Petr Maltsev

Petr Nikolaevich Maltsev was born on 23 February 1926 in Maslovka, Chuhuiv district, Kharkiv region. The extended biography records that the village site became a military range in 1931, and family memory places the first displacement and famine years at the beginning of his life. The sources describe childhood through eviction, hunger, work, and survival.

In the 1999 interview Maltsev recalled that he began to draw in Bashkyrivka as a seven-year-old, asking soldiers for a pencil stub. This draft chapter treats art as something that began beside historical trauma, not apart from it.

The extended biography states that Maltsev met the Second World War in Bashkyrivka, near Chuhuiv, and entered the Red Army in July 1943. It records service on the 1st Ukrainian Front, participation in the fighting that led through Eastern Europe and Berlin, a wound, and later treatment in a military hospital.

The 1999 interview gives the historical outline a human register: hunger at the front, danger in Berlin, and a refusal to let memory end in despair. The provisional public text keeps the military facts close to the source and avoids expanding beyond what the family documents state.

After the army, Maltsev returned to Slobozhanshchyna. The extended biography records work at the Kharkiv art-products factory from 1950 to 1955 and study in an art studio with S. M. Besedin, E. N. Tregub, and V. M. Nasedkin. Later, while working in the Kharkiv Art Fund, he entered the Ukrainian Polygraphic Institute in Lviv and studied graphic art with Vasyl Kasiyan.

This chapter is framed as a disciplined return rather than a sudden beginning. The sources show a veteran entering professional art through work, study, craft, and persistence.

In 1966 Maltsev became director of the Chuhuiv Children’s Art School named after Repin. The extended biography describes a school that had been close to closure and then grew to more than one hundred students each year, with student exhibitions shown across Kharkiv region and abroad.

The 1999 interview and later local text both treat the school as inseparable from Maltsev’s public life. For this draft, the school is not presented as a side role: it is one of the main works of his life, a place where teaching, local memory, and artistic discipline met.

The sources record exhibitions, diplomas, public commissions, membership in the Union of Artists of Ukraine, the 2006 title of Honored Worker of Culture of Ukraine, and honorary citizenship of Chuhuiv and Chuhuiv district. They also preserve Maltsev’s own ambivalence toward official recognition.

This chapter keeps both lines visible: the public honors and the artist’s quieter measure of value. The 1999 interview suggests that the school, the students, and the survival of meaningful work mattered more than display.