A geography teacher beats up his adopted daughter. In the Sverdlovsk region, investigators are investigating a scandalous story: a woman brutally beat her adopted daughter
Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Born in 1928 in Spassk, Primorsky Krai. In 1948 he graduated from the Sverdlovsk Art College. Since 1950, he has been a participant of city, regional, zonal, republican, all-Union and international exhibitions, a multiple winner of domestic and foreign book competitions. Since 1956 he has been a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. In 1973 he was awarded the honorary title of Honored Artist of the RSFSR. In 1995, the Prize was awarded to them. G.S. Mosin. 1998 Governor's Award Sverdlovsk region for outstanding achievements in the field of literature and art. In 2005 he was awarded the Gold Medal with the motto "Worthy" of the Russian Academy of Arts. In 2007 he was awarded the academic title Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Arts. In 2007 he was awarded the title of "Honorary Citizen of Yekaterinburg". In 2008, the Prize of the Governor of the Sverdlovsk Region was awarded for the second time for his great personal contribution to the development of fine arts and many years of fruitful activity. Works in book and easel graphics. Favorite techniques are etching, soft varnish, lithography, as well as watercolor, gouache, tempera... Lives and works in Yekaterinburg. The works are in the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkin, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, art museums in Yekaterinburg, Ivanovo, Magnitogorsk, Nizhny Tagil, Novosibirsk, Perm, Saratov, Chelyabinsk, Yaroslavl. the Prague National Gallery, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Museum of Modern Art in Cologne, the Museum of J.W. Goethe and F. Schiller in Weimar, the Shakespeare Center in Stratfort-on-Avon, as well as other public and private collections in Russia, Austria, Germany, Israel, Spain, Italy, USA and France. The collection of the Irbit Pushkin Museum is the largest and most complete collection of the artist's works.
Vitaly Volovich
G. Golynets, S. Golynets
The best evidence of Volovich is the portraits painted by his friends and associates Gennady Mosin and Misha Brusilovsky. The first shows a young man protesting full of energy, ready, like Don Quixote, to repulse the forces of evil, on the second - a tired, but not broken master philosopher. In the very appearance of Volovich there is something opposed to the “man of the masses”. Early spiritually matured, he always strove to be independent both from those in power and from fashionable social fads and social illusions. Nevertheless, the artist was shaped by time. His childhood and youth fell on the 30-40s, with their political tragedies and the heroism of the Great Patriotic War, the difficulties of everyday life and the total suppression of individuality. The passion for drawing originally lived in Vitaly Lovich along with a passion for history and literature. The future artist grew up and was brought up in a literary environment1. The world of literary images has always been for him, as it were, a second reality, both opposed to real life, and internally compared with it. After graduating from the Sverdlovsk Art College in 1948, the twenty-year-old Volovich immediately devoted himself to the book2. In conscientious pen drawings, in intimate landscape and animal motifs, it is difficult to predict the future creator of monumental images, an artist of a socio-philosophical orientation. But it was precisely the chamber, lyrical themes that made it possible in those years to protect oneself from the onslaught of official ideology.
