Gaideburov, Pavel Pavlovich

Born Feb. 15 (27), 1877, in St. Petersburg; died Mar. 4, 1960, in Leningrad. Soviet Russian actor, director, and theatrical figure. People’s Artist of the RSFSR (1940).

Gaideburov began his theatrical career in 1899 as a provincial actor. In 1903, together with the actress N. F. Skarskaia, he organized the Public Theater, attached to the Ligovka People’s House; on the basis of this theater in 1905 he organized the First Touring Drama Theater, which existed until 1928. The main repertoire of both theaters consisted of classical works, such as Ostrovskii’s The Storm (1903), Pushkin’s Boris Godunov (1905), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1908, 1922), Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1908), and all the plays of A. P. Chekhov. At the theaters, Gaideburov played the roles of Tikhon The Storm, Oswald in Ibsen’s Ghosts, Hamlet, and Tsar Fedor in A. K. Tolstoy’s Tsar Fedor Ioannovich, among others. In 1933 he directed a kolkhoz-sovkhoz touring theater. In 1943 at the Yaroslavl Theater he staged Leonov’s Invasion and for the first time acted the part of the Old Man in Gorky’s The Old Man. From 1944 to 1950 he acted with the Moscow Chamber Theater. He staged the play The Old Man at the Simferopol’ Dramatic Theater (the State Prize of the USSR, 1952). In 1955 he became a company member of the Evg. Vakhtangov Theater. Gaideburov was awarded two orders and various medals.