A review of the Pushkin event written in the Chronicle courtesy of Octavio Roca (Tuesday, August 31, 1999):

The idea was simple, the results breathtaking. “Pushkin in Music,” a bicentennial celebration of Alexander Pushkin’s birth, took over Herbst Theatre on Sunday afternoon and succeeded in honoring Russia’s greatest poet and some of its most beautiful sounds.

The joyous three-hour program, produced by the Russian-American Cultural Foundation, was San Francisco’s contribution to the worldwide celebrations of Pushkin’s 200th birthday. The party has been going on throughout the year and reached a climax earlier this summer in Moscow, where there were several competing productions of “Boris Godunov,” major revivals of “Eugene Onegin” and “Pique Dame” as well as what seemed like an endless parade of staged readings. There have been comparable festivities in St. Petersburg, and the Russian artistic communities in Paris and New York also have joined in with major concerts.

At Herbst, the singers included Elena Zaremba and Svetlana Nikitenko in spectacular form, alongside Elena Bocharova, Iosif Shalamaev, Anatoly Berkovich and the men’s chorus Slavyanka. There was poetry in both Russian and English, and Mayor Willie Brown even proclaimed Sunday to be Pushkin Day in San Francisco.

Charismatic SF Opera Director Lotfi Mansouri was the honored guest at the home of Russian Consul General Yury Popov. At the event, a fundraiser for the Russian American Cultural Foundation, Mansouri recalled: “When we produced War and Peace (in 1991), it was so popular, there were no tickets to be had. One man even posted himself on the Opera House steps, and carried a sign that said ‘Lady, please take me! You’re husband’s gonna fall asleep, anyway.’ I don’t know if he had any luck.”

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, Russian short-story writer, novelist and playwright, often seen by critics as the father of Russian realism. Although many of his works were influenced by his Ukrainian heritage and upbringing, Gogol wrote in the Russian language and his works are among the most beloved in the tradition of Russian literature. He was one of the first Russian authors to criticize his country’s way of life.

Nikolai Gogol was born on March 20, 1809 in the little Ukrainian Cossack village of Sorochyntsi. His father Vasily Gogol-Ianovskii, who died when Gogol was 15 years old, Read More