Pantry of the Sun has been published countless times, and I have Pantries in all sizes and colors, but yours is the best. These words, written by Mikhail Prishvin in 1953, supported the novice illustrator, who then still had to find his own path, which coincided in time with the approach of a new stage in our history - the thaw period. From now on, a person did not want to feel like a cog in the state machine. But this did not weaken civic aspirations, but, on the contrary, strengthened them. The affirmation of personality and at the same time the pathos of collectivism was expressed in the art of the turn of the 50s and 60s by the so-called severe style, which tried in a new way to combine the truth of life with lofty ideals. The harsh style contrasted the external nature-likeness of pictures of embellished reality with expression, the activity of a generalized artistic form, which corresponded to the resolute desire characteristic of those years for the speedy transformation of the world. The stern style manifested itself vividly in Sverdlovsk, the city with which Volovich's entire conscious life is connected and in which a truly creative environment has been developing since the late 50s. Volovich in this environment was to take a special place, giving an example of an ascetic attitude to his work. He tirelessly improved his skills, worked daily for ten or more hours, drew a lot from life, especially while traveling around the country, trips to Czechoslovakia, Germany, China, Korea, studied in museums and libraries. Time itself was moving towards the artist: entire layers of Russian and foreign culture were reevaluated, forgotten names were revealed, previously unthinkable expositions were unfolded. Both the legacy of the old masters and the achievements of modern art, from the monumental generalizations of Rockwell Kent to Picasso's cubism, were perceived by Volovich's generation not abstractly, from the outside, but as a source of their own searches. In the late 50s - early 60s, Volovich enthusiastically illustrated legends and fairy tales different peoples: the Chinese fairy tale "The Monkey and the Turtle"3, the Arabic "Caliph the Stork", the Czech "Shepherd and the Knight", the Nenets "The Defeated Whale", "Mansi Tales". The works of folk art attracted the young artist with their wholeness of worldview, clarity of aesthetic ideas. Fairy tales and legends allowed him to show his imagination, feel the atmosphere of different countries and eras and convey it, unobtrusively using the techniques of past art in illustrations. From now on, Volovich does not transfer sketches from nature into the book, but transforms them, subordinating the plane of the book page, striving for the stylistic unity of the image, ornament and font. The search for expressiveness prompted experimentation in different techniques: from drawing with a pen and watercolor, the artist came to engraving on linoleum, the lapidary language of which clearly revealed the features of a severe style. Editions of fairy tales with illustrations by Volovich were addressed to children, but he did not become a children's artist. Reflecting the stylistic trends of their time, these thin notebooks turned out to be a school of professionalism for Volovich and prepared him for work on other publications. For the first time, the artist encountered the problem of a large book ensemble when illustrating and designing Pavel Bazhov's "Malachite Box" (1963), a publication that included nine tales. At one time, the writer complained about the illustrators for the fact that they "did not look in a fantastic direction." In Volovich's linocuts, created not without the influence of modern Lithuanian graphics, the magical images of the Ural legends are raised above everyday life. With a dynamic composition, displacement of spatial extensions, the artist, without imitating the pattern of a stone, strengthened the associations between a colored print and a cut of malachite or jasper.
Despite Volovich's repeated victories at republican and all-Union reviews of the art of the book, local authorities were suspicious of the artist's searches and experiments. Dissatisfaction intensified after the party leaders visited an exhibition in the Moscow Manege at the end of 1962: they began to look for their formalists in Sverdlovsk. Things got to the point that Volovich, at the request of the ideological department of the regional party committee, was deprived of a diploma received at the all-Union competition for 50 best books for illustrations for The Defeated Whale. Successfully started cooperation with the Sverdlovsk book publishing house was interrupted for several years. But Volovich was already known outside the Urals. In 1965, the publishing house " Fiction "Published with his illustrations as a separate book Gorky's "Song of the Falcon" and "Song of the Petrel". The romantic interpretation of revolutionary events, the poster montage of allegorical and real images, the expressiveness of the silhouette form make these engravings on cardboard a typical example of a severe style. Following them, in the same technique, the artist executed illustrations for Robert Stevenson's ballad Heather Honey (1965), specially designed for the International Book Art Exhibition in Leipzig and awarded a silver medal there. The thin book, emphatically elongated vertically, included a series of spreads in which two worlds are contrasted: naive, touching dwarf mead makers, whose scarlet figures, like heather flowers, form a living moving ornament on snow-white pages, and ruthless conquerors, perceived by a poorly divided black-and-gray mass. The illustrations for "Heather Honey" seemed to concentrate all the previous experience of the young artist: a youthful passion for romantic literature of the 19th century, through which European antiquity and the Middle Ages were revealed to him, work on a children's book, contact with samples of folk fantasy. At the same time, new engravings spoke of the approach of maturity, in them the artist found his own theme, they indicated the main focus of creativity: denunciation of violence, cruelty, glorification of spiritual fortitude. We call Volovich a sixties man. This is true. But