ST. PETERSBURG, September 8. /TASS/. A monument to all Russian polar explorers of the past, present and future will be unveiled by the building of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg on Saturday, September 9.
A cannon of the Peter and Paul Fortress in downtown St. Petersburg made a fire at midday on Thursday to mark erection of the monument, the monument’s initiator, a member of the Polar Explorers Club, Igor Butvina, told TASS.
"A carving on a stone next to the monument will read: ‘To those who were the first, are the first, will be the first’," he said. "This is a monument to all the people, who share the ideal of polar research, the monument to the very idea of polar research, to its ongoing."
"Russia has many monuments to explorers, to well-known polar researchers, but till now it did not have a monument which could unite all of them." The composition’s center is a bronze figure of a two-meter man dressed in warm fur clothes. Next to him are two dogs - the unique members of all polar expeditions. The base of white granite is in the shape of a piece of ice, the man is looking forward, and the composition is overlooking the North.
The monument’s author, sculptor Boris Sergeyev told TASS "during work on the monument, I saw the image of ‘the white silence’: the space, the ice and a man among them," he said. The monument’s artist is Vasily Sukhov and the other sculptor - Olga Pankratova.
According to the chief sculptor, the figure is an image of many polar explorers. The authors had studied many materials at the Museum of Arctic and Antarctic, at the Research Institute as they added specific features to the composition.