Notes of the Actor Shchepkin

Mikhail Semyonovich Shchepkin (1788-1863) - a great actor and one of the founders of the Russian acting school. His biography is astonishing: a serf from the Kursk province who would perform in the imperial theater, befriend Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Nekrasov and other masters of Russian literature. However, his autobiography is no less remarkable. The witty, lively, and humorous story of the life of a genius of the theater would not have been possible without the efforts of Alexander Pushkin. On May 17, 1836, the poet gifted the actor a notebook, titled it "Notes of the Actor Shchepkin" and wrote the first lines himself: "I was born in the Kursk province, in the Oboyansk district, in the village of Krasnoye, which is by the river Penka." Now we can reliably, from the first person, learn what happened next: about parents, landowners, redemption, cities and the countryside, and most importantly - about the secrets of acting mastery.