it must be borne in mind that he found himself in full measure only in the second half of the decade, when the social situation in the country had already changed in many ways. In a certain sense, the position of the artist began to improve: nit-picking about formal searches and innovations softened even in the provinces, it would seem that the view of art became wider, but at the same time, the romantic moods born of the thaw disappeared and political dictate intensified. It was during this period that Volovich's social sensitivity manifested itself: he did not abandon the high ideals of his youth, but from now on affirmed them through tragic collisions. In the mirror of history, in the mirror of world literary classics, the artist sees the burning problems of our life. “For me, the principle of working in two dimensions is important - the time of the events of the book and the one in which I live. The ideas of time, felt as personal, give, it seems to me, the opportunity to look at the past with fresh, current eyes,” explains Volovich. No, the illustrator does not resort to any external updating. A great connoisseur of the history of material culture, weapons, architecture, he is able to convey the color of the depicted era with selected, characteristic details and at the same time emphasize in the tragedies of Shakespeare, Goethe, Aeschylus, in the medieval epic and chivalric poetry the thoughts that sound relevant today. The vicissitudes of the plot also fade into the background for the artist, and the details of the portrait characteristics, the images created by him acquire an impersonal character, become carriers of eternal ideas. In Volovich's interpretation, the heroes of Othello are perceived as symbols of human passions and suffering - the tragedy of love, faced with envy, slander, and ruthlessness. In this series, the artist clarified the method of chiaroscuro stylization he had chosen earlier. Widely known in medieval art - a fresco, an icon - this technique, creatively comprehended by Volovich, became perhaps the main expressive means of the master: the image is recreated by a miraculous line - the border between light and darkness, it vibrates, now plunging into darkness, then flashing with a sharp glare. The forms of the severe style remained organic for Volovich, but his courageous art was enriched with new features. Having retained the flatness of the image, the feeling of a book page, the master moved on to more complex spatial and plastic solutions, which also led to a change in the execution technique. Once again demonstrating the possibilities of engraving on cardboard in the illustrations for Othello (1966), Volovich then turned to classical etching, and a little later to lithography. In the illustrations for Shakespeare's tragedy "Richard III" (1966), the artist is outwardly restrained and even rational. The etching needle thickens the strokes into a black grid of shadows, draws a checkered floor, giving a hint of a breakthrough of the plane into the depths, and the horizontals of the sky, on the contrary, solidify this plane. In such conditional airless space, grotesque, theatrical characters of the historical chronicle and symbolic objects acquire materiality: the royal crown, assassins' daggers, the scales of justice, the executioner's axe. Interpreting "Richard III" as a political tragedy, Volovich consistently exposed the bloody path of its hero to
authorities.
The etchings for Shakespeare's tragedy remind us that, along with literature, the theater was a source of inspiration for Volovich. The artist is attracted to works of dramaturgy. And not only in the illustrations for them, but also in most of the compositions, the conventionality of the stage platform and the theatricality of mise-en-scenes are taken aback. "The whole world is acting" - the words of Terence, inscribed on Shakespeare's "Globe", Volovich could make the motto of his work. Appreciating this feature of the artist's talent, he was repeatedly invited to design performances in theaters - folk and academic, dramatic and musical, local and metropolitan. However, he, despite his love for the stage, for the theatrical environment, despite the fact that he himself was once going to be an actor, refused these proposals. Obviously, Volovich does not need co-authors. In books and easel compositions, he creates his performances, consonant with the search for modern theater4. The tragedy of Volovich's worldview grew from year to year. The inexorable fate pursuing a person becomes the main theme of illustrations for the Icelandic and Irish sagas (1968), where people are represented in outer space woven into a tight ball with sinister chimeras. However, even here the artist retained his ethical position and, having entered into a controversy with the text of the sagas, which reflected the views of the tribal society, opposed the cult of brute force with bright human feelings. The principle of active interpretation of the classics is also carried out in the illustrations for "The Romance of Tristan and Isolde" by Joseph Bedier (1972), awarded in 1976 at the International Exhibition in Brno with a bronze medal. In this case, the literary material itself contributed to this: the original text of the twelfth century has not survived, the versions that have come down to us reflected the ideas and tastes of the time when they were created, in some more connected with the ancient Celtic epic, in others with courtly knightly poetry. Volovich followed Wagner's reading of the novel and intensified the dark, tragic notes. The disunity of the characters, their impossibility to unite and the selfless dream of happiness - this is the main idea of the graphic series created by the artist of the 20th century. For its plastic expression, Volovich resorts to a technique he has grown fond of - to the repetition in all illustrations of a single construction scheme: the characters are fettered and alienated from each other by frontally located stone walls and arches, behind which a deserted distance opens up. Lithographic sfumato, roundness of forms, replacing the rigidity of the edges characteristic of previous works, made the sheets more spatial, the details more