At the House of Artists, you can see a bronze model of the future monument to the Irkutsk babr, created by Dashi Namdakov and Sergey Eloyan. The sculpture has already gone through several stages, from an electronic project to a clay model and a bronze casting, and the authors aim to make the babr image recognizable and historically accurate. The article also says where the monument is planned to be installed, what its pedestal will be like, and how much money will be needed to complete the work.
The model of the monument to the Irkutsk babr, conceived by the renowned sculptor Dashi Namdakov and artist Sergei Eloyan, can be seen at the House of Artists. It is cast in bronze, at a scale of one to ten of the intended size of the future monument.– This is an intermediate stage of the monument, – Sergei Eloyan explained. – At first, the project was created in electronic form, but we decided that it was not sufficiently visual, and Dashi sculpted it in plasticine, made a mold, and cast it in bronze.
The creation of this sculpture has been under discussion for several years. As a reminder, in 2007 at the city urban planning council, the preliminary sketches for the monument seemed unsuccessful to most of those taking part in the discussion. This, incidentally, is not surprising, because it is one thing to draw a “mysterious beast” on a coat of arms, and quite another to try to recreate in space an animal with a cat-like face, webbed paws, and a beaver tail. Dashi Namdakov’s sculpture, however, restores historical justice in many respects. There is hope that when the monument is installed, children will stop asking their parents questions: why is the beaver holding a sable in its teeth, and then who is the babr if it is not a beaver? And this word from the Siberian dialect is translated as “fierce” – that is what the Manchurian tiger, now extinct from the face of the earth, was called in our region.
However, the tiger created by Dashi Namdakov is by no means naturalistic. The author set himself the task of making the babr in the sculpture at least vaguely resemble its namesake on the coat of arms. Hence the slightly splayed paw pads, creating the illusion of webbing, a face somewhat uncharacteristic of a tiger, an elongated neck, and overly graceful limbs. Incidentally, despite the fact that the babr stands on two legs and its tail, the sculpture, according to the designers, will withstand even if three people sit on it at once “astride.”
According to the authors’ concept, the one-and-a-half-meter babr sculpture is to stand on a two-meter monolithic granite boulder. Sergei Eloyan was responsible for developing the pedestal design. According to him, the granite base will be decorated with Irkutsk symbols cast in bronze and a scroll on which Yakov Pokhabov’s report on the founding of the fort on the Irkut River will be reproduced.
Previously, it was assumed that the babr would be placed in Kirov Square, but the city authorities planned to erect a monument to the first settlers there. The sculpture was proposed to be installed in the square between the new building of the Irkutsk History Museum and the regional branch of the Union of Artists of Russia – at the intersection of Karl Marx and Frank Kamenetsky streets. All the more so since the reconstruction and landscaping of the square are scheduled for 2009.
According to Sergei Eloyan, about 12 million rubles are needed to produce the bronze elements of the monument, including the sculpture. With regular funding, the work of art can be created in about three months.