Raevskii, Iosif

Raevskii, Iosif Moiseevich 

Born Dec. 25, 1900 (Jan. 7, 1901), in Orenburg; died Sept. 23, 1972, in Moscow. Soviet Russian actor, stage director, and teacher. People’s Artist of the USSR (1968).

During the Civil War of 1918–20, Raevskii first worked in the Political Section theater of the First Army of the Eastern Front and then in the Second Studio of the Moscow Art Theater. Beginning in 1922 he was an actor and then a director of this theater. His roles included Kostylev in Gorky’s The Lower Depths and Perker in The Pickwick Club, adapted from Dickens’ novel The Pickwick Papers. Plays directed by Raevskii included Gorky’s Dostigaev and the Others (1938, with L. M. Leonidov), Kron’s Officer of the Navy (1945, with N. M. Gorchakov), La-vrenev’s The Break (1950, with V. Ia. Stanitsyn), Kilty’s Dear Liar (1962), and Korostylev’s Don Quixote in Battle (1966).

Raevskii staged plays in Byelorussia. He staged Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, in 1966, in Montreal. Beginning in 1932 he taught at the State Institute of Theatrical Arts, where he became a professor in 1939. In 1945 he became head of the institute’s subdepartment of acting. Here he trained a number of national groups, among them Ossetian and Kabardinian groups. Raevskii received three orders and several medals.