Anna Timiryova
Encyclopedia
Anna Vasilyevna Timiryova (July 18, 1893 Kislovodsk
- January 31, 1975 Moscow
) was a Russian poetess. Born Anna Safonova, she was the daughter of composer Vasily Ilyich Safonov
. At age 19 she married admiral Sergey Nikolayevich Timiryov, whom she divorced in 1918 to join her lover, Admiral Alexander Kolchak. After Kolchak's assassination, she was arrested several times. In 1923 she married Vsevolod Kniper. She was the mother of the painter Vladimir Sergeyevich Timiryov
in the north of the Caucasus. Another famous victim of Communism
, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was also born there. At the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, Kislovodsk welcomed many artists, musicians and members of the Russian nobility
.
in Siberia
.
After the arrest of the Admiral Kolchak, Anna approached the Bolsheviks and declared to them: "Arrest me. I cannot live without him." As a result, she was imprisoned in Irkutsk
but was released after Kolchak's execution in October, 1920.
. In June, 1920, however, she was sent to Omsk labor camp for forced labour. After being released, Timiryova appealed to local authorities for permission to join her first husband in Harbin
. Her request was ‘Denied’ and she received an additional year of imprisonment. The third imprisonment followed in 1922, the fourth one – in 1925. Official charges read “accused of undesirable connections with foreigners and former White officers.” She was sentenced to 3 more years’ imprisonment.
After she was released, Anna Vasilyevna married railway engineer Vladimir Kniper. But her sufferings continued. In spring 1935 she was arrested again for “concealment of the past”, sent to a labor camp. Later, this was changed to internal exile
in Vyshny Volochek and Maloyaroslavets. She earned her living by sewing, knitting and sweeping the streets. In 1938, the sixth arrest followed.
She was released after the end of WW2. She had nobody: her 24 year son, the artist Vladimir Timirev had been shot on May, 17, 1938. Her husband Vladimir Kniper died from heart attack in 1942. She was still not allowed to settle in Moscow, and she moved to Scherbakov (present Rybinsk
) in Yaroslavskaya Oblast, where she was offered a position of property-manager in local drama theatre.
At the same very time when Anna Timiryova lived in Rybinsk, Admiral Kolchak’s niece, Olga also lived there. Several times Timiryova made attempts to meet her, but Olga refused. According to one account she didn’t want to meet the woman who destroyed her uncle’s family. According to another – Olga was afraid of the secret police.
In the end of 1949, Anna was sentenced to 9 months imprisonment in Yaroslavl
and as deported convict she was sent to Yeniseisk. Anna was said to have been denounced by her workmates – the actors of the drama theatre. They accused her of spreading Anti-Soviet propaganda.
Anna Vasilyevna could turn her hand to anything. She was a woman of considerable talent, when she was young she drew and painted in private studio, being in exile she worked as toy-painting instructor and graphic designer.
She made beautifully carved gilded frames from paste impregnated papers covered with painter’s gold. The frames looked as if they were real. At a performance there was a huge vase on the stage. In the footlights it shone as a diamond. Actually, as theatre veterans say, Anna Vasilyevna made the vase from wire and pieces of cans.
Often, during the performance Anna Vasilyevna sat among the audience to note how everything looked on the stage.
‘Look! How nice this wooden gun!’ – she said to her nephew who stayed with her on holidays.
Sometimes she even took part in performance, playing small parts, such as Princess Myagkaya in “Anna Karenina”. In her letters to the loved ones she admitted ‘I don’t like the stage and I’m bored in make-up room. I feel as a property-manager, not as an actress, but it seems to me that I’m not out of the picture (it does no honour to the performing style) Please bring me a box of make-up, I can’t find it here and I don’t like to beg somebody for it.’
She was neat, well-mannered old lady with short grey hair and bright lively eyes. Nobody in the drama theatre knew about her, or about her and Kolchak's tragic love story. But to the surprise of others every time when the director, a respectable man of noble birth saw Timiryova he kissed her hand. People talked in corners about such attention devoted to the property manager.
