Bobyshov, Mikhail Pavlovich

Born Nov. 7 (19), 1885, in the village of Pogoreloe, Tver’ Province; died July 7, 1964, in Leningrad. Soviet theatrical artist and graphic artist. Became People’s Artist of the RSFSR in 1961.

From 1900 to 1907, Bobyshov studied at the Shtiglits School in St. Petersburg under V. E. Savinskii, and he came under the influence of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) group. The stage decor and costumes created by Bobyshov are characterized by a fine feeling for period style as well as a decorative graphic quality of total resolution. He taught at the Leningrad Academy of Arts (from 1926, and as a professor from 1939), and later at the Moscow Art Institute (1943–47). Bobyshov staged Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or at the Malyi Petrograd Academic Theater (1923), Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Stanislavsky Opera Theater in Moscow (1939), Glière’s The Bronze Horseman at the Kirov Leningrad Theater of Opera and Ballet and the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow (1949), and other productions.