Vladimir Yegorov(1878-1960)

Vladimir Yegorov is a renowned production designer who worked for over four decades for the Russian turned Soviet cinema. Born of a peasant family and trained at a school of commercial art, he started by painting murals and frescoes. He later became a designer at the famous Moscow Art Theater led by Stanislawsky. With him, he explored the new ideas which would revolutionize the theatre, the settings becoming an integral part of a production. In 1915, Yegorov turned to cinema, a new medium to which he applied the results of his own research work. That marked the beginning of a long and fruitful career, during which he designed about fifty movies, some having acquired the status of classic, in a variety of styles. They could be stories of the Revolution (We Are from Kronstadt (1936)), war films (Admiral Nakhimov (1947)), literary adaptations (Dubrovsky (1936)), etc. but they all have a common denominator, Yegorov's intimate knowledge of Russian people and their way of life. In 1944 Vladimir Yegorov was given the title of People's Artist. (Abridged from "Scenic Design in the Soviet Cinema", an article by Catherine de la Roche published in The Penguin Film Review # 3, London, August 1947)