Sagas about Icelanders
Exhibition of a book
20 May 2004 - 4 July 2004

A unique exhibition (Hall 28) has been organized jointly between the Hermitage and the Rare Book from St Petersburg Publishing House, with support from Russian entrepreneur Roman Abramovich.

Every book issued by Peter Suspitsyn's publishing house is an experiment in the same way as the book presented at this exhibition. Its print run is ten copies which are numbered and signed by the artists and the publisher. The odd-numbered copies are created using such materials as cowhide and sealskin, silver and copper-gold amalgam, and rock crystal; the even-numbered copies use cowhide, silver , copper and gold amalgam, ice quartz, and rock crystal. The book contains 48 prints, of which 40 were produced on separate sheets, as well as 46 sheets with calligraphy. Forty prints were made supplementally in five copies and bear Roman numerals.

Four artists worked simultaneously on the creation of this book. Yuri Borovitsky did illustrations for Egel's Saga using the mezzo-tinto technique, which is close to the traditions of German Symbolists at the end of the 19th century. The illustration to the Saga of Grettir by Boris Zabirokhin was done using the "dry needle" method. The artist has conveyed sensations of fantasy and imagination by his specific treatment of the real world, using different scales and an expressive hyperbolism. Mikhail Gavrichkov did the prints for the Saga about Gunnlaut, the Snake-Tongue using etching techniques.The artist fills the suface of the sheet and painstakingly elaborated the large forms. The prints for the Njal's Sagal in the illuminated etching method were created by the artist Yuri Lukshin. His work is a composition consisting of a mosaic of fantastic life. The basis for the visual series is an historical event - the conversion of Iceland to Christianity.

Calligraphic texts in Icelandic and Russian languages by Moscow artist Yuri Nozdrin have become a decoration for the Saga about Icelanders. He used subjects from Eastern Slavic manuscripts of the 17th century. Pavel Ekushev and Viktor Nikolsky designed and produced the binding - a frame of solid cast silver, colored by a copper-gold amalgam and worked to reproduce motifs from medieval Icelandic ornamentation. One interesting discovery was the locked upper part of the frame: a symbolic depiction of the island of Iceland hangs from the jaws of a mythical beast onto a sealskin which personifies the sea.

A saga is a vivid genre of ancient Icelandic literature. The Old Icelandic word saga means told, related and in antiquity the term was used to signify an oral tale. After written language appeared the word came to signify also written tales, and eventually came to mean a "written narration" of events from the past worthy of our attention.

Several forms of sagas exist: the sagas about ancient times - the time before Iceland was settled; the episcopal sagas and sagas about life in Iceland during the 12th - 13th centuries; the false sagas about imaginary events; and clan sagas, about the history of people from one clan. Another name for this group is the sagas about Icelanders, because the heroes are always people who lived in Iceland. Some of the clan sagas relate events which occurred in Iceland between 930 and 1030. Historians call this century in the history of the country the age of sagas.

Sagas about Icelanders
2004
Larger view