Born Jan. 11 (23), 1883, in Kiev; died there Sept. 10, 1941. Soviet Ukrainian basso. People’s Artist of the Ukrainian SSR (1930). Member of the CPSU from 1940.
Donets studied singing under A. A. Santagano-Gorchakova and M. V. Bocharov in Kiev. From 1907 to 1913 he sang at the S. I. Zimin Opera Theater in Moscow. Beginning in 1913 he was a soloist at the Kiev Opera Theater (from 1917 to 1927 he sang in Kharkov and Sverdlovsk). His repertoire included the most diverse roles: Taras Bul’ba in Lysenko’s Taras Bul’ba, Karas’ in Gulak-Artemovskii’s The Zaporozhian Cossack Beyond the Danube, the title role, in Glinka’s Ivan Susanin, the title role in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov,Kochubei in Tchaikovsky’s Mazepa, Dodon in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel, and Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust.