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Rostislav Mstislavovitch Doboujinsky was born in St Petersburg, Russian Empire. He was the eldest son of ballet and opera designer Mstislav Valerianovich Doboujinsky, who co-founded the Le Monde de l'art movement - mir istkusstva - with Alexandre Benois and Sergei Diaghilev.
Introduced from childhood to the world of the arts by his father, he took classical secondary studies in Russia and attended the Higher School of Fine Arts in Petrograd. In 1920 he worked as assistant designer at the Gorky theatre in Petrograd, in 1921 received his first stage design credit and in 1922 worked as set and costume designer for avant-garde and research group "Le Jeune Theater".
In 1924, the family fled to Lithuania where the young Doboujinsky was employed at the Kaunas theatre. A year later Rostislav moved to France with his wife Lydia, where he worked as a set designer and Lydia founded a fashion house which supplied costumes to ballets in Sweden and Monte Carlo. In 1939, Doboujinsky designed the costumes for Ondine, then worked with Christian Bérard, Leonor Fini, Lila de Nobili, and founded his own set workshop with Lydia. He created the mouse masks and costumes for Rudolf Nureyev's The Nutcracker (1967), the costumes for The Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden (1968) and the animal masks for The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1970). He achieved international success with his masks for The Heartaches of an English Cat by Alfredo Arias (1977).
Lila de Nobili had brought Doboujinsky over from Paris to make animal masks for the first act of The Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden, where he talked with Richard Goodwin and Christine Edzard, the producer and writers for The Tales of Beatrix Potter. In October 1969, he agreed to make a sample mask for The Tales' mouse character 'Hunca Munca'. He remade the mask thirteen times over the winter, working until he was satisfied with the fourteenth attempt in February 1970. With Christine Edzard, Doboujinsky made the original masks for The Tales of Beatrix Potter film, made of bike helmets, polystyrene, hand-sewn hair and vision holes covered in gauze. The masks had to be recreated for the stage, with a larger field of vision for the dancers. The artist used moulds of the originals, drilling hundreds of holes at the front and covering the mask in nylon hair.
A modest man, Doboujinsky referred to himself as a "jack of all trades", "only an amateur, only a dabbler" and was referred to by the entire profession as 'Tonton' ('uncle'). Alfredo Arias and René de Ceccatty paid homage to Doboujinsky in Les Peines de coeur d'une chat française (1999) in the form of a big bear named Djinsky.
At the age of eighty, and in collaboration with Sabine Dutilh, he designed the sets, costumes and masks for Arias and Kado Kostzer's Sortileges in 1983. His design work featured details such as ermine tails along the hem of the red curtains, and a grotesque Jester's costume. During his long life in France, Doboujinsky maintained his status as Lithuanian political refugee. He applied for, and obtained, French nationality a few months before he died in Paris on 23 June 2000.
