Svetozar Aleksandrovich Ostrov (1941–2024) was an artist, graphic designer, and illustrator.
He was born in Leningrad into a family of artists. He began drawing at the age of five. He studied at the Leningrad Secondary Art School and later graduated from the Faculty of Graphics of the I. E. Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. His first illustrations — for Alexander Volodin’s play Don’t Part with Your Loved Ones — were published in the magazine Neva. He began illustrating children’s books in 1964. Over the course of his career, he designed and illustrated more than two hundred books, including works by Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Herman Melville, J. R. R. Tolkien, Astrid Lindgren, Dr. Seuss, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Kuprin, Korney Chukovsky, Daniil Kharms, and Boris Zakhoder.
In addition to book illustration, he worked in easel and applied graphics. He was a member of the Union of Artists of Russia from 1970. In 2006, he was awarded the Silver Medal of the Russian Academy of Arts. He participated in and received awards at numerous exhibitions of book graphics and illustration in Russia and abroad, including the illustration biennales in Bologna (Italy), Bratislava (Slovakia), and Leipzig (Germany). His works are held in museums and private collections in the United Kingdom, Russia, the United States, France, and other countries.
Svetozar Ostrov is often described as a continuator of the long-standing traditions of the Lebedev school of Leningrad’s Detgiz. His mastery and respect for tradition, combined with charm, adventurousness, and humor, gave rise to a vivid, independent, and highly individual artistic voice.
“I received my first fee at the same time as my diploma defense. My mother (she was also an artist) was delighted: ‘That’s a good sign!’ And indeed, I was lucky — I never had to illustrate books I didn’t like. Almost from the very beginning, publishers themselves would call and offer me good projects.”
“I worked with children’s books for many years: the magazine Kostyor, the Leningrad and Moscow Detgiz, the publishing house Malysh… If you have old children’s books at home, chances are you have some with my illustrations. But I illustrated books for adults as well.”
“At one point, the head of the now-defunct Tveruniversalbank commissioned me to create a series of ‘documentary’ graphic works of St. Petersburg, which resulted in a series titled Portrait of St. Petersburg. Interestingly, I turned out to be the first artist after Sadovnikov, who created a similar series in the early nineteenth century. Many artists have drawn Petersburg, but to depict the entire city center — numerous buildings, panoramas, monuments — for some reason, few ever get around to it.”
“Two books with my illustrations were published by Vita Nova. One was Woe from Wit — those plates were created back in the 1960s. There is a brilliant printer there who cleaned the plates of rust, new impressions were made, and then I hand-colored everything (it is a colored etching). Unfortunately, the colors turned out slightly more aggressive than in the original 1960s edition. More recently, I illustrated Zoshchenko’s Dear People for them — a project they had wanted to publish for a long time.”
“Children’s illustration must прежде всего be professional. It must be drawn by an artist. Not the way it was done in the early 1990s — and, regrettably, still is in many publishing houses today. That is a disgrace. Fortunately, a small but solid circle of good children’s illustrators has formed, which gives hope.”
