In the early 1970s, the artist Viktor Zalitko went on a creative trip to the lower Pechora River, to Izhma and Ust-Tsilma Districts. As a result of the trip, he created a series of paintings and drawings that have since been displayed at many local exhibitions and included in the golden collection of Komi fine arts.
Several paintings of the series are dedicated to the village of Sizyabsk which is situated in a picturesque area on the high left bank of the Izhma River. Among them are “Sizyabsk Autumn”, “On the Izhma”, and “Sizyabsk After the Rain”. In the Komi language, the village is called “Sizya-yb” which translates as “woodpecker hill” because there is a large population of woodpeckers in the Izhma District. The village was founded almost 300 years ago, and as of early 2023, was inhabited by about a thousand people.
The artist Viktor Zalitko decided to depict one of the most spectacular views of the village, a high hill with three old houses on its slope. Such large houses had two living floors. The five-walled houses were constructed by local reindeer herders for their large families.
In the early 20th century, there were 118 houses of this type in the village, but over the century their number has decreased to merely 20. The view depicted by the artist is also a thing of the past: two houses burned down during the hot summer of 2009, and only the house on the left has survived to this day.
Viktor Zalitko took an ordinary landscape and transformed it into a sublime view filled with metaphors. This is what made his paintings so touching. He depicted three large old houses, clad in old timber which has darkened over time and now resembles the autumn sky above. The last surviving witnesses of the past, they fade into oblivion. In the foreground, there are newer small huts. Even their colors are different, creating a bright contrast.
Viktor Zalitko is an honored artist of the Komi Republic, and a member of the Artists’ Union of the USSR and Russia. He graduated from Mikhail Kaneyev’s painting and drawing studio in Leningrad. For over 35 years, Viktor Zalitko taught at the Komi Republic College of Fine Arts in Syktyvkar. The artist particularly enjoyed creating colorful paintings and elegant drawings depicting cityscapes and rural landscapes.
