prints claimed in the pamphlets gave grounds to imagine that the Pushkin collection of Japanese prints is a hidden treasure. After the collapse of the USSR, when the cultural policies of the early post-Soviet authorities (consequently, of the Pushkin Museum) became slightly more open, a team of specialists from Japan rushed to Moscow to photograph and briefly describe the prints. In the following year, 1993, a book of minuscule reproductions with short captions was published in what became the first volume of the new Japanese Art Abroad Research Project of the Nichibunken, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto[203]. That illustrated list, or reference work, the
Pushikin zuroku, was an important prolegomenon for a future catalogue. The catalogue proper had been, for several decades, a work-in-progress of the curator of the Pushkin Japanese collection, Beata G. Voronova. By early 2006, the curatorial and editorial work had been completed, and two volumes of about five hundred pages each were scheduled to be sent to the printer. Around that time, I happened to be in Moscow and met with Irina Antonova, Director of the Pushkin[204]. She asked me to review the manuscript “for the last look” before it was to go to press “next week.” Upon reading it, I advised her to stop production for at least a year for, as I gently put it, “updating and expanding.” My suggestions of what had to be reworked and further researched convinced Madame Antonova. She ordered production to be halted on the spot. Her lieutenants were aghast, crying that the sponsors would donate no more money in the event of a delay. Madame Antonova asked me to amplify the catalogue in the capacity, as they call it in Russia, of academic editor. What ensued was a year and a half of very intensive research, rewriting, translation from Japanese, reattribution, compilation of the glossary, updating of the bibliography and contribution of about six hundred new entries. I also examined the history of the collection, discovering a cache of documents concerning Sergei Kitaev. The present essay is an extension of my work on Kitaev and the collection history.
E-4
Iaponskaya graviura
(Japanese prints), the 2008 Pushkin Catalogue; volume 2 open. Photo by the author.
The “Pushkin Catalogue,” Iaponskaya graviura (Japanese prints), was published in 2008 in two thick tomes[205]. Unfortunately, it added scant visibility to this fabled collection inconnue. At the last moment, the Pushkin decided not to include English translations of the entries and introductory essay. The data in Latin letters are romanized names of the Japanese artists and the title and series of each print. I was only marginally successful in insisting on an alphabetical index of artists in Latin letters, to enable those users who do not read Cyrillic letters to find an artist listed alphabetically in a volume of over five hundred pages; Chikanobu (Тиканобу) and Hokusai (Хокусай), for example, come at the end of the Russian alphabet of thirty-three letters. After protracted persuasion, I seemed to have convinced the Pushkin bosses that a romanized index would be useful. The index was published – but without corresponding page numbers!
The incomplete roman index is a minor nuisance compared to the absence of the catalogue in bookstores and libraries. Brill publishers offered through me to distribute the catalogue outside Russia, a tender of no interest to the Pushkin authorities. There are copies in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, in the British Library, London, the library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC and the library of Waseda University, Tokyo. Two additional copies are those donated by me to the library of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, Norwich, UK, and to the Institute’s London office. The Pushkin Catalogue was printed in fifteen hundred copies; for roughly a month, it was available for sale for twenty-five hundred rubles (then one hundred dollars) in the Pushkin Museum bookstand. (I was lucky to have friends in Moscow who bought two copies and sent them to me – each set is about five kilos – over eleven pounds.) Since then, the catalogue is virtually unavailable, as it was never released to Russian bookstores.
The century-long story of the Kitaev Collection is, to borrow Churchill’s words, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” According to the Pushkin curator, Voronova, there are about two thousand prints currently in the roster. What happened to the tens of thousands proudly mentioned by the original collector? Why does this catalogue, called in the Pushkin “raisonné,” contain only 1546 entries, including insignificant prints in horrible condition, while dozens, if not hundreds, of decent works are left out?[206] (Sometimes the left sheet of a complete diptych is omitted, even though the right sheet is in the catalogue.) I made a start to unravel these contradictions. The fate of the Kitaev Collection is typical of what happens to a noble private initiative in Russia – be it under a czarist, Soviet or post-Soviet regime. Behind these vicissitudes remains the compelling story of Sergei Kitaev and his enchantment with Japanese art.
An “Encyclopedia of All the Arts of Japan”
In the late nineteenth century, when the young Sergei Kitaev began to buy Japanese art during his stopovers in Japanese ports (1885–86 and 1893–96), the collecting of ukiyo-e prints in the West was enjoying exponential growth. In Russia, however, he was virtually
