В пучине бренного мира. Японское искусство и его коллекционер Сергей Китаев - [64]

Unknown artist of Utagawa school

Вторая пол. XIX в.

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Композиция демонстрирует внутренний вид лавки, где делают и подают охаги. Это рисовые колобки, покрытые сладкой пастой из соевых бобов. Вареный рис толкут в больших ступах до состояния клейкой однородной массы. Работа эта долгая и трудная, сравнимая с отбиванием колобков моти. Сверху охаги могут быть посыпаны (гома).

В основе замысла этой картинки лежит злободневная сатира на политическую ситуацию революционного 1-го года Мэйдзи. Первое значение слова “хаги” 萩 – кустарник с мелкими желтыми цветами. Это был родовой узор могущественного клана Тё̄сю̄, врага сёгуната и зачинателя Реставрации Мэйдзи. Соответственно, лавка, где делают охаги, намекает на его заведение. Работники вокруг большой бочки – это разные самурайские кланы помельче, которые вынуждены присоединиться к Тёсю. Некоторые из работников демонстративно сложили руки на груди, не желая активно участвовать; кто-то смотрит, кто-то ахает, другие молча делают то, что велено.

Приправа из кунжутных семян к охаги выбрана не случайно: слово “гома” имеет несколько омонимов и три разных иероглифических написания и кроме “кунжут” (胡麻) означает “лесть, угодничество” (胡麻), а также “надувать, прикидываться” (誤魔). Те, кому льстят, с довольным видом поедают охаги слева. Это князья клана Тоса (справа, в желтом кимоно с черепаховым узором), Сацума и Аки. Рядом с каждым есть надписи, которые кончаются на слово “таю”; в зависимости от контекста это означает “главный актер” или “куртизанка высшего разряда”. Имя крайнего левого буквально означает “главный актер (или высшая проститутка) переходного года”, т. е. 1868-го, когда последняя эра эпохи Эдо (4-й год Кэйо) сменился 1-м годом Мэйдзи. В целом сатирический сюжет довольно прозрачно намекает на то, что в ситуации радикальных общественных перемен есть те, кто вынужден эти перемены осуществлять, и те, кто получает выгоду.

4 In the Vortex of the Floating World

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Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Kiheiji Rescued from the series Ten Heroic Accomplishments of Tametomo (Tametomo homare no jikketsu). 1847–1852.

The Kitaev Collection: La collection inconnue and its Cataloguing How it all Began

THE Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow predominantly holds antiquities and West European art. It also keeps a collection of Japanese art, especially woodblock prints, that includes a certain residue from the scores amassed by Sergei Kitaev (1864–1927), a Russian naval officer whose ship took him to Japan as he cruised the high seas between 1885 and 1896. Rumors circulate that the Japanese print collection is “big” or even “the largest in Europe,” but no one outside a few scholars in the late 1980s or early 1990s has viewed it. Until recently, only three pamphlets in Russian in conjunction with small exhibitions from the Kitaev holdings have been published. They sketch the provenance of the Kitaev Collection, said to include either twenty-two or twenty-five thousand woodcuts. The prelude to a story of misfortunes begins when Kitaev sent his crated collection to the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow for safekeeping in early 1917, when he left Russia, ostensibly for medical treatment abroad.

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Sergei Kitaev

(second from the right, is officer of the watch) on the conning bridge of the cruiser “Admiral Kornilov”. c. 1894–1896. From V. Yarovoi, “Kreiser Admiral Kornilov” (The cruiser “Admiral Kornilov”), “Morskaya Kampaniya” (“Maritime campaign”) 10 (2007): 17.

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Beata G. Voronova in her office at the Pushkin Museum. June 2007. Photo by the author.

With the closure of the Rumyantsev Museum in 1924, the Kitaev Collection was transferred to the Museum of Fine Arts, renamed the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (“the Pushkin”) in 1937. The number of Kitaev 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.