Ice Sculpting Comes In From the Cold in Russia

As winter’s dim sun rose over this city’s golden towers and palaces, tens of thousands of people gathered on the banks of the half-frozen Neva River, braving the chilly wind whipping in from the Gulf of Finland.

Drawing the crowd was a collection of ice sculptures, blue and shimmering, that slowly melted under the brunt of an unusual February thaw. Although transitory, the show marked something more permanent: Russians’ rediscovery of the art of ice carving, which is gaining in popularity each winter.

There is something magical about sculpting in ice, like cutting transparency and light itself, said Alexander Ignatyev, a carver from Yakutia, a region of Siberia that has produced some of Russia’s best sculptors.

Ice carving in Russia goes back at least 260 years, said Viktor Chernyshev, president of the Russian Assn. of Ice, Snow and Sand Sculptors. Around 1740, Empress Anna ordered an ice palace built along the Neva, complete with a four-poster bed made of ice. (She had a sadistic streak too: To humiliate a nobleman who displeased her, she ordered him to marry a homely peasant and, after a procession led by farm animals, to consummate the marriage in the ice palace.)

Trained as an engineer, Chernyshev took up ice sculpting 15 years ago.

“There is nothing more fascinating [than] an ice sculpture for me. An ice sculpture has a very strong energy--it does not live long, and just like all transitory things, it tries to share its energy with the world it lives in,” he said. “In that respect, ice is like fire: It is very short-lived, and it is so beautiful, one can hardly take his eyes off it.”

More than 50,000 people streamed down to the banks of the Neva this month for the city’s first International Ice Sculpting Festival. A total of 48 artists in 16 teams took part, creating confections ranging from a small but elegant mermaid to a replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa 13 feet high.

Russia has about 1,000 ice sculptors, Chernyshev said, and a majority of the nation’s northern cities hold such exhibitions every year. But ice sculpting has seen a relatively recent resurgence; for whatever reason, it was not encouraged in Soviet times.

“The [Communist] Party had lots of other things in its hands and never found the time to pay attention to ice and snow sculpture,” Chernyshev said. “No one must have thought of it before Boris Yeltsin.”

Before Yeltsin became Russia’s president in 1991, he was the Communist Party leader in the Siberian city of Sverdlovsk, where he encountered ice sculpting. In 1986, when he had become party boss in Moscow, he ordered that snow sculptures be built for the New Year’s holiday all around the capital. But unlike sculptors in Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, which had a hard freeze and generally clean snow, Muscovites used gray, dirty, damp snow scraped off the streets. City workers would paint it white so that it looked right.

“Kids who had the misfortune to slide down the ice hill made in the shape of a dragon in Gorky Park would have to go to the director’s office, where a jar of acetone was kept to get the white paint off their clothes,” Chernyshev recalled with a laugh. “But as all this was new to Moscow, no one complained.”

Chernyshev became fascinated with ice sculpting when he read an article about it in a then hard-to-get magazine called Photos of Japan. There were four subscriptions in Moscow, and he had one of them.

“I can still recall those photos--it was so picturesque,” he said. “That was it for me and ice sculpture, and there has been no stopping me since.”

Only since Russians became more free to travel in the 1990s have enthusiasts like Chernyshev been able to go abroad to learn the techniques of ice sculpting and visit famous ice festivals in Sapporo, Japan, and Fairbanks, Alaska.

He says each piece is unique, and he recalls with pleasure visiting an ice festival in Zurich, Switzerland, for three years in a row and each time seeing replications of the same work by Auguste Rodin. “The first time, I was impressed. The second time, I was enraptured. And the third time, I was moved. It was great,” he said.

“Ice is like diamond--it sparkles and scintillates and appears different depending on the angle of the light,” he said. “The color spectrum of ordinary ice is truly amazing, especially if it is illuminated in the dark.”

There are vistas for Russia to conquer in ice, Chernyshev said.

“We Russians have always been explaining that Russia is a northern country and that it’s the source of many of our problems,” he said. “But if Russia is a cold and snowy country, with an abundance of ice, then we should put it to good use. Let’s try to lead. We have a great potential to make Russia No. 1 in the world as far as ice sculpture goes.”

As it happens, some of the best Russian carvers are from Yakutia, part of the permafrost belt in Siberia, where many also specialize in making figurines from the tusks of ancient mammoths that have been preserved in the frozen tundra.

“In Yakutia, we say it is cold three months of the year and the rest of the time very cold,” a carver on the Yakutia team in St. Petersburg joked.

The team took five days to create a sphinx reached by an ice bridge. It required about 400 blocks of ice, which had been cut from a lake. Each block was about the size of a small desktop: 3 feet long, 1 1/2 feet wide and 10 inches thick, weighing about 150 pounds. The team’s tools included electric grinders and saws, chisels with high-quality steel tips, scrapers and a hair dryer.

The Yakutia carvers won third prize for their entry.

Carvers such as Ignatyev say sculpting in ice is extraordinarily difficult because of its transparency--often a piece is shaped more by feel than by sight. Only those who already have some skill in stone or wood sculpting will be successful, they say.

“Ice is a medium one can cut and carve very quickly, but it does not forgive mistake,” said Alexander Zaborev of the Yakutia team. “One mistake, and it is a spoiled work.”

“The texture of ivory is smooth and hard, and it takes a long time to make a figurine--maybe years,” said team leader Piotr Markov, 54. “With ice it is really miraculous. You have something in your head, and you can realize it in an hour or in three or four days.”

But the ice often melts just as quickly. The sculptors say they have learned to take the disintegration of their masterpieces in stride.

“We don’t really regret that the sculpture is gone, because we keep a photo of it and the people go away with the awareness that it is never to happen again in that same way,” Zaborev said.

“They will hold them in their hearts and remember,” Ignatyev said, “and that makes us happy.”