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The fantastic, satirical, comic plays of the eighteenth-century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806) found renewed popularity in the early twentieth century. Princess Turandot, a fantasy of exotic, lethal love set in an imagined Peking of the imperial past, is today perhaps best known as the inspiration for Giacomo Puccini’s last opera, which premiered posthumously in 1926. Notable adaptations of Gozzi’s Princess Turandot were staged by Max Reinhardt with sets by Ernst Stein in Berlin in 1911 and by Yevgeny Vakhtangov with sets by Ignaty Nivinsky in Moscow in 1922. The four semi-abstract stage sets presented here by the Kyiv-born artist Du-Bas (pseudonym for Igor Uzhinsky; 1896–1954) bear the influence of Vakhtangov’s 1922 Moscow production. Prior to the First World War, Du-Bas was active at the Odessa Opera Theater. Thereafter, he worked as a stage designer across the Soviet Union, including in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (a constituent union of the USSR established in 1924; current-day Uzbekistan). From 1929 to 1932, Du-Bas worked for the State Music and Drama Theater in Andijan, Uzbek SSR, the theater for which these sets were prepared in 1931.
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