Nikolai Pechkovsky

Nikolai Pechkovsky was a Russian tenor who sang Grigory, the Pretender, at the 1928 Leningrad premiere of the original 1869 Boris Godunov. Trained under L. D. Donskoy and then, from 1921, at the Bolshoi Theatre's own studio under Stanislavsky, he became leading soloist of the Leningrad Theatre of Opera and Ballet from 1924 to 1941, celebrated above all as Hermann in The Queen of Spades. Named People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1939, he was sentenced in 1945 to ten years in the Gulag for performing under German occupation, before returning to provincial houses on his release.