Queer Places:
Donskoi Monastery Cemetery
Moscow, Moscow Federal City, Russia
Sofya
Evgenievna Gollidey aka Sonya Holliday (December 2, 1894 – September 6,
1934) was a Russian actress who played a role in The
Green Ring. The role of the Infanta in Pavel Antokolsky’s play “The
Infanta Doll”, was written specifically for Sonya.
Sofia Evgenieva Gollidey was born on December 2, 1894 in Moscow and was baptized in the Vladimir Church in Svechny Lane. Sonechka’s father, an Russified Englishman, Eugene Georgievich Gollidey, a student of Anton Rubinstein, a famous pianist, was an honorary citizen of St. Petersburg. Her mother, Vera Pavlovna Rizzoni, daughter of the famous artist Pavel Rizzoni, taught piano at the Pavlovsk Institute. She was familiar with the Scriabin and Sofronitsky family. Close friends of Sonya herself were Alla Tarasova and Anastasia Zueva. She was a talented student of Evgeny Vakhtangov.
S.E. Holiday graduated from the St. Petersburg Mariinsky Gymnasium and went to work in the theater. She was absolutely incredibly talented - the actress, as they say, by the grace of God. But because of its very small stature and children's appearance, it could not be fully realized on the stage. She was offered the roles of girls and boys, and in her talent, in her creative and human nature, she was a heroine. She needed to put her whole passionate and troubled soul into the role: “I would give my soul - in order to give my soul!”
In 1918– 1920 Marina Tsvetaeva's work with an avantgarde Moscow theatre group, the Third Studio, led to her intimacy with Holliday in the spring of 1919. Their apparently platonic, but intensely erotic love affair was described by Tsvetaeva much later in the prose work ‘The Tale of Sonechka’ (which has not yet been translated into English) and in a cycle of lyrics, ‘Poems to Sonechka’. "I loved her more than anyone in the world," Tsvetaeva later wrote, recalling the intensity of her infatuation.
Holliday married Mikhail A. Abramovsky, an actor and director of one of the provincial theaters. He loved her faithfully and dearly, but they were not happy. When she got sick, he began to drink.
At the competition of performers of Russian classics, Holliday won the first prize for reading A. Chekhov's novel “A House with a Mezzanine”. It would seem that her creative life finally got better, but then an incurable disease overtook her. She died in a hospital. Alla Tarasova, Sonya’s husband, and Sergey Sergeyevich took her to the crematorium.
Information about the day of her death is contradictory. In one source it is called September 6, 1934, in another - 1935. She died of liver cancer. A niche with ashes of S.E. Golliday is at the Donskoi Monastery Cemetery in Moscow. Columbarium 10 (the outer side of the wall from the side of Ordzhonikidze St.). Section 46.
A poem from the series “Poems to Sonya” was written in 1919 and is dedicated to actress Sofya Gollidey. In a letter to Tsvetaeva dated July 1, 1919, S. E. Gollidey requested: “Marina, when I die, write these verses on my cross: So it ended with the refrain: -“ My little one!”
In 2003, a detailed and detailed book by Galina Brodskaya, Sonechka Golleyday. Life and acting fate, was published
My published books:
