Olga Knipper was a Russian and Soviet actress, one of the founding members of the Moscow Art Theatre, a People’s Artist of the USSR (1937), and the wife of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. She was born into the family of engineer Leonard Knipper and singer and teacher Anna Knipper. In 1871 the family moved to Moscow. Knipper graduated from a private girls’ gymnasium and, after her father’s death, earned her living by giving music lessons. In 1895 she was admitted to the Moscow Imperial Theatre School, and later to the Music and Drama School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society, where she studied in the drama class of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. In 1898, after graduation, she joined the company of the newly founded Moscow Art Theatre and made her debut as Tsarina Irina in the production of “Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich”. Knipper met Anton Chekhov in 1898 during rehearsals of “The Seagull” and “Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich”, and in 1901 they were married. At the Moscow Art Theatre she became one of the leading performers of the Chekhov repertoire, playing Arkadina (“The Seagull”), Elena Andreevna (“Uncle Vanya”), Masha (“Three Sisters”), among others. In addition to Chekhov’s plays, Knipper-Chekhova appeared in works by Ostrovsky, Gorky, Turgenev, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Molière, Tolstoy, and other dramatists. From 1919 to 1922 she was a member of the so‑called Kachalov Group, which toured southern Russia and abroad. Later she took part in a two‑year Moscow Art Theatre tour of Europe and the United States. After returning, she continued to perform on the Moscow Art Theatre stage, gradually moving into more mature character roles. The collection of the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum contains a large number of photographs of the actress both in everyday life and in her roles, as well as personal letters, telegrams, and other materials related to the life and work of Olga Knipper.