Group sculpture “Nordic folk wrestling”

Note

The pattern is a Swedish reduction of 1864 of a town monument “The Knife Wrestlers” created in the 1840s by J.-P. Molin (1814-1873) and installed in Gothenburg and Stockholm. The sculptural composition “Nordic folk wrestling” from the pre-1917 Kasli Foundry portfolio was replicated in two versions during the Soviet period: on a pedestal without genre scenes on side and end walls, and without a pedestal, on an oval stand. The item was known under the name “Scandinavian wrestlers” or “Scandinavian wrestling”. On ideological grounds, narrative scenes were removed from the factory pattern’s pedestal during the early Soviet period (two men quarrelling at a public house because of a woman, the death of one of the heroes and the woman grieving desolately in front of the grave stele), as a result of which the original meaning was lost, and later the item was only regarded as a sports sculpture. The collection of a Moscow collector A. V. Novitsky features a unique version of this casting of the 1920s - mid-1930s with agitational political slogans (instead of the narrative scenes) on the pedestal “Пролетарии всех стран соединяйтесь!” (Workers of the world, unite!) (side walls) and “За коммунизм” (For Communism) (end walls).