‘ I’m 65 and I’m in exile. Everything that happened 35 years ago is gone down in history. I have no idea who and why want that the last days of my life passed in such unbearable conditions. I ask you to put an end to it, do away with it and let me breathe and live that time which is left for me.’ she wrote to Premier Grigory Malenkov in 1954. But Anna Vasilyevna was rehabilitated
only in 1960.
She was then granted a small room of a communal flat in Pluschikha, Moscow
.
After long efforts Shostakovich and Oystrakh obtained a small pension for her (45 rubles) thanks to her father's services. Anna Vasilyevna appeared in a crowd scene of Gaidai’s ‘Diamond hand’ playing the part of charwoman and in Sergei Bondarchuk
’s War and Peace, playing the part of noble old lady at Natasha Rostova’s first ball. She died on January 31, 1975.
and by Elizaveta Boyarskaya
in Admiral (film)
.
Veronica Izotova recalled,
Elizaveta Boyarskaya commented,
After being asked about Doctor Zhivago (film), she said,
Kislovodsk
Kislovodsk is a city in Stavropol Krai, Russia, which lies in the North Caucasian region of the country, between the Black and Caspian Seas. The closest airport is located in the city of Mineralnye Vody. Population:...
- January 31, 1975 Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
) was a Russian poetess. Born Anna Safonova, she was the daughter of composer Vasily Ilyich Safonov
Vasily Ilyich Safonov
Vasily Ilyich Safonov was a Russian pianist, teacher, conductor and composer.Safonov, or Safonoff as he was known in the West during his lifetime, was born at Itschory, Russian Caucasus, the son of a Russian officer of Cossacks. He was educated at the Imperial Alexandra Lyceum, Saint Petersburg,...
. At age 19 she married admiral Sergey Nikolayevich Timiryov, whom she divorced in 1918 to join her lover, Admiral Alexander Kolchak. After Kolchak's assassination, she was arrested several times. In 1923 she married Vsevolod Kniper. She was the mother of the painter Vladimir Sergeyevich Timiryov
Vladimir Sergeyevich Timiryov
Vladimir Timirev was a Russian avant garde painter and a victim of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.-Life:Vladimir was born in 1914 as the son of Admiral Sergey Nikolayevich Timiryov of the Russian Imperial Navy. Vladimir's mother was the poetess, Anna Timiryova. His maternal grandfather was the...
Early life
Anna Safonova was born into the family of the famous musician and manager of the Conservatory of Moscow, Vassily Ilyich Safonov. Kislovodsk is a Russian spa of the kraï of StavropolStavropol
-International relations:-Twin towns/sister cities:Stavropol is twinned with: Des Moines, United States Béziers, France Pazardzhik, Bulgaria-External links:* **...
in the north of the Caucasus. Another famous victim of Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was also born there. At the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, Kislovodsk welcomed many artists, musicians and members of the Russian nobility
Russian nobility
The Russian nobility arose in the 14th century and essentially governed Russia until the October Revolution of 1917.The Russian word for nobility, Dvoryanstvo , derives from the Russian word dvor , meaning the Court of a prince or duke and later, of the tsar. A nobleman is called dvoryanin...
.
Education
In 1906, the Safonov family moved to St. Petersburg, where she got a certificate of the school of the Princess Anna Obolensky and learned drawing and painting with Zeidenberg, also becoming fluent in French and German. In 1911, Anna married an officer of the Navy, Sergey Timiryov. In 1914, she gave birth to a son, named Vladimir.Scandal
In 1915, Anna met Rear-Admiral Alexander Kolchak. Although, Kolchak was her husband's closest friend and commanding officer, they began a clandestine affair. In 1917, Anna openly left her husband for the Admiral.Russian Civil War
In years 1918-1919, Anna worked as a translator for the Department of the Business Service of the Council of Ministers. This was an agency attached to Kolchak's anti-communist White MovementWhite movement
The White movement and its military arm the White Army - known as the White Guard or the Whites - was a loose confederation of Anti-Communist forces.The movement comprised one of the politico-military Russian forces who fought...
in Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
.
