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

But it was only the beginning of the collection’s misfortunes (and those of the collector himself). In 1916, Kitaev was preparing to travel abroad for prolonged medical treatment, and he offered the government the chance to buy his collection. Surprisingly, the response went as far as establishing a commission of experts to evaluate the collection. Its members were Sergei Oldenburg (1863–1934), a professor of Buddhism and Indian culture; Sergei Eliseev (known in the West as Serge Elisséeff, 1889–1975), a Japanologist who had just returned from Japan after becoming the first European graduate of Tokyo University; Pavel Pavlinov, Kitaev’s fellow naval officer and artist; and Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, the printmaker who had been impressed by the collection at the 1896 exhibition. It was in anticipation of the examination of his collection that Kitaev sent two letters to Pavlinov to whet the latter’s interest. The commission met in Kitaev’s home in Saint Petersburg in September 1916 over the course of seven evenings, and recommended to the government that it should buy the collection. However, the purchase fell through because, as Pavlinov wrote forty years later, due to wartime expenses the government could not meet Kitaev’s asking price of one hundred and fifty thousand rubles, comparable to about fifty thousand dollars in 1916. That year was the beginning of a huge inflation in Russia; prices skyrocketed in autumn. Before the war, Kitaev’s salary would have been about three thousand rubles per annum. An apartment of five or six rooms, with bathroom and electriсity, averaged about two hundred per month. In 1898, Kitaev had wanted to sell his collection for fifteen thousand rubles. The difference between that figure and his asking price in 1916 was based on inflation, an increase in prices for Japanese art and the fact that in 1898 he was willing to sell his holdings for a fraction of their real value.

Meanwhile, Kitaev was eager to get out of the country and could not leave his collection in Saint Petersburg; the front line was very close, and there was a real possibility of the German army entering the city. The same Pavlinov, who had some connections in the Moscow Rumyantsev Museum, advised Kitaev to entrust the collection to its custody. In a letter to Vasily Gorshanov, a member of the Society of Friends of the Rumyantsev Museum, Kitaev had asked permission to leave the collection on loan for safekeeping, and mentioned his unsuccessful attempt to sell it to the state[235]. He then wrote a second letter in December 1916:

Dear Vasily Vikent’evich [Gorshanov]!

Thank you for your fast and kind reply.

I beg you to not think that I obtrude myself with my collection.

I am personally in love with it and am not interested in selling it soon. I only regret that it is not public property, so the people who understand true art could pick up from it a lot of the delight that it provides[236].

As a footnote to the story of the vanished grandeur of the Kitaev Collection, I would like to mention one virtually unknown reference to its breadth. It is a newspaper review of the exhibition organized by Kitaev in September 1905 in Saint Petersburg:

In total, there are two hundred and fifty paintings and several hundreds of sketches of the best artists. Next to it there are up to thirteen hundred systematized big photographs taken and artistically colored by the Japanese… Also, there are several thousand pictures printed in color [woodcuts]. Besides these, about one hundred and fifty watercolors of Japanese views painted by Kitaev himself are on view… On top of this, in the exhibition rooms there are many rare Japanese objects made of bronze, porcelain, ivory and screens (among the latter, there are a few of high artistic quality, such as the work of the famous decorative master Kо̄rin)[237].

It is difficult to imagine the enormous scale of this exhibition, but the number of two-dimensional works (two hundred and fifty paintings, thirteen hundred photographs and several thousand prints) coincides with what is known from other sources, including Kitaev himself. What is most interesting is the mention of decorative and applied arts. There is no material witness or paper trail of these objects or of what happened to them before or after Kitaev consigned his crates and boxes to storage in the Rumyantsev Museum basement at the end of 1916. The railroad car with Kitaev’s collection probably reached Moscow in February 1917. The collection would have been nationalized by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

Parting with the Collection