Tim Vasen (1964–2015)

Pushkin Review joins Princeton and Yale universities, and the larger theatrical community, in mourning the loss of Tim Vasen, Head of the Program in Theater at Princeton, who died in a freak fall outside his Brooklyn home at the end of December 2015. He was fifty-one years old. Tim directed Princeton undergraduates in acclaimed revivals of two Pushkin Jubilee projects featured in these pages: the Meyerhold-Prokofiev Boris Godunov (2007; PR 10, 2007) and the Tairov-Prokofiev-Krzhizhanovsky Eugene Onegin (2012; PR 16–17, 2013–14). Tim's passion for Pushkin and for things Russian had led him to study the language, learn Onegin stanzas by heart, and visit Mikhailovskoe deep in snow to obtain footage for theatrical projections. Tim is survived by his parents, brother, wife, two teen-aged children, and thirty years of innovative directing and co-teaching after graduating from Yale in 1993. Among his final projects was a studio course with experienced actors that dramatized Krzhizhanovsky's short stories (Spring 2015), and supervising the production of Bulgakov's Zoyka's Apartment as the Princeton Fall show (November 2015).