voluminous, and at the same time even greater monumentality was achieved. In Volovich's lithographs there is no captivating artlessness of the legend. While the novel is replete with colorful descriptions of battles, duels, feasts, hunting, as if intended for pictorial embodiment, the graphics, conveying a sense of the early Middle Ages and the harsh Cornish landscape, limit themselves to stingy means. In choosing topics, Volovich did not adhere strictly to the logic of plot development, omitted significant episodes, passed by many characters. Actually, the illustrative function is mostly performed by screensavers, and page illustrations serve as a metaphorical expression of ongoing events, their content is revealed not so much while reading, but when thinking about what has been read, remembering it. Entering art at a time when the problems of the ensemble solution of the book became topical, Volovich, in the works of the turn of the 50s and 60s, strove for the decorative unity of its elements. He always kept an attentive attitude to the layout and design of the publication, but the specific issues of book art are relegated to the background for him. Already at the end of the 1960s, a trend appeared in Volovich's work, which at that time was designated as the "decimation" of book graphics.
The artist felt cramped in the book: lithographs and etchings of the 70s, inspired by pagan mythology, medieval poetry and modern literature, are perceived as independent works. Sometimes they took on dimensions unusual for graphics and were formed according to the laws of monumental art into triptychs and polyptychs (“Fear and Despair in the Third Empire” based on the Zongs to the play by Bertolt Brecht, 1970; “The Theater of the Absurd, or Metamorphoses of Fascism” based on the tragic farce of Eugene Ionesco " Rhino, 1974; Conquerors, 1975). But more often they formed easel multi-sheet thematic series, work on which continued in subsequent decades. For many artists of the Volovich generation, the language of allegory was the only way to tell about the burning problems of our time. Thus, the Middle Ages, with empty knightly shells, burning books, perishing poets and scientists, became Volovich's unfolded symbol of the anti-human regime.
The motifs of the circus have occupied a special place in the master's work since the 1970s. The love for this kind of spectacular art, which turned out to be no less strong than the love for the theater, gave rise to a series of etchings, and later gouache and tempera. The artist, who wished to leave the circle of familiar themes and compositional solutions, was captured by the colorfulness, carnivalism of the circus performance, where “everything is possible”, where the work of artists on a dangerous edge makes the heart skip a beat with fear, where in clown interludes the joke is through tears, where self-disclosure and hoax life and creativity are inseparable. At first, Volovich came into contact with the Lotrek tradition of the grotesque, but still directly natural experience of the performance, but soon the theme of the circus sounded like an allegory. A kind of overture to the series was the sheet "Musical Eccentric" (1974). Against a grey-black oscillating background, a figure in a clown costume rises, between whose dancing shoes, rapidly shrinking to a low horizon line, a chess track runs. In forked hands - harmonica, clarinet and lute. white mask, obeying the movement of another hand that has arisen above the right shoulder, turns horizontally and, as it were, blows into the raised bugle. The composition merged the emptiness of the stage space of "Richard" and the cosmic nature of the elements of "Sag". Pozem here is at the same time the earth and the arena, the vibrating haze of the background is the sky and infinity, absorbing the theatrical curtain. In the plastic solution of the "Musical Eccentric" something universal is affirmed, and at the same time, for the first time, a lyrical, personal note sounds so clearly. Blackness penetrates from the background into the figure, dematerializes it, breaks the forms that are about to crumble in a puppet dance. The sharp lines of darkness and light pairing, like the illuminated edges of the structure, stop the disintegration of the ethereal figure. As if before us is not a clown, but his soul, not hands and musical instruments, but their movements and sounds. In the following sheets, drawings with an etching needle, sometimes made without a preliminary sketch, Volovich is more relaxed. Varying aquatint, reserve, soft varnish, combining various techniques etching with a collage of paper and fabrics, he achieves a unique variety and richness of textures, picturesque expressiveness of a monochrome range. Etchings, like numbers of a grandiose program, follow one after another. But these are not just circus attractions: sad clowns in love, arrogant self-satisfied donkeys, soulless mannequins, regal but humiliated lions and wise monkeys have become the heroes of parables about the surrounding reality. Without implying direct influence, one cannot but recall the etchings of Francisco Goya. If we keep in mind the actual circus motifs that captivated so many masters of the 20th century with their ambiguity, then Volovich evokes analogies rather than with painting and graphics, but with cinema, with Chaplin's Circus, with Federico Fellini's Clowns. Summarizing the theme in the polyptych "Parade-alle!" (1978), Volovich again submits himself to the strict structural organization of stereometric forms, the certainty of contours and the clarity of the stroke. The polyptych is a five-part symmetrical composition with a solemn parade in the center and narrow vertical stripes depicting antipodal donkeys holding shaky pyramids of animals and birds on their hooves along the edges. The motif of rotation (and “circle” is the original meaning of the word “circus”), the kaleidoscopic change of events determined the construction of the sheets, the combination of episodes of different times and different spaces in them. In the second and fourth sheets, the arena, where the main action takes place, is surrounded by screens depicting the events of circus life and black failures of exits.
