• Home
• The Artist
• Criticism Michail K. Anikushin | Armando Verdiglione |
• Bibliography
• Gallery Drawings | Bronzes | Monuments | Villa San Carlo Borromeo |
• Exhibitions
• Video
• Network
• Contacts
• IT

To the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, 1975, view of the whole monument (architects S. B Speransky and V. A. Kamensky)

To the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad

“I didn't need to study that tragedy, because I had experienced it first-hand”. With these words the Russian sculptor recalled the siege of Leningrad, one of the most dramatic episodes of the Second World War, some time after completing the work that commemorated it: To the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad (Geroicheskim zashch itnikam Leningrada).

The monument commemorates those who died during the invasion of the Soviet city by part of the German troops – a tragic, disastrous siege lasting nine hundred days (from September 1941 to January 1944). The horrific human suffering cost the lives of an astounding number of people (the exact death toll, which according to sources is between seven hundred thousand and a million, has still not been ascertained).

The momentous work, inaugurated on 9th May 1975 in Ploshchad Pobedy (Victory Square), is made up of thirty-five figures assembled in ten compositions, arranged in a U shape. The first group, The Siege, is composed of two statues; while the two statues of The Victors are placed in the centre of the square, in front of the majestic obelisk. On the right and on the left of the steps are two compositions, one made up of three and the other of four groups of sculptures: The People's Militia, The Work Front, Soldiers, on the right of the monument, and Airmen and Seamen, The People's Avengers, Defence Work and In the Trenches on the left.

“The whole thing”, observes the poet and art critic Aldo Gerbino, “is immersed in a dramatic backdrop in which the rhetorical afflatus and the stylistic features of socialist Realism dilute an expressionism verging on grief. It is undoubtedly a commemorative cipher meant to record events that destroyed on the social level, emotional bonds, feelings of brotherhood, all visible in the oppressive gesture of fear, and, in the excitement of hope, the vocation to forfeit one's human and cultural dignity”.
(A. Gerbino, Benvenuto Cellini, Michail K. Anikushin).