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Akimov, Nikolay (Pavlovich)
(b Kharkiv, 16 April 1901; d Moscow, 6 Sept 1968). Russian stage designer, director, painter and graphic artist of Ukranian birth. He studied in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) from 1915 to 1919 in an artists’ workshop under Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Aleksandr Yakovlev and Vasily Shukhayev. From 1920 to 1922 he worked as a stage designer in Khar’kov (now Kharkiv). In 1923 he returned to Petrograd, where he worked as a book illustrator and stage designer at the Theatre of Musical Comedy, the Theatre of Drama and the Gor’ky Bol’shoy Theatre of Drama; he also worked in Moscow, at the Theatre of the Revolution, the Vakhtangov Theatre and the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT). From 1929 he worked as a director, designing his own productions. He was the Art Director of the Leningrad Theatre of Comedy (1935–49), where the most notable productions he directed and designed were Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1938), Lope de Vega’s Dog in the Manger and Widow of Valencia (1939) and Yevgeny Shvarts’s The Shadow (1946), among others. From 1951 to 1955 Akimov was the artistic director of the Leningrad Soviet Theatre; Shadows (by Saltykov-Shchedrin) and The Case (by Sukhovo-Kobylin) stand out among the productions he directed and designed there. From 1955 to the end of his life he was at the Leningrad Theatre of Comedy as Artistic Director; among his best productions there were Shvarts’s An Ordinary Miracle (1956) and The Dragon (1962), and Motley Stories (1960) after Chekhov.
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