Alexandre Alexeieff work location Paris
Cadet Corps School
Alexeieff entered the Cadet School of Saint Petersburg at the age of seven. His favorite course was drawing. His art teacher taught the students how to draw from memory. He would pass various objects, such as a violin, through the class, remove it and ask the students to draw it. This early training became extremely valuable for Alexeieff later on in life when he became an illustrator. The teacher would also ask them to portray events such as dance or a holiday feast, or read them text and have the students illustrate it, a task Alexeieff particularly enjoyed.While in the Cadet School, Alexeieff founded a literary magazine which contained works created by students. His friends did not take this project seriously. However, Alexeieff was able to petition for funds and also obtain access to the library which was very valuable to him.His older brother Vladimir was also a student at the Cadet school. They rarely met but their names were engraved on the wall of the school for having been the best students in their class. Nikolay, who was deaf in one ear, never attended the academy with his brothers.
When the Russian Revolution of 1917 began with general strikes in St. Petersburg, school was closed for three days and Alexeieff returned home to Lesnoi by train. However his brothers Nikolai and Vladimir had not returned and his mother was in a state of panic. Eventually, his brothers did return having been caught as bystanders in a fight between the police and revolutionaries. Shortly thereafter, he received word that Tsar Nicholas the Second had been arrested and abdicated. When Alexeieff was in his teens, he was attracted to communism. However, the arrest and execution of his mother's brother by the Bolsheviks led him to rethink his position.
In 1921, Alexeieff was forced to leave the city of Ufa where he had spent the summer with his maternal uncle in order to cross Siberia with a group of cadets. They landed in Vladivostok, where they took the last boat of the Tsar which was in the harbor. The boat went to Egypt where it was purchased by the British who kept the crew in order to transport coal from Southampton to Cairo. During one of the crossings, a storm forced them to anchor in the French Riviera where Alexeieff jumped ship holding on to a letter of recommendation to the Russian set designer Sergei Soudeikin who was living in Paris.  Alexeieff started by working designing and painting sets for the Pioteff Theater. He lived in Montparnasse, a bohemian area of Paris.
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