Urgalkin, Aleksei

Born Mar. 17 (30), 1910, in the village of Elaur, in what is now Sengilei Raion, Ul’ianovsk Oblast. Soviet Chuvash actor. People’s Artist of the USSR (1976).

Urgalkin graduated from the studio of the Magnitogorsk Theater of Young Workers in 1932. In 1936 he became an actor in the Chuvash Academic Theater in Cheboksary. He has played leading roles in the Chuvash repertoire, for example, Setner and Mikheder in Narspi (after a work by Ivanov), Aidar and Pichura in Osipov’s Aidar, Vavil in Terent’ev’s The Cuckoo Still Cuckoos, Smolin and Entip in Rzhanov’s Entip, and Sherkkei in Il’bek and Mikushkin’s Rye Bread. In the Russian and Soviet classics he has interpreted the roles of Zhukhrai in How the Steel Was Tempered (after the novel by N. A. Ostrovskii), Vershinin in Vs. Ivanov’s Armored Train 14–69, and Liubim Tortsov, Neschastlivtsev, and Knurov in A. N. Ostrovskii’s Poverty Is No Crime, The Forest, and The Girl Without a Dowry.

Urgalkin was a deputy to the eighth and ninth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the Chuvash ASSR. He has been awarded the Order of the Badge of Honor and various medals.