内容摘要：Coral, a rescued manatee, swims in a pool at the Bicho d’Agua project facilities in Castanhal, Brazil, Sunday, March 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Jorge Saenz)

Coral, a rescued manatee, swims in a pool at the Bicho d’Agua project facilities in Castanhal, Brazil, Sunday, March 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Jorge Saenz)

MOSCOW (AP) — Zurab Tsereteli, a prominent Georgian-Russian sculptor known for colossal, often controversial, monuments, died early on Tuesday at 91.His assistant Sergei Shagulashvili told

state news agency Tass that Tsereteli suffered cardiac arrest.Tsereteli was born on January 4, 1934, in, which was part of the Soviet Union at the time, in the capital Tbilisi.

In the 1970s, Tsereteli became an art director with the Soviet Foreign Ministry, traveling the world and decorating Soviet embassies. In between, he worked on Mikhail Gorbachev’s summer house in Abkhazia.“I don’t know why they chose me,” he said in a 2013 interview. “But I went through a good school - maybe that’s why. A school that synthesised architecture and monumental art! I had good teachers.”

In 1989, a monument designed by Tsereteli was erected in London. In 1990, another one was unveiled in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Tsereteli moved to Moscow and built a rapport with then-mayor Yuri Luzhkov. The relationship guaranteed him regular and lucrative commissions. He designed several squares and two metro stations in central Moscow and put up a dozen massive monuments around the city.Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vargas Llosa’s longtime friend, later confessed that he had rooted against the writer’s candidacy, observing: “Peru’s uncertain gain would be literature’s loss. Literature is eternity, politics mere history.”

Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso, left, honors writer Mario Vargas Llosa with the medal of “merit in the Order of the Grand Cross” in recognition of the writer’s contribution to world literature, in Quito, Ecuador, Sept. 27, 2021. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa, File)Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso, left, honors writer Mario Vargas Llosa with the medal of “merit in the Order of the Grand Cross” in recognition of the writer’s contribution to world literature, in Quito, Ecuador, Sept. 27, 2021. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa, File)

Vargas Llosa also used his literary talents to write several successful novels about the lives of real people, including French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin and his grandmother, Flora Tristan, in “The Way to Paradise” in 2003 and 19th-century Irish nationalist and diplomat Sir Roger Casement in “The Dream of the Celt” in 2010. His last published novel was “Harsh Times” (Tiempos Recios) in 2019 about a U.S.-backed coup d’etat in Guatemala in 1954.He became a member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994 and held visiting professor and resident writer posts in more than a dozen colleges and universities across the world.