Nadezhda Plevitskaya

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Nadezhda Vasilevna Plevitskaya (born Vinnikova) (Russian: Надежда Васильевна Плевицкая) (January 17, 1884 - 1940) was a Russian singer.

Nadezhda Plevitskaya, the most popular female Russian singer of the World War One era, was born to a peasant family in the village of Vinnikovo near Kursk. She loved to sing, and after two years in a religious chorus she became a professional singer in Kiev, where she married a Polish dancer named Edmond Plevitsky. Soon they moved to Moscow, where she began singing in the well-known Yar restaurant, whose specialty was gypsy bands with beautiful female singers, and going on tour; at a concert in 1909 at the Nizhny Novgorod fair, she was heard by the great tenor Leonid Sobinov, who brought her to the attention of a wider public, which soon included the Imperial family as well as Feodor Chaliapin. A Russian song site says "Plevitskaya possessed a rare musicality, lush and flexible, and a mezzosoprano of wide range. Her repertoire included, alongside popular ditties of mediocre quality, superb examples of Russian peasant folksong from Kursk province as well as songs of city life that are still meaningful today. Her manner of performance showed great sincerity, rich intonation, expressive declamation, and an unusually subtle and deep feeling for the beauty of Russian speech."

According to Jahn (p. 100), "This self-made singer of rural background was instrumental in displacing the gypsy craze with the patriotic and sentimental songs of village life in the prewar years... As one of the first Russian gramophone stars, she had the largest audience of any estrada [variety show] artist of the time, triggering a 'Plevitskomania' all over the country and among all social strata. During the war, Plevitskaya, like some of her colleagues, volunteered as a nurse for a couple of months, and on her own time she appeared in her Red Cross outfit and sang folk songs in hospitals for the wounded. Her recordings were played in gramophones in the trenches, on warships, and in officers' messes, offering nostalgic dreams of homey villages and peasant kitchens."

She married again, this time a Lieutenant Shangin of the Cuirassiers, but he died in battle in January 1915. After the October Revolution she continued singing for the troops of the Red Army, but in 1919 she was captured by a unit of the White Army commanded by General Nikolai Skoblin, who became her third husband in Turkey after the defeat of the Whites. She made concert tours throughout Europe (and, in 1926, to the United States, where she was accompanied by Sergei Rachmaninoff), while her husband took a leading role in an emigre White organization, but neither produced much income. In 1930 both were apparently recruited by the GPU, the Soviet secret police, and were involved in the 1937 abduction of General Evgenii Miller, who was executed in Moscow in May 1938; her husband having disappeared, Plevitskaya was tried and convicted later in 1938 and sentenced to the harsh term of 20 years. She died in Rennes prison in the autumn of 1940.