Photo: Yelena Yakovleva.
By Yevgeny Shvedov
If you wander through the Duma Tower underpass on Nevsky Prospect, you may spot a young woman with an easel practising the ancient art of the silhouette.
And if you want to get a unique souvenir of St Petersburg to bring back to your family and friends, don't just walk by, stop and have a look.
The young woman's name is Liza Burnayeva and she came to St Petersburg from Kaliningrad, formerly Konigsberg.
She got into silhouettes quite by chance when she ran out of money while holidaying in the south.
Liza took lessons and gradually acquired the skills. It was not long before it became her main source of income.
Liza has a genuine talent and a professional approach to her work. Her silhouettes are remarkably lively and original.
Of course working in the Metro isn't without its dangers as she rubs shoulders with the tramps, drunks, petty thieves and racketeers.
And the police aren't exactly enamored of artists plying their trade in the underpass but then Liza is tough and determined to survive in the heavy climate of the post-Communist era.
Virtually every evening she can be found either in the underpass or on the street by the Duma Tower, trying to eke out a living from her art.
Silhouette art is as old as time.
Its roots can be traced back to ancient Chinese shadow theater and to the sculptured forms of gods and heroes which adorned the ancient Greek amphitheaters.
But in its present form it was given its name by the 18th century French minister of finance Etienne de Silhouette (1709-1767) who, when he was not involved in state matters, used to cut out profiled figures from pieces of black paper.
Silhouettes quickly caught on throughout Europe and then surfaced in Russia where two European craftsmen, F Sido and F Anting, had a profitable business doing portraits of Russian noblemen, generals, and well-known dignitaries of the 18th century.
The first Russian silhouette artist was the famous sculptor Fedot Shubin who made a portrait of an unknown woman using black ink against a gold background.
Silhouettes reached the height of their popularity in the comfortable salons of court society at the beginning of the 19th century. In the 1870s the published tales of Turgenev were illustrated with silhouettes by Y K Bem. This artist along with her contemporary colleagues, N N Karazin and K K Izenberg, made names for themselves illustrating children's books.
The fashion for silhouettes reached a peak at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.
During this period, there were many exponents of this art-form including Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, Konstantin Somov, Alexander Benua and Boris Kustodiyev.
But the greatest contributors to silhouette art appeared at the start of the 20th century with the advent of two artists, G I Narbut, famous for his illustrated St Petersburg themes, and Yelizaveta Kruglikova, author of a whole gallery of portraits -- artists, writers, poets, scientists and other famous faces from Russia's cultural "Silver Age".