Obituary of Olga Mityashina

OLGA MITYASHINA, veteran actress, stage manager and costumer of the Komedy Theatre, Leningrad, USSR, passed away peacefully and quietly January 4, 2010 in her home in Blue Hill, Maine. She was 90 years old. Olga was born July 20, 1919 in the northern, very rural area of Siberia. After completing her secondary education, she was accepted to an acting school in Archangel in northern Russia. After completing her studies, she auditioned for a theatre in the middle Asian Republic of Tajikistan, thousands of miles away from her home. A group of Russian actors were forming a new Russian Language Theatre there and that is where she met her husband of 65 years, Yakov Bourakovsky. When the Second World War broke out, they both volunteered to go to the front lines to entertain the troops. After the war, they were accepted into the prestigious Komedy Theatre and moved to Leningrad where she worked for more than 35 years. She had a daughter, Elena Bourakovsky who continued the family legacy working at the Komedy Theatre as its costume designer. When her granddaughter Anna was born, Olga retired from the theatre to help raise her, thus enabling Elena to work full-time in the theatre. Anna can testify that she was a stern taskmaster bringing out Anna's wonderful talents on the violin. In 1990 she and her husband were invited to visit Maine where her daughter was a J1 professor at the University of Maine in Orono. In 1996 she and her husband received their green cards to live permanently in America. She moved in with her daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law in Blue Hill, Maine where she embraced gardening, rural life, puppy raising, mushroom hunting and helping with the theatre productions of her son-in-law, Bill Raiten. She performed in the Maine Center for the Arts in a production of "The effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds" where audiences said, "once she was on stage I could not take my eyes off of her". She helped with many costumes for the New Surry Theatre and the many chores that make a family united and comfortable. She outlived her husband by a year and a half and will be sadly missed by her daughter, granddaughter, son-in-law and all of the lives she touched living here in America.