Karina Dobrotvorskaya

The future art historian, film critic, and one of the creators of a Russian glossy magazine was born on September 25, 1966, in Leningrad, to the family of engineers Anatoly Solomonovich and Maya Iosifovna Zaks. “If one sets aside genealogies, with which things here are not simple, then aristocracy is upbringing. At least for me. Politeness, punctuality, goodwill, naturalness.” In 1982, she entered the Theater Studies Department of the Leningrad State Institute of Theater, Music, and Cinematography (LGITMiK, now the St. Petersburg State Academy of Theater Arts). After graduating from the institute, she firmly decided to apply to postgraduate studies; however, on the way to academic heights, one bureaucratic obstacle could have arisen — the notorious fifth item. The laudatory reviews from her teachers, publications and lectures on the history and criticism of Soviet cinema that did not go unnoticed, as well as the overall political situation in the country, settled the matter in her favor — in 1987, K.A. Dobrotvorskaya enrolled in postgraduate studies at the Department of Foreign Art and at the same time began teaching the history of Western European theater. In 1992, she defended her dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Art History, devoted to the theatrical culture of European modernism and the work of Isadora Duncan. While still a student, she met the young and already well-known film critic and screenwriter Sergei Dobrotvorsky (1959–1997). On March 16, 1991, they married, becoming one of the brightest creative couples in intellectual St. Petersburg. In 1997, due to difficult family circumstances, she was forced to leave Sergei Dobrotvorsky and move to Moscow, where she married journalist Alexei Tarkhanov, head of the culture department of the daily newspaper Kommersant, to whom she gave birth to two children: Ivan (born in 1997) and Sophia (born in 2002). Since 1997, she worked at the newspaper Russian Telegraph, and later as deputy editor-in-chief of Premier magazine, until in 1998 she was invited to the position of culture editor and deputy editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Vogue. Karina Dobrotvorskaya’s дальнейшая судьба became closely tied to the Condé Nast empire: after serving at Vogue for