in which he acted himself. In Petrograd, he completed a three-year acting school at the Imperial Theaters, in the class of the great actor Vladimir N. Davidov. Before his graduation, out of consideration for his father's state title, Yuri Ljvovich Jonin took the stage name Rakitin.

photo: promo

Soon after, he was hired by the Theater Studio, which was managed by the rebellious Vsevolod E. Mayerholjd. During the October Revolution of 1917, he found himself in Petrograd as an established director and assistant to Meyerhold. As unbearable hunger followed, reduced opportunities for professional work, and Rakitin himself did not share the ideas of the "reds", he moved to a relative's estate near Gomel (today's Belarus), where his wife and one-year-old son Nikita already lived. In 1920, he left his homeland, to which he would never return.

At the invitation of Milan Grol, manager of the National Theater in Belgrade, in 1921 he entered the world of Yugoslav and Serbian theater. He directed in the Belgrade National Theater until 1947. Due to certain ideological disagreement, he was stripped of his directorship. The wheel of wisdom, two follies Ostrovsky and is retired as unfit. In the same year, he directed three plays in Novi Sad and was then appointed permanent director of the Serbian (then Vojvodina) National Theater in Novi Sad, where he remained until his death in 1952. In that period, he directed ten plays.

In addition to his work as a director, Yuri Rakitin also worked as a teacher. At the Acting School in Belgrade, Raša Plaović, Mata Milošević, Milan Ajvaz, Dara Milošević, Nevenka Urbanova, Bora Hanauska, Teja Tadić and others studied with him. He also taught acting in Novi Sad, first at the Drama Studio, and then at the State Theater School. He directed two plays (1949) of his students, among whom Stevan Šalajić and Mira Banjac stood out. He was buried in Novi Sad, on the Russian plot at Assumption Cemetery. A large part of his heritage (diaries, documents, manuscripts, photographs) is in the Theater Museum of Vojvodina.

At the opening of the exhibition in the White Church last week, Vladimir Kasteljanov, a descendant of the local White Russians, the last survivor in this place, also spoke. Kasteljanov is also the founder of the small family mausoleum, the Russian Room, which stores memorabilia related to the existence of this community in Bela Crkva. When I visited this place two years ago, I had the opportunity to see on the walls 53 drawings and watercolors depicting all the major places on the road from Russia to the White Church, made by the grandfather of Vladimir's wife Valentina, Ivan Pavlovich Trofimov. Grandfather's staff is kept here, in which he carved the names of important places with dates, on the road from Poltava and Vladikavkaz, Sevastopol - all the way to Bela Crkva.

The exhibition can be seen in the National Museum in Bela Crkva until February 21st, a day later it will be presented to the Belgrade audience in the Russian House, and on February 27th it moves to the House of Culture in Novi Bečej, another center of the White Russians in the interwar period.