Vasily Kalinin

Vasily Kalinin was a Russian tenor who sang Missail at the 1928 Leningrad premiere of the original 1869 Boris Godunov, a part that was among his best. Born in Vilna, he studied solo singing at the St Petersburg Conservatory under E. I. Ivanov-Smolensky, made two gramophone records in 1911, and joined the Mariinsky company in 1912, where he stayed for twenty-nine years and returned to the Conservatory to teach in the early 1920s. The character tenors were his ground: Yeroshka in Prince Igor and the Scrivener in Khovanshchina beside Missail. He created Pyotr Fyodorovich in Shostakovich's The Nose.