Khokhlov, Konstantin Pavlovich

Born Oct. 20 (Nov. 1), 1885, in Moscow; died Jan. 1, 1956, in Leningrad. Soviet stage director, actor, and teacher. People’s Artist of the USSR (1944).

Khokhlov graduated from the Moscow Theatrical School in 1908. He acted with the Moscow Art Theater and its first and second studios. In 1921 he joined the Bolshoi Drama Theater in Petrograd. In this theater he also directed his first play, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1922), in which he also played Mark Antony; he later became principal director of the theater. From 1925 to 1930, Khokhlov was director of the A. S. Pushkin Leningrad Academic Theater of Drama, where he staged Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (1924) and Trenev’s The Pugachev Rebellion (1926; jointly with L. S. Viv’en and N. V. Petrov).

From 1931 to 1938, Khokhlov was a director of the Malyi Theater in Moscow, where he staged Gorky’s Enemies (1933), Ostrovskii’s Wolves and Sheep (1935), and Trenev’s On the Bank of the Neva (1937). From 1938 to 1954 he was artistic director and principal stage director of the Kiev Lesia Ukrainka Russian Drama Theater, where he staged his best works: Lesia Ukrain-ka’s The Stone Master (1939, 1946), Gorky’s The Zykovs (1940) and Enemies (1951), Solov’ev’s Field Marshal Kutuzov (1940), Leonov’s Invasion (1944), Aleshin’s Director (1950), and Turge-nev’s A Month in the Country (1954). In 1954 he returned to the Leningrad M. Gorky Bolshoi Drama Theater, where he staged Leonov’s The Gardens of Polovchansk (1954) and Hauptmann’s Before Sunset (1955). He began to teach in 1922 and became a professor in 1946.

Khokhlov was awarded the Order of Lenin, three other orders, and several medals.