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

The “dangerous” information about the full fifteen-volume first Manga edition was present in the text file with Kitaev’s transcribed letter sent to me to edit (see fig. 8). In my (unpublished) essay for the Pushkin Catalogue “Japanese pictures of the floating world and their 19th-century European collectors and admirers: The view from our day on the meeting of the two worlds,” I mention the first edition in a very benign context, emphasizing the original glory of the collection[257]. In its defense, the museum staff may not have known about the discrepancy since the books are lost, yet the authorities, fearing that it could encourage uncomfortable inquiries from their superiors, decided it would be better to conceal it completely – by not publishing my essay and by deleting this information from the published version of Kitaev’s letter[258].

Pushkin Catalogue Postscript

The catalogue of Japanese prints in the Pushkin is not easy for a non-Russian reader to use. My assessments that many prints (about seventy surimono and others) were recuts of the early 1890s disappeared at the final moment from the English text and were published only in Russian. Who ordered the omission and for what reason, I was never able to find out. In one or two cases they missed deleting my revision (see no. 510 in vol. 1, p. 367). In the Russian description the word “recut” (peregravirovka) which I, as the academic editor, put in the title line, was moved by the in-house editors into the entry text, with the added disclaimer “in E. Steiner’s opinion this is recut.” In many cases it looks odd because immediately after that follows the text (written by me): “No originals are known” (in the case of Setsuri’s Fish and Squid, no. 144) or “only two originals in such and such museums are known.”

My foreword as academic editor with the brief summation of the goals of the edition and my role, as well as acknowledgment of colleagues and organizations that helped me in my work, was published – but without any heading (possibly it was removed at the very last minute because, on the top of that page, six lines are left empty). My foreword is not mentioned in the Table of Contents and appears after the curator’s introduction on page 20.

E-10

Kitagawa Utamaro II

(?–1831). Infant Komachi (Osana Komachi), from the series Little Seedlings: Seven Komachi (Futabagusa nana Komachi). C. 1803.

Color woodcut, ōban. Published in Impressions Journal, vol. 32 (2011), p. 57.