The war interrupted his schooling, but he continued his studies after demobilisation under the famous artist L. Mutchnik. He eventually graduated from the Kiev Art Institute in 1954. He was for a while Deputy Director at the Odessa Western and Oriental Art Museum, and in 1956 he started teaching painting at the Odessa Theatre and Art College, a position which he held until his death in 1990. Throughout his career, Sosnovsky never attempted to promote his art or indeed himself. He was known as a brilliant but reclusive painter, and he seldom if ever parted with a picture or even a sketch. A strange cultural alchemy produced in the USSR of those years a number of highly cultured and gifted individuals who were not oriented towards personal advancement or public recognition, but, content with the minimum essentials of survival, pursued their studies or arts in almost total isolation. Sosnovsky was one of these, and his works have thus the additional charm of being creations intended exclusively for the artist himself.

Weather permitting, Sosnovsky spent all his free time sketching outdoors in and around Odessa. He was particularly attracted by the harbour and Shevchenko Park, as well as the fields and woods around the suburb of Mikhailovka. Of course, he was also remarkably well-versed in studio painting, mainly still lives and compositions of inanimate objects. But it was nature that really attracted him, nature and views without any hidden meanings, sincere and alive. He created his own beautiful world, full of glorious sunsets, rose bushes, streams and trees moving in the wind.

Sosnovsky was married without children, and his widow kept his studio intact until her own death in 1998: following that, the contents of the studio were sold and dispersed by the heirs. We consider ourselves fortunate to have had the chance to secure a good number of his outdoor sketches, as well as some of his finished pictures.