В пучине бренного мира. Японское искусство и его коллекционер Сергей Китаев - Евгений Семенович Штейнер

Japanese Art Abroad Research Project, ed., Pushikin bijutsukan shozō Nihon bijutsuhin zuroku (Catalogue of Japanese art in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts) (Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 1993).

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Irina A. Antonova (b. 1922) worked in the Pushkin Museum since 1945 and was at the helm since 1961 to 2013. In the West she was often reverentially (and perhaps nor without a tinge of irony) referred to as Madame Antonova. She was President of the Pushkin from 2013 to November 2020 when, in the ripe age of 98, she died of Covid-19. I was introduced to her when I was hired to the Pushkin Museum in 1975.

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This two-volume work for which I served as academic editor is referred to collectively as the Pushkin Catalogue in the present essay and endnotes: Beata G. Voronova, Iaponskaia graviura, Evgeny Steiner, academic editor, 2 vols. (Moscow: Krasnaia Ploshchad, 2008). A second edition, published in 2009 and released in 2010, was available in the Pushkin bookstore during a few months for about $100.

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This number corresponds to 1948 accession numbers. Each sheet of a diptych and triptych was given its own accession number; 116 entries came from sources other than the Kitaev Collection.

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Among the very few of Kitaev’s predecessors to buy Japanese arts and crafts was Vice-Admiral Evald A. Stakelberg (1849–1909). As an officer on the corvette Askold that sailed to Japan in the 1870s, he spent much time in Japanese ports. He was interested mostly in Japanese armor and decorative art. In 1882, there was a small exhibition from Stakelberg’s collection in Saint Petersburg, organized in conjunction with the official visit of Prince Arisugawa Taruhito (1835–1895). A collection of Japanese porcelain bought by Admiral Konstantin N. Pos’et (1819–1899), Vice-Admiral Alexander E. Kroun (1823–1900) and Captain Vladimir V. Lindstroem was donated around that time to the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Saint Petersburg. After several exhibitions from the Kitaev Collection, and with the influence of Japonism and the surge of interest in Japan provoked by the Russo-Japanese War, small collections of Japanese prints were amassed by Russian artists, critics and art collectors: P. I. Shchukin (1853–1912); I. S. Ostroukhov (1858–1929); I. E. Grabar (1871–1960); P. P. Konchalovsky (1876–1956) and others.

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Kitaev’s letter to Pavel Pavlinov, Aug. 20 (Gregorian calendar, 2 Sept.), 1916. Department of Manuscripts, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, stock 9, inventory II, document 608. Here and throughout the present essay translations from Russian and Japanese are by the author.

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This is a Russian rank established in 1832 for prominent citizens of the entrepreneur class who did not belong to the gentry; it was prestigious and restricted. At the time Kitaev was born, hereditary honorable citizens made up about 0.2–0.3 percent of the population of Russia. This information is entered in his service record in the Russian state naval archive (Saint Petersburg) and reproduced in facsimile in the 2008 Pushkin Catalogue, vol.˛2, 550. In Naselennye punkty Riazanskoy gubernii (Inhabited localities of Riazan [Ryazan] province), ed. by I. I. Prokhodtsov (Riazan: Riazanskii Gubernskii Statisticheskii Komitet, 1906) an estate of a “gentry Kitaev” is mentioned, which suggests that the wealth and prominent position led the compilers of this statistical book to believe that the Kitaevs belonged to the old gentry class.

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Report of Captain Chevazhevsky, the acting head of the 1st department of Spassky district of St. Petersburg (1904), Central Russian Historical Archive, stock 6c/102, inventory 1, document 20, p. 92. See Iz istorii Russko-Iaponskoi voiny 1904–1905 gg (From the history of the Russo-Japanese War 1904–05) (Saint Petersburg: Saint Petersburg University Publishers, 2005), 384.

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Alexander Kitaev, “Nagasaki,” Niva (The Field) 28 (1891): 610–15.

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The place where these letters were written is not indicated, but from the text it is clear that Kitaev was at that time far from Saint Petersburg. Because they are written on letterhead titled “Chernovskie kamennougol’nye kopi” (Chernovo coal mines), it is natural to assume that the letters were written there (19 km from the Siberian city of Chita), where Kitaev and his family summered with his wife’s relatives (the owners of these mines were the Zamiatin brothers, and his wife was born as Anna Zamiatina).

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These are only selected data from the Brief List. Other entries include twelve hanging scrolls by Hokusai; three hanging scrolls by Hiroshige; scrolls of the Tosa school; hanging scrolls by Kano Tan’yū, etc. This list is found in a draft of a letter to Vasily V. Gorshanov, Department of Manuscripts, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, stock 9, inventory I, document 22. The letter is published in the 2008 Pushkin Catalogue, but without its longer component, the Brief List, which is omitted without mention. See Pushkin Catalogue, vol. 2, 549. Kitaev’s guide to the first exhibition of 1896 gives more detailed, but slightly different, data: Ōkyo and Shijō school – 16 scrolls; Ganku and Kishi school – 74 scrolls; Hokusai – 13; Kyōsai – 11, Tosa school – 3, Sesshū school – 2, etc. One should bear in mind that not all of Kitaev’s attributions were correct.

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I saw many of these photographs in the late 1970s in the Pushkin’s Department of Scientific Documentation, a visual archive that is now part of the museum library. The accordion-style (orihon) albums were stored in original Japanese upholstered-wood boxes, on the very top of the high shelves (filled with huge boxes of loose reproductions of Western European paintings taken after World War II from the Dresden Gallery as “trophy art”). The location of the Kitaev boxes was not indicated in any finding aids or even catalogued in the ledger books. After the relocation of the materials of