Mstislav Dobuzhinsky — painter, graphic artist and stage designer with roots in the Russian Empire
Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky was born on 14 August (2 August, Old Style) 1875 in Novgorod, in the Russian Empire, the son of Valerian Dobuzhinsky, an army officer who rose to lieutenant general and came from an old Lithuanian noble family; his mother was an artist. He attended the drawing school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in St Petersburg and studied in Munich with Anton Ažbe and in Hungary with Simon Hollósy between 1899 and 1901.
From 1902 he exhibited with the World of Art, the circle around Alexander Benois and Léon Bakst that reshaped Russian visual culture, and from 1910 he was its secretary. He became known as a master of the urban landscape, above all of St Petersburg, and as a graphic artist, contributing to the satirical magazines of 1905–06 and illustrating books. In the theatre he worked for Vera Komissarzhevskaya and, from 1909, for the Moscow Art Theatre, where his designs for Turgenev's A Month in the Country began a long collaboration; in 1914 he designed for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris. After the Revolution he served as a curator at the Hermitage, was the first director of the Vitebsk Art School in 1919 and designed for the Bolshoi Drama Theatre in Petrograd, and in the early 1920s illustrated Dostoevsky's White Nights and Leskov.
In 1924, on the advice of the Lithuanian poet Jurgis Baltrušaitis, he left Soviet Russia and took Lithuanian citizenship. He lived in Kaunas and in Paris (1926–29), and from 1929 led the studios of the Kaunas Art School and became chief designer of the Lithuanian State Theatre, for which he designed thirty-eight productions; he painted Kaunas and Vilnius and designed Lithuanian playing cards.
In 1939 he travelled to London and then, with the actor Michael Chekhov, to the United States to work on a stage version of Dostoevsky's Demons; the outbreak of the Second World War kept him there. In New York he designed for the Metropolitan Opera, the City Center and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, illustrated books and wrote his memoirs, published posthumously. He spent much of his last decade in Europe, and died in New York at the home of his younger son on 20 November 1957, aged eighty-two; he was buried at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois near Paris. Over a thousand of his works are kept in Lithuania.
"Left Soviet Russia in 1924 and took Lithuanian citizenship; worked in Kaunas, Paris and London, and from 1939 lived mainly in New York."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Novgorod, Novgorod Governorate (Russia)
Born in Novgorod in 1875 into the family of an army officer of Lithuanian noble descent, he made his career in St Petersburg as a painter of the city, illustrator and designer for the Moscow Art Theatre before leaving Soviet Russia in 1924.
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Novgorod, Novgorod Governorate (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.