Vera Sudeikina Actress of the Chamber Theater and Russian silent cinema. Date of Birth: 06.01.1889 Country: USA

Biography of Vera Sudaykina

Vera Sudaykina was an actress in the Chamber Theater and Russian silent cinema, as well as an applied arts artist and painter. She was born in St. Petersburg into a family of a Swedish woman, Henrietta Fedorovna (nee Malmgren; 1870-1944?), and a Frenchman, Arthur Arturovich de Bosse (1867-1937). Vera attended the M.B. Pussel Moscow Gymnasium, where she graduated with a gold medal and the right to teach mathematics and French. She also received a musical education, taking lessons from pianist David Shor (1867-1942), a member of the famous trio "Shor, Krein, and Ehrlich" at the time. In 1910, she enrolled in the University of Berlin, where she studied philosophy and natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, and anatomy. On her second year, she switched to the Faculty of Art and attended lectures by Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) on art history, which she credited with opening her eyes. She also studied architecture. In 1910, she married a man named Lury, but their marriage was soon annulled by her parents. In 1912, she married for the second time to Robert Fedorovich Shilling (1887-1939), a student and later actor at the Moscow Art Theatre, whom she met in Berlin. Shortly after, World War I began, and she was unable to complete her university studies. Upon returning to Moscow, she joined the ballet school of Lydia Richardovna Nelidova, started acting in films (in two years - 1914-1915 - she played, presumably, five roles in films produced by the "P. Timan and F. Reingardt" film company, directed by Yakov Protazanov, V. Gardin, and A. Andreev), and was accepted into Alexander Tairov's Chamber Theater troupe. In 1915, she met artist Sergey Yuryevich Sudaykin (1882-1946) at the theater, and in March 1916, she moved to St. Petersburg to live with him. In April 1916, Mikhail Kuzmin gave her and Sudaykin a Easter gift - "A Stranger Poem", and their images were also reflected in his pantomime "The Enamored Devil". In June 1917, she and Sudaykin traveled to Crimea. In August 1917, they had a conversation with Osip Mandelstam, who dedicated a poem to them, "A stream of golden honey flowed from a bottle...". After spending the summer of 1917 in the vicinity of Alushta, they moved to Yalta by autumn, and then to Mishor, where they lived until April 1919. In February 1918, they registered their relationship. In the autumn of the same year, she exhibited her works for the first time at the "Art in Crimea" exhibition in Yalta. In April 1919, they, along with many others, moved to Novorossiysk, and at the end of the month, to Tbilisi. In December 1919, the Sudaykins left Tbilisi and moved to Baku. On March 12, 1920, they returned to Tbilisi, and then they went to Batumi, from where they left for Paris in May. Vera described this period of her life with Sudaykin in her diary, which she kept from January 1, 1917, to September 2, 1919. In it, she tells about their life in Petrograd on the eve of the February Revolution and their meetings with friends, a trip to Moscow for the "World of Art" exhibition, her divorce from Shilling, and how the "stuck in Crimea" days of politicians, actors, writers, and artists went. She also describes the colorful life of Tbilisi in May 1919. On February 19, 1921, Diaghilev introduced Vera to Igor Stravinsky, and in November, she returned to the stage in a small role as the Queen in the ballet "Sleeping Beauty". At the end of May 1922, she left Sudaykin.

In June 1922, in Paris, Vera opened a shop for fashionable and theatrical accessories called "Tulavera" with her friend, artist A.A. Danilova (Tula). She also created costumes for Diaghilev's ballet company by his order. In August 1922, Sudaykin went to America, and Vera became Stravinsky's companion. Stravinsky, who was married and had no intentions of leaving his family, never told his mother about his relationship with Vera, but at his request, his wife Ekaterina Gavrilovna met her in Nice on March 1, 1925. In March 1939, Stravinsky's first wife passed away, in June, his mother died, and in the autumn, Stravinsky left for America. At the end of the year, after overcoming bureaucratic obstacles, Vera managed to join him. They got married on March 9, 1940, almost twenty years after their first meeting. In August 1945, together with her friend Elizaveta Sokolova, Vera opened an art gallery called "La Boutique" in Beverly Hills, which hosted exhibitions featuring Pavel Chelishchev, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dali. Vera continued to paint, and starting from 1955, she began exhibiting her works again in Rome, Venice, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Houston, Tokyo, London, Berlin, and Paris. In the autumn of 1962, she and Stravinsky visited Moscow and Leningrad. This meeting with the Stravinskys was shown on Moscow television. They lived together for fifty years, only briefly separating. With Vera's participation, several books about Stravinsky and their life together were published, including their correspondence and her diaries translated into English. Vera de Bosse lived a long life, passing away on September 17, 1982, in New York at the age of ninety-four.