Ballet company of the Leningrad Maly Opera Theatre during the evacuation (1941-1944)
One of the most poorly studied periods in the history of the Maly Opera Theatre is its work during its evacuation in the town of Chkalov in 1941-1944. The period was covered in some of the memoirs of artists, but most of these recollections about the wartime are not only sketchy, but also written long after the described events, and therefore not always accurate. In this article, an attempt is made to reconstruct the life of the ballet company in this period on the basis of the unique materials of the Mikhailovsky Theatre archive, the most important of which is the unpublished diary of the orchestra musician Ivan Alekseevich Polomarenko (1876-1965).