Arina Sobakina

Arina Matveyevna Sobakina (1762 – died after 1785), was a Russian ballerina and stage actress.^[1]She belonged to the pioneer group of professional stage artists in Russia.

She was from an orphanage in Moscow and trained as a ballet dancer by the imperial ballet master Leopold Paradise from Vienna, which was not an uncommon background for a Russian stage artist in this period. In 1780-83, she was engaged at the Karl Knipper Theatre, where she was also trained as an actor, and was then active in both capacities at the Petrovka Theatre in Moscow, where she is last mentioned in the season of 1784-85 as a leading artist of the theater, a leading actress as well as a popular comical dancer.

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