Popov, Alexey Dmitriyevich

▪ Russian theatrical director

born March 12, 1892, Nikolavsk, Russia

died Aug. 18, 1961, Moscow

      Soviet stage director and prominent exponent of Socialist realism whose monumental productions were notable for their meticulous attention to naturalistic detail.

      Popov began his career as an actor with the Moscow Art Theatre and then moved to Kostroma to be managing director of a studio formed to follow the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavsky. At Kostroma he directed standard plays from the world repertoire, as well as the type of Soviet propaganda piece for which he would become noted, such as An Evening Dedicated to the Paris Commune. Popov returned to Moscow to direct, with few exceptions, new Soviet plays at the Vaktangov Theatre (1923–30) and the Theatre of the Revolution (1930–35). He introduced Lydia N. Seifullina and V.P. Pravdukhin's Virineia (1925), Boris Lavrenev's The Break (1927), and, most especially, Nikolay F. Pogodin's Poem of the Ax (1931), My Friend (1932), and After the Ball (1934). Popov was made head of the Central Theatre of the Red Army in 1935, a position he held until 1960.

      Although Popov did a few Shakespearean plays and also revived Russian classics, his productions invariably were monumental in scope and shaded to teach moral lessons regarding class struggle from the Soviet viewpoint. Popov's principal interest was in staging more overtly propagandistic pieces. Among the new plays that he directed were The Year Nineteen by Eosif L. Prut (1936), The Men of Stalingrad by Yury Chepurin (1944), The Wide Steppe by Nikolay G. Vinnikov (1949), and Virgin Soil Upturned, a dramatized version of the novel by Mikhail Sholokhov (1957). Popov was honoured as a People's Artist of the U.S.S.R. in 1948.

* * *