Loving the world

To the 115th anniversary of Aleksey Glebov

It has long been noted that development proceeds in waves in some areas: a galaxy of especially gifted people appears at a certain point in the era. They pull, push forward certain areas of art, culture, literature or public life. In astronomy, the Pleiades is one of the largest star clusters that can be seen with the naked eye. But other people glow no less brightly — during their life and after, beyond its threshold. People’s Artist of the BSSR, sculptor Aleksey Glebov is one of the representatives of the powerful Belarusian creative wave, which became widely discussed in the 1930s at the level of the entire USSR. Among his comrades in the profession, contemporaries and colleagues were Zair Azgur, Andrei Bembel, Sergei Selikhanov, Mikhail Kerzin and other outstanding sculptors who left their mark on the culture of the country. A truly bright constellation in which Glebov’s star shines with its own unique light.

Aleksey Glebov was born in the village of Zverovichi (it was Belarusian before the revolution, today it is the Smolensk Region). He was the priest’s son — his father was a modest village priest, as usual, with many children — he did not disassociate himself from his family even in those years when the persecution of religion was widespread. Aleksey Glebov loved and appreciated his father for everything that was taught to him in the family: a reverent attitude to life, humanity, love for the word and nature, a special attitude towards horses. Perhaps that is why he reached out to painting — to capture the beautiful world that he saw around him, and, despite the seriousness of his monumental sculptural works, Glebov remained a lyricist until the end of his life.

Aleksey Glebov and his General Lev Dovator (1948)

His elder brother fought for the Reds in Civil War, and when he returned, he taught in the town of Rudnya. He helped the younger Alyosha with his studies at school, and at the same time supported his desire to draw. His childhood comrades were Konstantin Kosmachev and Alexander Mozolev, future famous Belarusian artists. There was a whole company of them — Rudnya boys, obsessed with the dream of entering the Vitebsk Folk Art School, led by Marc Chagall, a place where unprecedented and glorious things were created. They fulfilled this dream. Glebov, having entered the school in the mid-1920s, when the famous sculptor Mikhail Kerzin was the director, also took up sculpture under his influence: once, along with paintings, he demonstrated several studies in clay, and the keen enthusiast Kerzin immediately saw the potential of the student. Later, when the student committee expelled the priest’s son from the school under the pretext of a dubious origin, it was Kerzin who gave him shelter, fed the student who had lost his scholarship and fought for him in the offices, seeking restoration. He took care of Glebov all his life, until the very end, remaining to him not only a teacher, but also a good friend. True, in 1930, a few months before graduation, the ill-wishers of the young talented sculptor again raised the topic of his ‘wrong’ family and exclusion. If there was another person in his place, he or she would have written a dissociation, renounced his or her relatives — many did just that, but not Glebov. He slammed the door and, despite the persuasions of the teacher, who again took up the task of his restoring, did not return to the school again.
He got a job as an assistant to an artist-painter, then as a props at the Vitebsk Drama Theatre, then moved to Moscow — he was in charge of the props and furniture workshop at the Moscow Art Theatre, where in those years many enthusiastic young artists gathered at once. Creative destiny could take a turn here and give way to the skill of an artisan, if not for Kerzin, who still dreamed of a career as a sculptor for his student. In 1933, he persistently invited Glebov to Minsk to take part in the design of the Government House. It was in this team of a good dozen artists who were engaged in sculpting statues, busts and bas-reliefs that Glebov began to seriously take shape as a master, to develop his own style and author’s manner. The efforts of Kerzin, who sought to return the young talent to the republic, were not in vain: the sculptor was appreciated, and he himself finally felt the taste of recognition. It was his sketch that won the competition for the creation of a monument to the liberation of Belarus from Polish oppression, for the pavilion at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VDNKh) he created bas-reliefs with Kryzhachok and Lyavonikha national dances.

Yanka Kupala and Maxim Gorky (1947)

The equestrian statue of Marshal Voroshilov also showed another undoubted talent: Aleksey Glebov had no equal in the Soviet Union in the modelling of horses! 
His work was also appreciated in the first decade of Belarusian literature and art in Moscow, which took place in 1940.
He worked in Minsk until June 22nd, 1941, when the Great Patriotic War began. He took his family — mother, wife and son — to the evacuation, and he himself went to the front. Number 1 of the machine-gun crew, he participated in the battle for Moscow, was seriously wounded. The head of the hospital, Lieutenant Colonel Giller, an educated and cultured man, created conditions for the creative work of artist, who was undergoing treatment. There he, having seen enough human suffering and sipped it himself, fashioned the Carrying Out the Wounded bas-relief, the figures of the donor and the nurse — alas, the location of these works is still unknown. After recovery, he was withdrawn to the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement in Moscow, where Panteleimon Ponomarenko gathered many figures of Belarusian culture — their talent in wartime was especially needed by the people. With them, the sculptor returned to the liberated Minsk in 1944 to raise his small homeland from the ruins.
All his life he was drawn to literature, he worked on the images of the writers Yanka Kupala and Maxim Gorky for years, he studied the personality of the first printer Francysk Skaryna, creating sculpture after sculpture. The second theme was the war — its heroes, fallen compatriots, received a new life in sculptures. 
The brilliant cavalryman Lev Dovator is the legendary Hero of the Soviet Union, for whose head the Nazis promised crazy money (of course, on horseback!), a whole partisan epic — after all, living prototypes walked side by side, along the same streets, building a peaceful life and remembering the past, an obelisk-monument to the soldiers of the Soviet army who died in the battles for the liberation of Belarus...

Partisans of Belarus, one of the high reliefs of the Victory Monument in Minsk (1954)

Joker and the soul of society, he loved the world around him. We can say that Glebov was in a warm relationship both with life and people. 
He was not destined to live long — a wound in the lung, developed asthma, incessant smoking (like many front-line soldiers), and also constantly drying clay in the workshop, where it was necessary to maintain humidity... The generation that went through the war, was catching up with fragments and bullets in the 1960s and 1970: then, already in peacetime, one after another, many left, who had broken their health in battles and in work for wear and tear, suffered hardships, those who for five long years covered their native land with their own breasts, most often in the most literal sense. They lay down in platoons in cemeteries under modest monuments with a red star: they had completed their combat mission and could already rest... Apparently, the sculptor also felt something like that, because he kept a letter to his teacher Kerzin under his pillow — the family had to send it in case of death. And so it happened.
Aleksey Glebov managed to come up with and sculpt a model of the monument to Francysk Skaryna in Polotsk, and he received the State Prize of the BSSR for it posthumously. The grandiose sculpture was cast and installed by Glebov’s students, and now this 12-metre composition adorns the hometown of the first printer. The Minsk State Art College was named after him, which became the successor to the Vitebsk Art School, which the sculptor never finished. His works live in the halls of the National Art Museum — beautiful female images, lovingly fashioned horses: he considered both of them the most perfect creatures on this earth...

By Irina Ovsepyan