From individual parables-fables, Volovich moved on to a generalized image of the world, the naive model of which is the circus with its round arena and a dome overturned over it. The conflicts here are blatantly absurd: a stupid donkey easily juggles majestic lions, a fragile white clown drives powerful heavy rhinoceroses in a circle and it seems that the rhinos themselves are chasing him, another clown, catching a butterfly, steps on a boa constrictor, the musicians sing carelessly, spreading the notes on the teeth of their open mouth crocodile. The paradox, the absurdity of the world is revealed not only in numerous plot moves, but also in the violation of the usual spatial representations, the sharpness of plastic comparisons. The problems that Volovich solves on the basis of literary and historical material acquire an eccentric and therefore more personal, with a touch of self-irony, sound in The Circus: these are reflections on the world and the place of the Artist in it.
In an effort to expand the range of his work, to diversify the means of expression, the artist began to work systematically from nature in the 70s. Previously referring to the drawing only as preparatory material Now, while traveling in the Urals, Central Asia, the Pamirs, Dagestan, Pskov and Vladimir Rus', he creates independent easel landscapes in pencil and watercolor. A similar turn towards drawing began to appear in our art at the end of the 1960s. However, Volovich’s sheets bear little resemblance to the “quiet”, intimate graphics that have become widespread since that time, lovingly immersing themselves in the uniqueness of a particular object, fixing the very process of perception and comprehension of nature. In Volovich, the desire to convey a direct impression sometimes came into conflict with the internal programming of the composition, a free stroke or stroke was discordant with the rational logic of graphic construction. The artist achieved integrity through the rejection of everything fleeting, elusive. Depicting the ancient earth with architectural structures, as if fused with it, witnesses of the centuries-old history of mankind, he already saw the finished work in nature and immediately discarded the accidental, made the necessary movements. The drawings made by Volovich in the 1970s, with their wide spatial coverage, the rigidity of contours, and careful shading, reminiscent of lithographic, bear a clear trace of previous work in book graphics, in the techniques of author's printing. Having completed illustrations for Goethe's tragedy "Egmont" in 1980, which were soon awarded a bronze medal in Leipzig, Volovich returned to the book after an eight-year break. But now he prefers to have professional designers and type designers work on the layout and design. In the book, ten diptychs are placed on special inserts, parts of which are narrow vertical sashes depicting structures of giant crosses and gallows, losing their stability and ready to bury people like puppets under them. The motifs inspired by Brueghel's paintings and Dürer's engravings provide an opportunity to feel the era of the Dutch Revolution and church wars. But for Volovich, again, it is important, to repeat his own words, not only the time of the events of the book, but also the time in which he lives. Narrating the Inquisition of the 16th century, the artist does not forget about the horrors of fascism in the West, about the crimes of the totalitarian system in his own country. The cramped spaces, flickering "zinc" light are associated with an atmosphere of stagnation and lack of freedom. In the early 80s, for the first time before the illustrator, a masterpiece of Russian literature - "The Tale of Igor's Campaign". The reason for the work was the approaching 800th anniversary of the Lay, the preparation of an edition that was the result of the work of Ural historians, literary critics, and translators, which included sixteen etchings by Volovich (1982). Capturing scenes of invasions, battles and massacres, they emphasized the anti-war sound of the poem. The artist, remembering the suffering of the people in the Great Patriotic War and hating those “small” senseless wars, of which he had to be a contemporary, showed his civic position here. The clash of ancient Russian motifs, starting from the outlines of the arch, which determined the compositional solution of the sheets, with the expressive graphic language of the 20th century, enhances the dramatic tension of the series. Illustrations for the tragedy of Aeschylus "Oresteia" (1987) are the result of Volovich's understanding of world literary classics. An appeal to the work of the great Greek playwright allows us to say in the most general way about what moral blindness leads to, the destruction of natural human ties. Just as the capacious image of a depersonalized man-robot was suggested to Volovich in his time by the knightly shells exhibited in the Hermitage, so now the fragments of antiquities have helped, by metonymic means, to convey a picture of a collapsing world. The illustrations for Orestea, which delighted the viewer with the beauty and logic of graphic construction, prompted the master himself to update.
