Minsk. Monument to Yazep Drozdovich.

The future artist was born at the end of the 19th century, in 1888, in the picturesque village of Punki, Vitebsk region. Although the family was noble, it was not rich: the mother raised six children alone. Nevertheless, she gave her youngest son an art education, which Yazep received at the Vilna School of Painting named after Professor I. Trutnev.

The fate of this talented man was not easy, sometimes even tragic. His contemporaries did not understand him, he lived in poverty, did not have a family and offspring. There are many examples in history when people with advanced views suffered more for them than they received recognition. This happened to Yazep Drozdovich, whose ideas were far ahead of the era in which he lived.

Drozdovich's first works were influenced by the Art Nouveau style. He worked on book illustrations, his work was on the cover of the "First Belarusian Calendar for 1910" (Nasha Niva edition), and also designed the collection of poems by Constance Builo "Stone Flower". The artist was inspired by his native nature, creating landscapes of Disney. 

During the First World War, he was a paramedic, in peacetime he taught drawing at a girls' school, worked as an illustrator and a decorative artist. He was engaged in ethnography and scientific research. He was considered an oddball because long before flying into space, he turned his gaze to the sky. He believed that people would be able to leave Earth and meet with aliens. His series of paintings is dedicated to this: "Life on Saturn", "Life on Mars" and "Life on the Moon".

 In 1937, Drozdovich created detailed sketches of a multi-stage rocket (realized only in the late 1950s), and in the manuscripts of the 1930s he described in detail "astral travel" to the Moon, Mars and Venus. As it became known later, his intuitive descriptions of the landscapes of distant planets largely coincided with the real ones. 

The sculpture dedicated to Yazep Drozdovich was created by I. Golubev and is a thesis for the sculptor. It is called "The Eternal Wanderer", because it was this scientist and artist who was a wanderer, who did not receive recognition during his lifetime. The monument reflects not only the portrait similarity, but also the artist's worldview. This is a figure of a walking man with a staff and an easel. Nearby there is a tree with an unusual crown, in which you can guess the "Belarusian cosmos", planets, castles and knights.