Grigory Gnesin was a Russian and Soviet singer, dramatic actor, writer, poet, translator, bibliophile, and enlightener. He was born on June 17, 1884, in Rostov-on-Don, the youngest brother in the Gnesin family. He was the brother of Mikhail, Yevgenia, Maria, Yelena, Yelizaveta, and Olga Gnesin. He graduated from the Petrovsky Realschule in Rostov.
From 1902 he studied chemistry at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute and was also a student at the universities of Darmstadt and Geneva. In 1903 he received a Doctor of Natural Sciences degree in chemistry from the University of Geneva. Having inherited vocal gifts from his mother, he possessed a beautiful baritone and regularly performed in amateur circles, singing Russian romances, Italian songs, and famous opera arias. He also studied singing intermittently in St. Petersburg. In 1905, after an audition with Conservatory director Alexander Glazunov, he could already have been admitted to the conservatory, but the revolutionary events prevented this.
Gnesin was a vividly and broadly gifted man, marked by both enthusiasm and adventurousness. He traveled widely and often took part in dangerous and turbulent events. In 1903 he went from Geneva to Italy to study singing and performed in traveling commedia dell'arte troupes. After returning to Russia, he studied singing in St. Petersburg and took part in various amateur and professional productions as a dramatic actor. During the Revolution of 1905-1907 he spent a year and a half in prison, then lived on the Karelian Isthmus. He was arrested and exiled in 1908, and from 1909 he was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
After returning from Italy in 1910, he lived in Crimea, Alushta, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. In Finland, in Kuokkala, he associated closely with Vsevolod Meyerhold, Korney Chukovsky, Nikolai Kulbin, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who drew his pencil portrait. In 1916-1919 he worked in Murmansk on railway construction and in Petrozavodsk in a children's home. From 1919 until the end of his life he lived in Petrograd-Leningrad, working as an artist, man of letters, and translator.
In the 1930s, on Leningrad radio, he hosted the popular children's program "Uncle Grisha Tells Stories" and managed the music library of the Leningrad Choral Capella. He was the author of opera libretto translations, including Giovanni Paisiello's The Barber of Seville for the Stanislavsky Opera Theater in Moscow, as well as translations of Italian songs, numerous poems, the book Memoirs of a Wandering Singer: Essays on Italy, and musical works. He was also one of the largest bibliophiles in Leningrad.
Gnesin was arrested on November 2, 1937, and shot on February 4, 1938, after being accused of being a Latvian spy during the so-called "Polish operation." He died in Leningrad and was rehabilitated in 1956. Because of the confiscation of property after his arrest, only a very small part of his literary and epistolary legacy survived. Some of the remaining materials were later transferred by his daughter to the Gnesin Museum.
In 2007, the Italian philologist Stefania Sini, who studied Gnesin's fate and translated fragments from Memoirs of a Wandering Singer, discovered in the Manuscripts Department of the Russian National Library a previously unknown large collection of his works, including plays, poems, and translations, among them an album containing 450 poems. These texts had been deposited in the library during the siege in 1943. In 2019 a book was published bringing together various materials from his literary legacy, including Memoirs of a Wandering Singer, radio stories about composers, plays, and poems.
His memory has been honored in later years with commemorative markers. In 2015 a memorial plaque was installed in Rostov-on-Don on the house where the Gnesin family had lived at the end of the nineteenth century. On August 3, 2019, as part of the public program "Last Address," a memorial plaque dedicated to him was unveiled on a house on the 6th Line of Vasilyevsky Island in St. Petersburg.