Zarkhi, Aleksandr

Born Feb. 5 (18), 1908, in St. Petersburg. Soviet film director and screenwriter. People’s Artist of the USSR (1969). Member of the CPSU since 1948.

Zarkhi graduated from the Leningrad Technicum of Cinema Art in 1927, and in 1929 with I. E. Kheifits (with whom he worked until the 1950’s) headed the first Komsomol production group in a Leningrad factory, Sovkino (now the LenfiTm Studio), which produced films featuring Soviet youth—for instance, Against the Wind (1930), Midday (1931), and the comedy Hectic Days (1935). Zarkhi and Kheifits’s film The Baltic Deputy (1937) describes with historical depth, psychological truth, and great artistic power how an eminent Russian scientist, Professor Polezhaev (played by N. P. Cherkasov), joined the revolution. Another important work by the two men, A Member of the Government (1940), fol-lows a peasant girl (played by V. P. Maretskaia) along the difficult path from a hired farm laborer to a deputy of the Supreme Soviet. Zarkhi directed other films with Kheifits, including They Call Him Sukhe-Bator (1942), Malakhov Mound (1944), and the documentary The Defeat of Japan (1945). At the Mosfil’m Studio, Zarkhi directed Height (1957) and People on the Bridge (1960) and did the screen version of L. N. Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1968). He received the State Prize of the USSR in 1941 and 1946 and was awarded three orders as well as various medals.