Serafima Birman

Serafima Germanovna Birman (; – 11 May 1976) was a Soviet and Russian actress, theatre director and writer. People’s Artist of the RSFSR (1946). Biography Serafima Birman was born in Kishinyov in the Russian Empire (modern-day Chișinău, Moldova) into a Russian Orthodox family. Her father German Mikhailovich Birman was a Stabs-kapitan who served in the 51st reserve infantry battalion of the Imperial Russian Army. He came from raznochintsy, but was granted personal nobility after making a successful military career. He resigned rather early and died in 1908. Serafima described him as a "lonely, unsociable man... who had little success at finishing things, like the Moldovan-Russian dictionary he was writing for years". Her mother Elena Ivanovna Birman (née Botezat) "was a complete opposite". She came from a wealthy Moldovan family, studied in a finishing school and married as a teenager. At the time German met and married her, she was already a 19-year-old widow with two daughters. Serafima also had a younger brother, Nikolai. Theatre She grew up in Kishinyov and graduated from a local gymnasium for girls with a gold medal. At the age of 11 she visited a theatre and became obsessed with it. One of her stepsisters, then a student at the Saint Petersburg medical university, was offered to play a small part in Konstantin Stanislavski's play. She brought Serafima a signed photo of him and suggested to enter the Moscow Art Theatre. In 1908 she left for Moscow and entered drama courses led by Alexander Adashev; among her fellow students was Evgeny Vakhtangov. , a well-known Bessarabian State Duma deputy and philanthropist, supported her and paid for the first year of studying. In 1911 Birman graduated from the courses and became an actress of the Moscow Art Theatre with the help of Vasily Kachalov, one of her teachers who sent a recommendation letter straight to Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. From 1913 on she also performed at the First Studio led by Stanislavski. She played her first big role of Ortensia in the 1914 adaptation of The Mistress of the Inn play. In 1924 the First Studio was turned into the by its actors led by Michael Chekhov. Same year Birman debuted as a theatre director with Love – A Golden Book, an adaptation of Aleksey Tolstoy's play. After a number of internal conflicts the theatre was finally closed in 1936.