After the arrest of the Admiral Kolchak, Anna approached the Bolsheviks and declared to them: "Arrest me. I cannot live without him." As a result, she was imprisoned in Irkutsk
Irkutsk
Irkutsk is a city and the administrative center of Irkutsk Oblast, Russia, one of the largest cities in Siberia. Population: .-History:In 1652, Ivan Pokhabov built a zimovye near the site of Irkutsk for gold trading and for the collection of fur taxes from the Buryats. In 1661, Yakov Pokhabov...
but was released after Kolchak's execution in October, 1920.
The GULAG archipelago
After Kolchak’s death. Anna Timiryova was released as part of an amnestyAmnesty
Amnesty is a legislative or executive act by which a state restores those who may have been guilty of an offense against it to the positions of innocent people, without changing the laws defining the offense. It includes more than pardon, in as much as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the...
. In June, 1920, however, she was sent to Omsk labor camp for forced labour. After being released, Timiryova appealed to local authorities for permission to join her first husband in Harbin
Harbin
Harbin ; Manchu language: , Harbin; Russian: Харби́н Kharbin ), is the capital and largest city of Heilongjiang Province in Northeast China, lying on the southern bank of the Songhua River...
. Her request was ‘Denied’ and she received an additional year of imprisonment. The third imprisonment followed in 1922, the fourth one – in 1925. Official charges read “accused of undesirable connections with foreigners and former White officers.” She was sentenced to 3 more years’ imprisonment.
After she was released, Anna Vasilyevna married railway engineer Vladimir Kniper. But her sufferings continued. In spring 1935 she was arrested again for “concealment of the past”, sent to a labor camp. Later, this was changed to internal exile
Internal Exile
Internal Exile was Fish's second solo album after leaving Marillion in 1988. The album, released 28 October 1991, was inspired by the singer's past, his own personal problems and his troubled experiences with his previous record label EMI.The album's music reflects Fish's indulgence in the vast...
in Vyshny Volochek and Maloyaroslavets. She earned her living by sewing, knitting and sweeping the streets. In 1938, the sixth arrest followed.
She was released after the end of WW2. She had nobody: her 24 year son, the artist Vladimir Timirev had been shot on May, 17, 1938. Her husband Vladimir Kniper died from heart attack in 1942. She was still not allowed to settle in Moscow, and she moved to Scherbakov (present Rybinsk
Rybinsk
Rybinsk is the second largest city of Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia, which lies at the confluence of the Volga and Sheksna Rivers. Population: It is served by Rybinsk Staroselye airport.-Early history:...
) in Yaroslavskaya Oblast, where she was offered a position of property-manager in local drama theatre.
At the same very time when Anna Timiryova lived in Rybinsk, Admiral Kolchak’s niece, Olga also lived there. Several times Timiryova made attempts to meet her, but Olga refused. According to one account she didn’t want to meet the woman who destroyed her uncle’s family. According to another – Olga was afraid of the secret police.
In the end of 1949, Anna was sentenced to 9 months imprisonment in Yaroslavl
Yaroslavl
Yaroslavl is a city and the administrative center of Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia, located northeast of Moscow. The historical part of the city, a World Heritage Site, is located at the confluence of the Volga and the Kotorosl Rivers. It is one of the Golden Ring cities, a group of historic cities...
and as deported convict she was sent to Yeniseisk. Anna was said to have been denounced by her workmates – the actors of the drama theatre. They accused her of spreading Anti-Soviet propaganda.
Khrushchev thaw
After she was released Anna returned to the Rybinsk drama theatre. She was in her 70s, but she continued working.Anna Vasilyevna could turn her hand to anything. She was a woman of considerable talent, when she was young she drew and painted in private studio, being in exile she worked as toy-painting instructor and graphic designer.
She made beautifully carved gilded frames from paste impregnated papers covered with painter’s gold. The frames looked as if they were real. At a performance there was a huge vase on the stage. In the footlights it shone as a diamond. Actually, as theatre veterans say, Anna Vasilyevna made the vase from wire and pieces of cans.
Often, during the performance Anna Vasilyevna sat among the audience to note how everything looked on the stage.
‘Look! How nice this wooden gun!’ – she said to her nephew who stayed with her on holidays.
