Sakhalin artist Givi Mantkava in the space of literature

Abstract

The article presents a systematic account of the activities of the artist Givi Mantkava (1930-2003), who resided on Sakhalin. It describes his work as an illustrator of art books and as a subject of poems written in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The quoted poetic texts by L. Gladkaya, T. Kuznetsov, N. Tarasov and other authors, which are little-known and primarily related to the artistic image of G.M. Mantkava, are introduced into the scientific discourse and can be used by art historians to analyse the work of the painter and graphic artist, by biographers to restore lacunae and by museum staff to write texts for excursions and scientific works. Additionally, the article endeavours to categorise the array of books illustrated by the artist during his tenure at the Sakhalin branch of the Far Eastern Book Publishing House. Here is information about poets, writers and journalists — the heroes of the portraits “Sasha Alshutov (Beilin)” (1958), “Writer Viliam Ozolin” (1962) and others. It is also assumed that one of the previously unidentified heroines of Givi Mantkava's most “densely populated” painting “Friends and Comrades” (1962) is the Leningrad poet Lydia Gladkaya. It was she who dedicated the first poem to the artist at the turn of 1959 — the beginning of the 1960s, at a time when many people from different regions of the USSR worked on Sakhalin. The article establishes the sequence of writing poems in which Givi Mantkava himself is mentioned, and also summarizes by means of poetry what was the fruit of his creative thoughts and realized plans. This is the inaugural articulation of the theme of the island artist in the context of literature and publicism discourse. Consequently, the principal elements of this theme are merely sketched out in order to facilitate further reflection.