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

The Kitaevs (Sergei, his wife Anna and their twenty-year-old son Innokenty) left Russia, temporarily, or so they thought. Several months later, the Bolshevik Revolution erupted. Kitaev’s last years have become known only recently. Ishigaki Katsu, the former Russian bibliographer of the National Diet Library in Tokyo, discovered that the Kitaevs were in Mukden (now Shenyang) between 1917 and 1918[238]. It may be that because of the war the Kitaevs could not go to Europe and went instead to relatives in Chernovo, and from there to neighboring China. In the beginning of the twentieth century there was a strong Russian presence in Mukden; after the Battle of Mukden in 1904 the city fell into Japanese hands.

In October 1918, the Kitaevs were in Yokohama, living at Nakamura-chо̄, no. 1492. According to a Yokohama newspaper, “while in Japan thirty-three years ago, the artist Kitaev, well-known in artistic circles, collected fourteen thousand works of Japanese art, including three hundred paintings as well as three thousand prints by Kitagawa Utamaro [1753?–1806], Utagawa Kunisada [1786–1856], Utagawa Toyokuni [1796–1825], Hokusai and other masters – in total about eight thousand[239].” Around that time, Kitaev organized an exhibition in Yokohama of about seventy of his watercolors. In 1921, he moved to the Bluff area. In the Yokohama City Archive, I found a Bluff Directory for 1923. Kitaev was listed there as S. Kitaeff with the house number 179c. It was next to the Ferris seminary (no. 178) and close to the French consulate (no. 185) and the Russian library with the editorial offices of the newspaper Delo Rossii (The Russian Cause) (no. 186).

On June 16, 1922, the Yomiuri newspaper printed the penultimate short news item about the collector: “Mr. Kitaev, the patron of Japanese art who lived in Yamate in Yokohama, suddenly went insane – possibly because of the painful feelings provoked by the state of affairs in Russia.” It happened during the intensive preparations for his one-man exhibition of watercolors at Shirokiya Department Store in Nihonbashi in Tokyo. He had a nervous breakdown. Here it is appropriate to reveal that Pavlinov had mentioned in his letter of recollections about Kitaev that “in 1916… I met Sergei Nikolaevich, who was somehow better after his illness. Doctors recommended he go somewhere abroad for treatment[240].” It may be pertinent that Kitaev’s elder brother, Vasily Kitaev, had committed suicide “having a sudden fit of acute insanity” in 1894, as was mentioned in passing in a newspaper obituary[241].

After an initial hospitalization in Tokyo’s Aoyama neurosis clinic, Kitaev was transferred to Tokyo Prefectural Matsuzawa Hospital with the diagnosis of manic depressive psychosis. This occurred in December 1922; soon afterward, their house on the Bluff was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake. Kitaev’s wife and son left for America (the name Innokenty Sergeevich Kitaeff is in the 1925 M.I.T. yearbook). Sergei Nikolaevich died in Matsuzawa Hospital on April 14, 1927. The notice of his death appears in the bulletin Seikyо̄ Jihо̄ (The Orthodox Messenger), stating that an admiral of the Russian navy, Kitaev, was given the last rites and escorted to a cemetery by a Father Inaga and an attendant, Vasily[242].

During the following decades, the name of Kitaev was completely forgotten in Soviet Russia. His collection (or what was left of it) entered the Pushkin Museum in 1924, with the closing of the Rumyantsev Museum; between 1929 and 1930 the Kitaev Collection was entered in accession ledgers. In 1950, Beata G. Voro- nova, the curator referenced earlier, was assigned to the collection. She held that post for the next fifty-eight years[243].

The Mystery of Big Numbers

Working on the catalogue of the Pushkin prints, I resolved to investigate the huge discrepancy between the original number of Kitaev holdings mentioned in different sources, and what remains. In the Pushkin Catalogue, which had been conceived as a complete presentation of the museum’s holdings of Japanese prints, only 158 of Hokusai’s works are listed (even including those few with a dubious attribution and coming from other, non-Kitaev, provenances). It is not so small a number in itself, but somehow it is more than twenty times smaller than Kitaev’s own estimate[244].