During the years of perestroika and in the post-Soviet period, trips to France, West Germany, Austria, Italy, Palestine were added to traditional travels in our country, during which, as far as circumstances allowed, the artist worked from life. In new watercolors and tempera, depicting the cities of the East with heaping flat roofs, domes and minarets, Russian hilly plains under swirling clouds, Gothic streets, Tavatui boulders and Chusovoi fighters, Volovich demonstrated his ability to combine the metaphysical uniqueness of various regions and lands with picturesque freedom and artistry ... Meanwhile, the thought of the book never left Volovich. Combining easel sheets into the cycles "Circus", "Medieval Mysteries", "Women and Monsters", he dreamed of books-albums, where his compositions could be interspersed on the principle of free association with excerpts from prose and poetic texts. But regardless of such ideas, Volovich's easel sheets are close to his book graphics. Like illustrations, they develop the theme in time, are built on historical parallels, allegory. In the Soviet period of the Aesops, the artist's language was stimulated by censorship bans, although it was caused, of course, not only by them. After all, Volovich does not part with allegories, theatrical and circus metaphors even today. They allow him to create a generalized picture of the world, touch on the eternal themes of human passions, vices and weaknesses.
The thematic cycles that have evolved over several decades convince us that Volovich, with all his loyalty to his favorite images and plastic techniques, does not remain unchanged. And the point, of course, is not only that black-and-white etchings were replaced by monotype, and then gouache and watercolor, that, as in landscapes, the role of color increases in plot compositions, but above all, that the art of the master is filled with new thoughts and feelings. Thus, the image of a Gothic cathedral that appeared in the 1980s as a model of the universe made it possible to express feelings different from those that Volovich usually filled with medieval motifs. In one of the compositions, made in the technique of engraving on cardboard and tracing paper, the figure of a bishop, immersed in deep thought, grows through the bizarre forms of the temple. Designed for consistent perception, prints differ from one another in color. The image either appears in a golden or silver glow, or almost disappears, dissolving in a range of muted colors. The sheets are composed into a mournful but majestic pictorial and graphic suite that tells about the life of the human spirit, about the painful search for truth. In Volovich, the problem of good and evil acquires an increasingly complex solution. Turning to the pagan world in the sheets of the 1990s from the cycle “Women and Monsters”, the artist makes an attempt to rise above these categories, above the shackling attitudes. But this is just a game: Volovich cannot completely get away from ethical assessments, and, obviously, he does not want to; looking into the unconscious, he only protects himself from moralizing. Volovich is ironic, and sometimes merciless, first of all, to himself. About him, about the artist, about his world, the recently completed colorful series “My Workshop” narrates, about which Volovich convincingly tells himself: “The workshop is the space of life, its stage platform. In this space, real life is intertwined with fiction. The sublime - with the insignificant. Deep - with momentary. Life is inseparable from the game, and the game, in fact, is life. All. From the deeply intimate to the ostentatious. From “everything for yourself” to “everything for sale”. These are parables from the life of an artist. The most important scenes from it: reflections. Creative failure. Thirst for perfection. Ambition... This is a cycle in which more and more new stories can be included. This is a novel in pictures. A novel with a sequel. Volovich's whole work appears as such a novel or a multi-act uninterrupted performance. The “Workshop” has just been completed, and the gigantic “Tragic Farces” are already on the easel. ..
