16 Facts About Alexander Dovzhenko

Alexander Dovzhenko is often cited as one of the most important early Soviet filmmakers, alongside Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, as well as being a pioneer of Soviet montage theory.

Oleksandr Dovzhenko was born in the hamlet of Viunyshche located in the Sosnitsky Uyezd of the Chernihiv Governorate of the Russian Empire, to Petro Semenovych Dovzhenko and Odarka Yermolayivna Dovzhenko.

Alexander Dovzhenko served as an assistant to the Ambassador in Warsaw as well as Berlin.

Alexander Dovzhenko turned to film in 1926 when he landed in Odessa.

Alexander Dovzhenko's ambitious drive led to the production of his second-ever screenplay, Vasya the Reformer.

Alexander Dovzhenko gained greater success with Zvenigora in 1928, the story of a young adventurer who becomes a bandit and counter-revolutionary and comes to a bad end, while his virtuous brother spends the film fighting for the revolution, which established him as a major filmmaker of his era.

Alexander Dovzhenko's following "Ukraine Trilogy", are his most well-known works in the West.

Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth has been praised as one of the greatest silent movies ever made.

The poet, Demyan Bedny, attacked its "defeatism" over three columns of the newspaper Izvestia, and Alexander Dovzhenko was forced to re-edit it.

Stalin approved the project but 'suggested' that Alexander Dovzhenko's next project, after Aerograd, should be dramatized biography of the born in Ukraine communist guerrilla fighter, Mykola Shchors.

Later, Alexander Dovzhenko was summoned to the Kremlin again, and told by Stalin that he was a "free man", who was not under "any obligation" to make the film about Shchors.

Alexander Dovzhenko was then summoned in front of the boss of the Soviet film industry Boris Shumyatsky to be told that the script contained serious political errors.

Alexander Dovzhenko later told friends about one frightening arrival in Stalin's office, when he refused to speak to Dovchenko, and Beria accused him of joining a nationalist conspiracy.

Khrushchev claimed that with his rise to power after the death of Stalin and the execution of the police chief Lavrentiy Beria, the persecution of Alexander Dovzhenko ended, and he was able to "live a useful active life" again.

Alexander Dovzhenko embarked on two projects, a film adaption of the novella, Taras Bulba, by Gogol and Poem About a Sea, neither of which was completed before Dovzhenko died of a heart attack on November 25,1956, in his dacha in Peredelkino - though the latter was completed by his widow Yulia Solntseva.

Over a 20-year career, Alexander Dovzhenko personally directed only seven films.