Асен Русков - емблема на комичното на оперетната ни сцена (Ескиз към творческия профил на актьора)
Assen Ruskov - Emblem of the Comic on our Operetta Stage (A Sketch to the Creative Profile of the Actor)

Summary/Abstract: Assen Ruskov is one of those amazingly large-scale, unique with their inherent talent and achieved professional perfection phenomena in Bulgarian Theatre (a legend even in his lifetime), for which it is getting increasingly difficult to find a key to interpreting and rationalizing the created by and inherited from him on the stage. A genre antipode to our other operetta legend - the lyricist and soubrette Mimi Balkanska, in the period between the two world wars, Ruskov was (not by chance) our most popular comedy actor, universally acknowledged by the public and the critique as “the king of laughter”, “the master of the grotesque and stage makeup”. He was called “the great Ruskov” and “the Krustio Sarafov of the operetta stage”, “an actor with a hundred faces”, “a great creator of types” and “a comedian with Chaplin-like constructive imagination” -due to the great number of unforgettable types in operettas, musical comedies, farces, vaudevilles and even dramas, re-created by him on the stages of almost all private operetta theatre in the capital (later on the stage of the National Operetta and the State Musical Theatre). His name has been and still is synonym of spontaneous comedy magic, bubbling over from his organic actor’s behaviour - specific articulating, intoning, gesturing, miming, plastic movements; of bursting laughter as a result of his witty parodies and topical improvisations; of his inimitable face mask and perfect costume, in which each detail is pedantically fixed - in support of the entire dazzling and unique scenic image, created by Ruskov. His actor’s technique is universal and all-inclusive, open to any hybrid forms of the comic. Therefore the comedy special line of the actor is so large scale: Ruskov was a bouffe opera (parody) comedian, and a cascade (eccentric) comedian , and a character (type) comedian, and a tragic comedian. In his 250 comic characters - created during his almost 40-year-long ascending stage career, he combined with intelligence and masterly ease the paradoxical with the realistic, the caricature with the grotesque, the parody with the cascade. But in the contemporary research approach to the artistic genius of Assen Ruskov, it is obligatory to mention some newly found historical documents from his personal archive as well as some more precise criteria and assessments of the professional theatre critique of the time, which throw a new and different light upon the familiar facts of his artistic and personal biography.

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