Notes
1. The artist's mother, Claudia Vladimirovna Filippova (1902-1950), was a journalist and writer, author of articles, dramatizations, short stories, novels. The most popular were the repeatedly reprinted stories "In the Gymnasium" (1938) and "Between People" (1940). Collaborated in the Sverdlovsk press: in the newspaper "Ural worker", the magazine "Ural Sovremennik" and in the "Literary Almanac". Stepfather, Konstantin Vasilievich Bogolyubov (1897-1975), writer and literary critic, researcher of Ural literature.
2. In the Sverdlovsk Art School, V. M. Volovich studied at the painting department. His teachers were A.A. Zhukov (1901-1978) and O.D. Korovin, who, as an experienced book graphic artist, influenced Volovich in his post-school years. Of great importance for Volovich was communication in his youth with the painter S.A. Mikhailov (1905-1985), who lived next door on Mamin-Sibiryak Street.
3 Design and illustrations for the book "The Monkey and the Turtle", awarded a diploma
at the All-Union competition "The Best Books of the USSR in 1959" and a large silver medal at the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy, were performed by V. M. Volovich together with his wife, Tamara Sergeevna Volovich (1928-1999), an artist who worked in book and applied graphics.
4. The idea of the "Volovich Theater" was repeatedly expressed by the Sverdlovsk theater critic Yakov Solomonovich Tubin (1925-1989), friendly communication with which meant a lot to the artist - interpreter of world literature.
“Vitaly Volovich is a legendary personality, covered with glory, myths, and worship. We can safely say that while Volovich lives in Yekaterinburg, the city has a future. It is difficult to find a surname that would be so suitable for its bearer. A tall man, slightly stooped, his hands are hefty claws, large glasses sit on a large hooked nose. A person is highly intelligent, but the intellect is spent depending on the circumstances and the degree of preparation of the interlocutor. Loves to please women and really likes. In the company a person is gambling, noisy, cheerful, witty, a duelist in a dispute. An artist with a worldwide reputation, but this is the field of art history. I will limit myself to saying the main thing: he is my friend, and I am proud of it.
From the notes of M. Brusilovsky.// Misha Brusilovsky: "The World of the Artist". M., 2002. S. 208
You somehow don’t notice that the artist is more than 80 years old: he jokes, smiles, cares like a real gentleman, kisses his hands. Even business women in his presence, they suddenly stop on the run: “God, I’m a woman!” Vitaly Mikhailovich Volovich is a real “work addict” from art: for many years now he has been spending 9-10 hours every day in the workshop, and if forced “weekends” happen, his mood deteriorates noticeably: “All the best that happens in my life , happening in the workshop! I can’t imagine that if I didn’t have this profession, then I would have been retired for 20 years and didn’t know what to do with myself! Everything in me rejoices from the lack of time and the desire to run to the workshop, where the most interesting work awaits me, which I invent for myself. I rush here with an incredible desire and leave with reluctance.
When the future artist was four years old, his family moved to Sverdlovsk from the Primorsky Territory. After graduating from the Sverdlovsk Art College in 1948, Vitaly Volovich began to cooperate with the Central Urals Book Publishing House: he designed covers and made illustrations for books. “My work in the publishing business began absolutely bleak. I was offered to make illustrations for the story “Suvorovets”, and I drew several pictures: “Partisans blow up a train”, “Children make a snowman” ... I wore them to the publishing house thirteen times - and thirteen times the art editor made comments to me. In the end he accepted them, not because they were good, but because the edition was already on the way. For me, this was the first shame in my life: when the book came out, I decided that I would no longer come close to any publisher. But in a year, the bitterness of defeat passed, and for the next ten years I did a variety of daily work - magazines, guides, reference books.
