Elina Bystritskaya, a Russian actress best known for her leading role in the film version of the Nobel Prize-winning novel And Quiet Flows the Don, has died in Moscow.
She was 91.
Bystritskaya was born in Kyiv in 1928 and graduated from the Kyiv Theater Arts Institute in 1953, after which she began her career at theaters in Vilnius and Moscow.
Bystritskaya gained wide popularity for her role as Aksinya in director Sergei Gerasimov's 1958 film version of Mikhail Sholokhov's novel, about Cossacks living in the Don River valley during World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War.