Life in Paris

In 1923, he married Alexandra Alexandrovna Grinevskya (1899–1976), who had been sent to Paris in her childhood because she was the illegitimate daughter of a St. Petersburg dignitary.^[5] In order to save the name of his aristocratic family, Alexandra's father had not married the mother of his child. Instead, the baby was taken away from her mother at the age of two and adopted by her father's sister Katia who kept a musical salon in Paris. Her mother was given a ticket back to Poland, her native country.

When she grew up, Grinevskaya left her aunt to become one of the main actresses in the avant-garde Pitoeff Theater. When Konstantin Stanislavski came to Paris and saw her acting, he offered to have her go back to Russia but Alexandra refused, remaining by Alexeieff's side. Their daughter Svetlana was born in 1923.

Alexeieff became well known in this period shortly after illustrating his first rare books. However, he lost one of his lungs while using nitric acid to do his aquatints and was forced to spend two years in a sanatorium. During that time Grinevsky-Alexeieff took his tools and taught herself how to engrave and became the bread winner for the family.^[6] While the invention of the pinscreen is often credited to Claire Parker and Alexeieff, Grinevsky-Alexeieff was the first to help Alexeieff build the pinscreen, with the help of her eight-year-old daughter.

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