(b Grodno [now in Belarus’], 27 May 1859; d Leningrad [now St Petersburg], 3 Jan 1939). Russian sculptor, teacher and writer. His talents were first discovered in 1870 by Mark Antokol’sky in Vil’na (now Vilnius, Lithuania). Antokol’sky subsequently brought him to St Petersburg as his child prodigy and trained him for the Academy of Arts, which he eventually entered in 1878. While still a student, he began to develop an interest in small, highly detailed sculptures of figures in a narrative context, and this type of work would predominate throughout his career. He also executed full-length portraits of such eminent contemporaries as Lev Tolstoy, Vasily Vereshchagin, Dmitry Mendeleyev and Anton Rubinstein, many of whom he knew personally, almost all of whom would be depicted engaged in an action related to their profession (e.g. Tolstoy at Work, bronze, 1891; Moscow, Tolstoy Mus.; the Artist Vasily Vereshchagin at Work, bronze, 1892; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.). Despite the proximity of his style and subject-matter to the paintings of the WANDERERS, with whom he exhibited only in 1895, his rejection of both classical idealism and Impressionism, combined with an apparent indifference to technical innovation, did not prove attractive to his contemporaries. His concentration on everyday and contemporary aspects, while open to charges of being anecdotal, marked, through its rejection of traditional themes and approaches, a new and significant development in Russian sculpture, and he emerged as a leading exponent of the Russian realist school. His characteristic works include Boy about to Bathe (bronze, 1886; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.) and On the See-saw (bronze, 1901; Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal.). After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he became a teacher and was appointed Professor of Sculpture (1918–23) at the Petrograd State Free Art Studios (Svomas). From 1923 he was a member of the ASSOCIATION OF ARTISTS OF REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA (AKhRR).