Inna Solovyova studied both stagecraft and the Russian soul

Here and there though, discreetly placed, were signed portraits of famous directors, paintings by eminent set designers and books signed by artists. She had dedicated much of her life to the history of the Moscow Art Theatre, founded in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavsky as “a theatre for the first and last time”: a theatre built on trust, a microcosm of the country and of Russian life in art. It was rooted in the ideas of Leo Tolstoy and devoted to psychological realism and the exercise of conscience. She too was inspired by these ideas; the founding essence and impulse of the theatre, to get to the heart of questions of life, death and morality, was hers, too. She was a living link to Tolstoy’s humanism and Chekhov’s almost tactile sense of the passing of time.