Farewell (Parting) — a monument created by sculptor Vladimir Kurdov, dedicated to the participants of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. It is a bronze sculptural composition consisting of figures of three people — a man going to the front, as well as a woman and a boy saying goodbye to their husband and father.
The monument is installed on the site where, during the Great Patriotic War, there was a draft station from which more than six thousand soldiers from the Penza region were conscripted to the front.
Next to the monument is a pedestal into which several metal capsules are embedded, containing soil brought from countries of Eastern and Western Europe — from the battlefields of Penza soldiers.
Opposite the "Farewell" monument was a commemorative sign installed even before the monument itself was created. It was a large natural stone into which an open book made of black marble was embedded. On the pages of the book, a fragment of a poem by the Penza poetess Larisa Yashina, daughter of a front-line soldier who died in 1943, was engraved:
Columns stretched beyond the horizon,
Where haven’t you been, our fellow countryman...
From here the front began,
From here Victory was seen.
The poem was originally carved on a stele. But later it was decided to move the stele with these verses to the site of the first battle of the 354th Rifle Division — near the former village of Matushkino. Today, this place is the city of Zelenograd. During reconstruction in 2013, the stone was removed, and the poetic lines were transferred to the base of the monument and to the pedestal of the capsules with soil.
