Event date: Wednesday, April 30, 2025 at 7 p.m. at Third Place Books, Ravenna
Third Place Books is thrilled to welcome filmmaker, photographer, and Chekhov scholar Serge Gregory for a discussion of his new book, The Sirens of the Hotel Louvre: An Actress, a Writer, and the Creative Life in the Silver Age of Chekhov. Gregory will be joined in conversation by historian and translator Douglas Smith. This event is free and open to the public.
For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
RSVP for this event on the Third Place Books website.
About The Sirens of the Hotel Louvre. . .
Combining history and biography, The Sirens of the Hotel Louvre focuses on the intimate relationship and professional collaboration between two creative women in Russia's Silver Age (1880s–1920). The actress Lidia Yavorskaya and the writer Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik overcame moral and social boundaries to assert themselves as successful artists. Their lives intersected with practically all the major theatrical entrepreneurs and artists of the period in Moscow and St. Petersburg, most notably Anton Chekhov.
The opening in the 1880s of private theaters in Moscow and St. Petersburg resulted in an extraordinary flourishing of the dramatic arts, exposing theatergoers to the latest works by both Russian and Western European playwrights. In The Sirens of the Hotel Louvre, Yavorskaya and Shchepkina-Kupernik serve as guides to this remarkable artistic and literary world. Serge Gregory shows how their success in fashioning independent careers reflects the emergence of the theater as one of the few professional paths available for educated women in nineteenth-century Russia who wished to escape the constraints of traditional family life.
More information about this event can be found on the Third Place Books website.