Marietta Shaginian (1888–1982)

Marietta Sergeevna Shaginian was born in Moscow to a Russified family of Armenian origin. She earned a degree in history and philosophy in 1912 from the Higher Courses (Ger’e Advanced Courses) for Women in Moscow. She became a journalist and contributed to Moscow newspapers as well as others in the southern USSR. She published her first book of poetry, First Encounters, in 1909. It was followed by Orientalia (1913), and the short story collections Narrow Gates (1914) and Seven Conversations (1915). Her first published novel was One’s Destiny (1916; appeared in full in 1923). Marietta Shaginian was an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and drew on Communist themes for her prolific writing. She produced plays, essays, articles, and literary portraits of well-known writers and artists, as well as some full-length biographies, including Resurrection, on the Czech composer J. Mysliveček. Also using the pseudonym Jim Dollar, she wrote a trilogy of satirical adventure novellas in the 1920s, known as the Mess-Mend series, which enjoyed enormous success and was adapted for the screen. For her novels about V.I. Lenin's life and activities, she received the Lenin Prize in 1972. She also received the Stalin Prize, two Orders of Lenin, and several other Soviet medals and honors. Her second husband Victor Efimovich Tsigal was a noted Russian Jewish painter.