Kiev sculpture

Pronya Prokopovna and Svirid Petrovich Golokhvastov, by sculptors Vladimir Shchur and Vitaliy Sivko.
Photo by Sylvie Barbalat, 2006.

They are characters from a famous play by the Ukrainian dramatist and writer Mikhail Petrovich Staritsky (1840-1904). The comedy “Za Dvumya Zaytsamy” ( “After Two Hares ”) - meaning that if you run after two hares, you will catch neither - was even made into a film.
The plot was that the guy with the stag beetle was the one after the two hares.
Did you spot it? Oh, they do land on people sometimes!

Male stag beetle. Photo by Sylvie Barbalat, October 2006.

Close-up of the stag beetle on the young man's coat. Photo by Sylvie Barbalat, 2006.

It was a very humorous and apt detail to add.
Kiev is one of the many towns that have stag beetles [1]. Other examples that I know of are Budapest, Basel, Bonn, Brussels, London, and Colchester which is where I live.

For its location in Kiev click here.

[1] - Mamonov G (1991) The Great European Stag Beetle - its Past and its Future. Bulletin of the Amateur Entomologist's Society 50: 157-163. [PDF]

Acknowledgments

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