Georgy Adamovich Stronk was a painter, graphic artist, and illustrator who worked in the genres of portrait, landscape, and thematic painting. He studied at the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture and began exhibiting his works in 1939. He became a member of the Union of Artists in 1940. Stronk was awarded the State Prize of the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and received the title of People’s Artist of the Karelian ASSR.

For over 35 years, until 1984, Georgy Stronk focused on the “Kalevala” which he considered a beautiful and unsolved mystery. He sought to create portraits of the characters from this poem. Some of them show the features of Russian folk heroes (bogatyrs) such as Ilya Muromets, Dobrynya Nikitich, and Alyosha Popovich.

When he won the All-Union Book Contest, Georgy Stronk received the opportunity to independently design the “Kalevala” edition which was published in Finnish with his illustrations in Petrozavodsk in 1956.

This edition required extensive preparatory work. For quite some time, Georgy Stronk struggled in capturing the image of the timeless soothsayer, Wainamoinen. “We tried painting him with an impressive beard, snow-white hair, and an entire labyrinth of wrinkles; we dressed him in homespun garments, with a requisite knife hung at his side; we placed a kantele in his hands; yet no sage emerged from this image…” the artist writes in his book “Around Karelia”.

Perhaps Stronk did not entirely succeed in eliminating traditional cliches in the portrayal of Wainamoinen, but he did convey to the reader the beauty and potency of his singing, his epic, primordial power, and wisdom of this character.

The first kantele was crafted by Wainamoinen himself. He fashioned the instrument from the teeth and jawbones of a large pike. For the strings, the rune singer used “the hairs of Hiisi’s gelding”. After crafting the kantele, Wainamoinen asked everybody he met to play a soulful melody on the instrument, but none managed to extract a sound. Finally, the kantele itself could no longer endure the silence, and in a human-like voice, it said that it “will play for a musician, play for him who toiled to make me“. It was referring to Wainamoinen who, for some reason, had not yet touched the strings. Wainamoinen began to play the kantele and all those living in the sky, on land, and in the ocean listened intently. His music moved them all deeply, tears were welling up in their eyes. Large tears fell from Wainamoinen’s own eyes and rolled onto the ground, eventually turning into beautiful blue pearls as they entered the water.