В пучине бренного мира. Японское искусство и его коллекционер Сергей Китаев

Aug. 20, 1916. Department of Manuscripts, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (stock 9, inventory II, document 608). Kitaev writes that he has all fifteen volumes of the rare first edition of Hokusai’s Manga. The 2008 Pushkin Catalogue excludes these lines in its transcription of the text and inserts a few words to smooth the gap. There are ten offending graffiti marks on this page, including, in the upper righthand corner “A Letter of S. N. Kitaev to the artist P. Ia. Pavlinov”, and the underlining of names of Japanese artists. Kitaev uses letterhead from the Chernovo Coal Mines of the Zamyatin Brothers Company.

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Sergei Kitaev

One page of the Brief List, a description of his Japanese print collection, from a draft of a letter to Vasily V. Gorshanov. 1916. Department of Manuscripts, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (stock 9, inventory I, document 22).Kitaev’s letter to Gorshanov was published in the 2008 Pushkin Catalogue (vol. 2, p. 549), but without its main component, the Brief List; the second line of Kitaev’s list mentions thousands of prints by Hokusai.

Kitaev made acquisitions in all ports from Nagasaki and Kagoshima in the south to Hakodate in the north. He did not miss Otsu, famous for its folk pictures, and “the Russian village” Inasa in Nagasaki Bay, where the Russian naval base was established in 1859. On the other hand, all evident advantages notwithstanding, there was a serious problem: in port towns (especially, Yokohama and Kobe) a significant part of the art market was targeted at foreigners, as discussed below.

Kitaev had every reason to call his collection “an encyclopedia of the arts of all Japan[216].” He was not just an amateur who was buying pictures he liked, without any system. Kitaev took care to represent Japan the country through its art. The bulk of his collection was formed in Japan before 1895, when he reached the age of thirty, although he continued to add items through his agents when he settled in Saint Petersburg. He also thought about the benefits to the public and future specialists. Nagata Seiji noted in his introduction to the catalogue of the collection’s 1994 exhibition in Japan: “The huge variety of the materials of this collection is its particular feature. From the scholarly viewpoint, Japanese art is represented in a very strong fashion and conveys the sensibility of the collector. Geographically, it contains everything from the prints of Edo to those of Kyoto, Osaka and Nagasaki. For a foreigner of those days it has a rarely seen breadth[217].”