Vasily Vassilievich Struve and the Egyptian collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, in the early 1920s

Abstract

The article publishes a document from the Archives of the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg (fund 1, dossier 17, unit 6/9, pp. 1–6), a memorandum presenting arguments to transfer to the Hermitage the famous collection of Egyptian antiquities, which was gathered by Vladimir Golenischeff and placed upon its purchase by the state in 1909 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. The handwriting in the manuscript makes it possible to identify the compiler of the document as Vasily Struve (1889–1965), a prominent researcher of the ancient Orient in the early Soviet period and the keeper of the Hermitage Egyptian collection since the mid-1910s. A comparison with a document from the archives of the A. S. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, which mentions and quotes the memorandum, allows dating it to the middle of 1923. The context of Struve’s initiative was the mobility of academic and cultural institutions in the post-revolutionary years and, probably, more specifically, the attempts to reorganize the collections of Egyptian antiquities in Moscow (to centralize them in the so-called Museum-Institute of the Classical Orient launched by Vladimir Vikentiev). As expected, this initiative was met with harsh objections from the Museum of Fine Arts, most likely backed by Tatiana Borozdina-Kozmina who was Boris Turaev’s successor as the keeper of the museum’s Egyptian collection. In the end, this initiative was never implemented. The episode reflected in this document is an interesting illustration of the degree of mobility even in the life of the leading and best-established museum collections in post-revolutionary Russia.