Belarus (magazine #11 2021)

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CREATIVE FEATURES KONSTANTIN DROBOV

Home land compass About Boris Zaborov – world famous artist and book graphic artist from Belarus I am leafing through the 1972 edition of the poem of the national poet of Belarus Yakub Kolas "Symon the Musician". Minsk book publishing house "Belarus". Its circulation is unique – 20 thousand (!) copies. A real gift for the 90th anniversary of the birth of Yakub Kolas. The author of the book is the book graphic artist Boris Zaborov. …"What a real success – to meet the right person at the beginning of the Path. Teacher. He was and remains my first teacher: Sergey Petrovich Katkov. He was a man of broad, kind soul, generous love for us, insightful. He understood that we all, six or seven of us in a group of boys, love him very much, so he treated everyone equally and attentively, not letting envy settle in our hearts," – Boris Zaborov said in a preface to a book that cannot be forgotten, which was published in St. Petersburg in 2018. I wish this book were republished, translated into Belarusian! On the pages of the publication there are meetings with Vasil Bykov, Naum Kislik, Ryhor Baradulin, Petrus Brovka, the artistic and literary life of Minsk in the 1950-1980s...

And some more passeges from the book of memoirs of the artist Boris Zaborov: "In summer, Sergey Petrovich took us out for plein air. One trip to Polesie, a region known in Belarus for impenetrable forests, swamps and peat bogs, is alive in my memory. We stayed in a small village surrounded by forest. We slept on the barn-floor... In the morning, we got up before dawn and we went out with a local guide. Our hike was called "Around partisan places." We walked through the forest along a narrow, with tree abatis, animal path. After several hours of hiking, we got tired, decided to rest, and then it turned out that our guide had lost his way. But we didn’t worry as Sergey Petrovich was with us. He, a former Soviet army officer, had a compass. I was impressed by this image, this artistic symbol, which, perhaps, even by the future famous artist was not chosen for the sake of an accent... The compass of Sergey Petrovich Katkov... Boris Abramovich Zaborov (1935-2021) was born in Minsk. Belarusian and French painter, graphic artist. The son of the artist Abram Zaborov. From 1949 to 1954 Boris Zaborov studied at Minsk Art School. Then he studied at Ilya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture of the Autograph from a famous artist USSR Academy of Arts in Leningrad. In 1956 he

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БЕЛАРУСЬ.BELARUS NOVEMBER   2021


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