Vitaly Mikhailovich admits that he did not take the illustration of books seriously until things took a serious turn. “I was offered to make Mikhail Prishvin's Pantry of the Sun. It was very interesting to work with good literature! And when the book came out, Prishvin himself wrote a letter to the publishing house: “The pantry of the sun” was published countless times different countries, and I have Pantries in all sizes and colors on my shelf. But yours is the best. It was serious praise, and I was at the writer's house in Moscow shortly before his death. Then I realized that book illustration is an important thing for me.”
Like many talented artists, Vitaly Mikhailovich had difficulties with official work in Sverdlovsk: the publishing house accused him of formalism, did not allow him to exhibit, and even withdrew diplomas received at various book competitions. “Somehow I collected my paintings and drawings and went to Moscow. There I was immediately ordered illustrations for "The Song of the Falcon" and "The Song of the Petrel" by Maxim Gorky, a proletarian writer. The book received many awards, and I was invited to participate in international competition illustrators in Leipzig. I chose Stevenson's novels - and got a silver medal! After that, I realized what kind of literature makes me tremble, and the new status put me in a privileged position: now I offered creative requests, and not just fulfilled orders. In addition, there is nothing better than working with dead authors: in all my time I have not had a single conflict with either Cervantes, or Shakespeare, or anyone else. And censorship is dormant,” the artist smiles.
However, Soviet censorship was replaced by economic censorship. In the early 1990s, some publishing houses closed down, while others no longer made orders to artists: “They began to publish good books that were sold out even without illustrations - illustrations increase the cost of publication. The book has been the subject of economics before, but to a greater extent it has remained a subject of culture. Now it's the other way around. For 14 years in a row I was left without work as an illustrator, without publishing books - my favorite thing. I have not yet come up with the idea of creating art albums in which the classic ratio “writer - illustrator” changes. Now I do not illustrate literature, but recreate a certain environment, the atmosphere in which the events of the work are placed.
In this format, the book “Medieval Romance” was published, which included “Tristan and Isolde”, “Knight with a Lion” and “Parzival”, another book was recently presented - “Parade Alle”, dedicated to the circus. And now another one is being prepared for publication - “Through the Pages of European Erotic Literature”, which will include selected excerpts from the works of Apuleius, Catullus, Ovid, Boccaccio, Henry Miller, Lawrence, Ovid, de Sade, Casanova and many others. And, of course, illustrations by Vitaly Volovich.
In addition to illustration, Volovich creates etchings: in his workshop, the machine occupies a separate room. The process of creating each print is laborious and painstaking (the technique has not changed much over several centuries, despite technical progress), and it can take up to several months to create one sheet of small format. One of the recent works by the artist is as much as 7.5 square meters in area, it has undergone 170 acid etchings! One can only admire the master’s character, but he himself has a different opinion: “Character would be required if I didn’t like to do it and for some reason I had to. But I love and am torn, for me to sit with a pencil and a brush is an incredible pleasure.
Vitaly Volovich is not only an artist, he is also a fighter - today, together with his friend Misha Shayevich Brusilovsky, he is fighting for the creation of a museum of Ernst Neizvestny, another great Uralian. Vitaly Volovich also has painting cycles, one of them is “Old Yekaterinburg”. "I had old friend- Lesha Kazantsev, we were friends for 67 years, and now he is no longer alive. We had a tradition: every year at the end of summer we went somewhere to study, because by autumn we were already green with fatigue. We visited Central Asia, in the north of Russia, traveled around the Urals. If we could not go anywhere, then we went out to draw in the city. Unfortunately, the first sheets I drew only in 1970 or 75, and I realized how interesting it was. But if I had started ten years earlier, I would still have found a lot in the city. I gave away many sheets, they were bought inexpensively, the series quickly dispersed. But now I will not return to this cycle - the city has become different, almost nothing remains of it from the old buildings. “I painted, therefore I loved,” these words end the introduction to the book “Old Yekaterinburg”.
Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1973), laureate of the G.S. Mosin (1995), winner of the Prize of the Governor of the Sverdlovsk Region for outstanding achievements in the field of literature and art (1999), winner of the Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Arts for a series of graphic sheets for the tragedy of Aeschylus "Oresteia" (2005), corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts, honorary citizen of the city of Yekaterinburg (2007), honorary citizen of the city of Irbit (2008).
