The Presidential Library to illustrate the artist’s artworks in the besieged city

One of the recent materials published on the Presidential Library’s portal was dedicated to the siege through the eyes of the artists who survived. Another article told about the Leningrad inventor, who made pencil sketches of patients at the hospital, where he appeared in early 1942. Moreover,  the drawings by E. Aganin and I. Doroshev are available free in the Presidential Library’s electronic collections. However, this theme is not over.

In the course of a major campaign to collect evidence of the siege, which the Presidential Library initiated in conjunction with the newspaper Petersburg Diary and Radio Rossiya - St. Petersburg, Leningrad and Petersburg resident Elizaveta Kurochkina addressed us. Her grandfather Ivan Korolev, a famous graphic artist, continued to paint during the war. He survived the first, the most severe siege winter, but in the spring of 1942 he died on the way to evacuation.

Among the drawings of Ivan Pavlovich, which will enrich the electronic collections of the Presidential Library, there are a lot of portraits made in different techniques: a color pencil, a dry needle, etching, etc.  

A series of bright watercolors of the pre-war years shows us the most diverse people encountered by Korolev during the life journey. Among his works are portraits of famous political and party leaders: Vyacheslav Molotov, Valerian Kuybyshev; lithographs with images of colleagues in the shop - Leningrad artists... Here's another drawing in pencil: a slightly thoughtful 43-year-old man looks at us. This is a self-portrait of Ivan Pavlovich in 1931.

Finally, in his works, Ivan Korolev captured the siege. The figure of December 2, 1941 shows an emaciated man leaning against a brick wall of a house. The author’s signature is slightly lower: “To Dimitry Vasilyevich Suslov. In memory of the experience of the Patriotic War in Heroic Leningrad”.

The self-portrait of 1942 depicts an old man in a hat with earflaps exhausted by hunger and disease... He is only 54 years old. But it seems that here and in the portrait of 1931 two different people are depicted ...

Ivan Pavlovich Korolev was born in 1888 in the village of Nemerino, Kashirsky district, Tula province, into a peasant family. At 21, he entered the N. D. Seliverstorov Penza Art School, where the teachers were I. I. Repin's students A. I. Vakhrameev and I. S. Goryushkin-Sorokopudov. The classes there were implemented according to a plan resembling the program of the Academy of Arts. After graduating from college, Korolev was approved "as a professional draftsman with the right to teach drawing and calligraphy in secondary schools". However, he did teach: he spent 1914-1924 years in military service.

Only in 1924, Korolev returned to the profession. In the 1920s and 1930s, he devoted a lot of work to industrial subjects, the lives of collective farmers, the lives of representatives of various peoples inhabiting the Soviet Union. The studio in which the artist worked was the center of etching art in pre-war Leningrad.

Korolev also actively worked on book illustrations, collaborated with the magazines "Chizh", "Bonfire" and "Around the World". Shortly before the war, in 1938 his first solo exhibition took place in the Leningrad branch of the Union of Soviet Artists.

Ivan Pavlovich died on March 13, 1942 on the way to evacuation from besieged Leningrad. The artist is buried in the city of Kovrov.

Earlier, as part of the campaign to preserve the historical memory of the siege of Leningrad, we told the story of a submariner with lines from his last letter, about a message to the past addressed to a deceased brother, works of Leningrad schoolchildren written in the harshest winter of 1941/42, a diary that interested the author Two Captains Veniamin Kaverin, about the ships that were raised from the bottom and deepened the fairways , etc.

In total, over 250 people responded to the call to share memories of that time, providing about 3,000 documents for digitization. In April 2019, the Presidential Library announced the launch of a new project dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Victory. It will be called "Victory 75".

With the participation of the Presidential Library in St. Petersburg, a Unified City Information Center, coordinating the coverage of events, both the 75th anniversary of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi siege, and the 75th anniversary of the Victory, has been established. The Presidential Library’s portal provides a virtual tour of the exhibition halls of the temporarily closed State Museum of Defence and Siege of Leningrad and gets familiar with the electronic collection “Defence and Siege of Leningrad”, which includes official documents, periodicals, memories of Leningrad citizens, food cards, photo and newsreels.