Aleksei Nikolaevich Arbuzov ( - April 20, 1986) was a Soviet playwright.

Arbuzov was born in Moscow, but his family moved to Petrograd in 1914. Orphaned at the age of eleven, he found salvation in the theater, and at fourteen he began to work in the Mariinsky Theatre

Mariinsky Theatre

The Mariinsky Theatre is a historic theatre of opera and ballet in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Opened in 1860, it became the preeminent music theatre of late 19th century Russia, where many of the stage masterpieces of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov received their premieres. The...

. In 1928 he joined a group of young actors in the Guild of Experimental Drama; after its dissolution he joined a traveling agitprop

Agitprop

Agitprop is derived from agitation and propaganda, and describes stage plays, pamphlets, motion pictures and other art forms with an explicitly political message....

theater for which he began to write plays. He moved to Moscow in 1930; in 1935 he wrote the play Dal'nyaya doroga (A long road) and in 1939 Tanya, his two most successful plays. Avril Pyman writes of him, "The charm of his work lies in his shrewd but affectionate attitude to his fellow-man; he sees through human foibles to the basic desire to lead a good and useful life, and creates plausible, even likeable, 'positive' characters."

External links

• Biography of the playwright Aleksei Arbuzov at Alice in Theaterland