About the book: 1977 / The hero of this book was already proclaimed great during his lifetime. For more than twenty years, Alexey Semenovich Yakovlev reigned on the St. Petersburg stage at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries. For the first time he brought Shakespeare's Hamlet and Othello and Schiller's Karl Moor to the Russian stage, and played in the tragedies of Sumarokov, Knyazhnin, Ozerov, Voltaire, and Racine. The highest point of his creative rise was during the Patriotic War of 1812, when he carried the entire patriotic repertoire on his shoulders. Both the creative and personal life of Yakovlev passed before his contemporaries as the life of a romantic hero. The book was written in the genre of documentary-fiction biographies, with extensive use of material first found in archives.