Gerken-Rusova, Natalia

Gerken-Rusova, Natalia [Ґеркен-Русова, Наталія], b 14 June 1897 in Kyiv, d 28 December 1989 in Rawdon, Quebec, Canada. Scenographer, painter, and journalist. She studied art at the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts in Kyiv under Mykhailo Boichuk, Vasyl H. Krychevsky, and Heorhii Narbut. She continued her studies in Florence, Nice, and Paris, where she graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1927, and worked as a set designer in Paris, Prague, Brno, Bratislava, and Bucharest. She lived in Bucharest with her husband Yurii Rusov from 1930 to 1941; there she also worked as an interior decorator for the king of Romania. She is the author of Heroïchnyi teatr (The Heroic Theater, 1939, 1957), the plays Shevchenko u Repninykh (Shevchenko at the Repnins, 1947) and Sviato dvokh epokh (The Fete of Two Epochs, 1949), and articles in émigré periodicals. Her art works were exhibited several times in Europe. After the Second World War she lived in Montreal.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]