Ilya Bogdesko

Biography

Ilya Bogdesko’s father was arrested in 1933, when the boy was ten. The family was dispossessed as “kulaks”, the better-off peasants targeted in Soviet collectivisation, and deported to the Kirov region, then to the Gorky region. In 1938 his father was shot, and the family was moved back to the Kirov region.

That same year Ilya entered the Kirov art and teacher-training school.

He was born on 20 April 1923 in Butuceni, on land then in Odessa Governorate; the village is also known as Botushany, and it now lies in the Rybnitsa district. The Romanian spelling of his name is Ilie Bogdesco. In 1942 he was called up into the Red Army, and by some accounts he spent the war in auxiliary units near the front line. After the war, in 1951, he graduated from the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad, where he studied under Konstantin Rudakov, Sergei Priselkov and Gennady Epifanov. His diploma work was a set of illustrations for Gogol’s “The Fair at Sorochyntsi”, done in ink, pen and brush. He was admitted to the Leningrad branch of the Union of Soviet Artists. In 1952 he taught at the art school in Saratov, and from 1953 he worked in the Moldavian SSR, in Chișinău.

Book graphics became his main occupation. From 1961 to 1963 he was chief artist of the publishing house Cartea Moldovenească. For Pushkin’s “The Gypsies” he made illustrations in black watercolour (1956); for the Moldovan folk ballad “Miorița” he used watercolour and tempera; and in 1961–1963 he produced the series of colour linocuts “My Homeland”. For this series, for the drawing “Protest” and for his illustrations to Ion Creangă’s “Punguța cu doi bani” (“The Purse with Two Coins”) he received the State Prize of the Moldavian SSR in 1966. He wrote out the whole text of that book by hand, and it was not an isolated case: in several editions he lettered everything by hand, from the titles to the imprint. Later he wrote a textbook, “Calligraphy”. In Saint Petersburg he completed (in 2001) a typeface based on the Cyrillic alphabet that bears his name, and he also made a Latin version.

His best-known work is considered to be the illustrations for Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”. He cut them with a burin on copper, in a technique used as far back as Swift’s day and rarely used now. The book appeared in 1970 from the publisher Lumina, and a second, revised edition came out in 1980 from Khudozhestvennaya Literatura; in that same year the work was awarded the Ivan Fyodorov diploma at the All-Union competition “The Art of the Book”. The series of 33 illustrations for Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” took five years. In Leipzig in 1970 his illustrations for Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” won a gold medal at the international book art exhibition. In all he designed more than a hundred books. He also painted, and made easel graphic series and murals: “Fishermen of Constanța” (1980), “In the Clouds” (1984), “The Merchant” (1985). In 1968 he received the Large Gold Medal of the USSR Academy of Arts for a mural in the House of Culture of the Krasny Sadovod state farm in the Slobozia district. He described his work in different techniques, from pencil and ink to linocut and etching, in an album published in Moscow in 1987, writing a preface for each of its five sections.

He was also a public figure. He was a member of the Communist Party from 1968 and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR from 1975 to 1990. He headed the board of the Union of Artists of the Moldavian SSR; the year of his election is given as either 1972 or 1977. He became a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts in 1975, a full member in 1988, and a professor in 1986.

From 1992 Bogdesko lived in Saint Petersburg; in 2002 he became head of the Graphics Studio at the Repin Institute. He died on 29 March 2010 and was buried at the cemetery of the Saint Petersburg Crematorium, beside his wife, Alla Edinevskaya.