The war left in the hearts - traces that are not erased by time

The National Art Museum of Belarus in the framework of the "Exhibition of One Picture" presents a work by Vladimir Tovstik, where a brass band plays in the city garden, one of the post-war days. The canvas, completed in 1983, represents a fairly bright day in history - post-war days, full of both hope for the future and grief, which is hardly possible to cope with in a lifetime.

The war sweeps away the destinies of people, leaving nothing unchanged. However, its main misfortune is that even after its completion, post-war horrors have long reflected on people’s lives. Not surprisingly, the contrast between a single woman, with pain and severity looking at the audience, and the rest of the space of the picture, is so striking! The fact that a woman is single is beyond doubt. The wasteland around her could not be hidden even by a large number of people in the background. She seemed to have always eaten into her heart after the loss of loved ones. But there is no despair, there is a determination to survive everything in order to overcome death!

Vladimir Tovstik wrote this painting based on memoirs from a distant childhood, being a post-war child, he did not find the horrors of war, but they touched him even deeper - at the level of the heart. Everything was saturated with the memory of the war, everything was poisoned by its events.

Eve Istr