"CRIME and PUNISHMENT"
F. Dostoevsky
Shanghai
For several months, day after day, I lived this story on the pages of a book. I tried to understand its characters, their actions and decisions. Every day, it came deeper and deeper into my mind and caused many conflicting feelings. But the strength of this book is such that it is impossible to remain indifferent to it. Crime and Punishment is a novel about a person, about his weaknesses and vices, about relationships, about pain, about injustice, about “Napoleonic plans” and everyday routine, about dead ends and ways out of them, about the fall and salvation. Crime and Punishment is a novel about life. Sharp, uncomfortable, sticky, about a life in which you don't want to plunge, but the author makes you do it.
Therefore, a person, his/her secrets and thoughts, emotions, bodily and mental pains—this is what I was looking for in my illustrations, and this is what our body, our eyes show so well. Not a single architectural structure, not a single outfit of that time attracts my attention to the same extent that it attracts a person and the situations in which he/she finds himself/herself. My goal in my work was to find those points in the narrative that are responsible for each decision made or influenced the thoughts and feelings of the characters, led to monstrous consequences and torments.
The search for images is probably one of the most important stages of my work on this book. What they will be, of course, is already predetermined by the author. He created them, wrote them down on paper and in life. Indeed, after reading once a book, the characters created by the writer become already good acquaintances to us, and we volens nolens imagine them in reality. They are enclosed in the stream of the reader's thoughts, scraps of phrases, emotions, actions, descriptions. At the moment when the artist starts to work, he/she should dissolve in the thoughts of the author and follow the “instructions”: “By the way, he was remarkably good-looking, with beautiful dark eyes, dark blond hair, taller than average, thin and slender”. Every artist needs a prototype that would contain the very necessary set of features in order for the reader to trust the artist and say, “I believe!”. Certainly, sometimes you have to give up some characteristics for the sake of the overall composition, to refuse the details of clothing or everyday life, for the sake of a sharp idea, an expressive image. My task was to find that same Raskolnikov, Avdotya Romanovna, Sonechka Marmeladova among many faces and characters. The characters of this incredible story are my friends, relatives, colleagues, famous and novice Ukrainian artists, such as Victoria Kalaychi (Katerina Marmeladova), Yaroslav Leonets (Rodion Raskolnikov), Oleg Omelchenko (Semyon Marmeladov), Vadim Lipskikh (Arkady Svidrigailov), Maria Dzyuba (Sofya Marmeladova), and many others. I express my gratitude to everyone who took part in the creation of visual images and compositions for this project.
Project includes 30 b\w illustrations and cover