Sometimes she even took part in performance, playing small parts, such as Princess Myagkaya in “Anna Karenina”. In her letters to the loved ones she admitted ‘I don’t like the stage and I’m bored in make-up room. I feel as a property-manager, not as an actress, but it seems to me that I’m not out of the picture (it does no honour to the performing style) Please bring me a box of make-up, I can’t find it here and I don’t like to beg somebody for it.’
She was neat, well-mannered old lady with short grey hair and bright lively eyes. Nobody in the drama theatre knew about her, or about her and Kolchak's tragic love story. But to the surprise of others every time when the director, a respectable man of noble birth saw Timiryova he kissed her hand. People talked in corners about such attention devoted to the property manager.
‘ I’m 65 and I’m in exile. Everything that happened 35 years ago is gone down in history. I have no idea who and why want that the last days of my life passed in such unbearable conditions. I ask you to put an end to it, do away with it and let me breathe and live that time which is left for me.’ she wrote to Premier Grigory Malenkov in 1954. But Anna Vasilyevna was rehabilitated
Rehabilitation (Soviet)
Rehabilitation in the context of the former Soviet Union, and the Post-Soviet states, was the restoration of a person who was criminally prosecuted without due basis, to the state of acquittal...
only in 1960.
She was then granted a small room of a communal flat in Pluschikha, Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
.
After long efforts Shostakovich and Oystrakh obtained a small pension for her (45 rubles) thanks to her father's services. Anna Vasilyevna appeared in a crowd scene of Gaidai’s ‘Diamond hand’ playing the part of charwoman and in Sergei Bondarchuk
Sergei Bondarchuk
Sergei Fedorovich Bondarchuk was a Soviet film director, screenwriter, and actor.- Biography :Born in Belozerka, in the Kherson Governorate, Sergei Bondarchuk spent his childhood in the cities of Yeysk and Taganrog, graduating from the Taganrog School Number 4 in 1938. His first performance as an...
’s War and Peace, playing the part of noble old lady at Natasha Rostova’s first ball. She died on January 31, 1975.
Poetess
In the years following the execution of her beloved, Anna Timiryova composed many poems dedicated to his memory.In popular culture
Anna was depicted onscreen by Veronica Izotova in the 1993 miniseries the The White HorseThe White Horse (series)
The White Horse is a Russian TV serial aired in 1993. The film, in 10 episodes, was directed by Gelii Ryabov. The film presents the Russian civil war in Siberia from 1917–1920 and to the struggle of the white Russians under the command of admiral Alexander Kolchak against the bolshevik forces,...
and by Elizaveta Boyarskaya
Elizaveta Boyarskaya
-Biography:Elizaveta was born on December the 20th of 1985 in Leningrad to a family of two famous Russian actors Mikhail Boyarsky and Larisa Luppian. Her father is of Russian and Polish descent and her mother is of Estonian, German, Russian and Polish ancestry...
in Admiral (film)
Admiral (film)
Admiral is a 2008 biopic about Alexander Kolchak, a Vice-Admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy and leader of the anti-communist White Movement during the Russian Civil War...
.
Veronica Izotova recalled,
"I put on a red make-up using a brick. My face was dirty, my sad eyes, my clothes torn, and I have to walk many hours... I wanted to play the Snow QueenSnow QueenSnow Queen may refer to:* The Snow Queen, an 1845 fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen-Adaptations of the Andersen fairy tale:* The Snow Queen , a 1957 Soviet animated film* The Snow Queen , a 1995 British animated film...
. I was always more expressive and more sensitive than the average of my compatriots."
Elizaveta Boyarskaya commented,
"She was a woman of such force, of such will, with such magnanimity... I feel an amazing resemblance to her... When I read script, I was even a bit scared: because she has the same vision of history as me. All that it can arrive at is me. And when I played Anna, I did not play, I was her. It was my epoch, my attitude regarding love.
After being asked about Doctor Zhivago (film), she said,
"The only thing that these two films share consists in the love which the Russian women can carry; it is a topic approached by many novels. They love up to the last drop of blood, till the most dreadful end, to the death; they are capable of leaving family and children for the love of the man which they have chosen."