Keeper Of Antiquities Research Articles

The Keeper’s letters. From Yury Dombrovsky’s correspondence with friends and colleagues about The Keeper of Antiquities [Khranitel drevnostey] and other matters

It appears that existing collected works and editions have been misleading as to when exactly Yury Dombrovsky started writing his novel The Keeper of Antiquities [Khranitel drevnostey]. This hitherto unpublished collection of annotated correspondence between Dombrovsky and his friends and fellow writers not only reveals the year when he began writing his book, but also provides an invaluable source of biographical knowledge that sheds light on the later Moscow-based period of his life (1955–1978) and, specifically, on the favourable period during the Khrushchev Thaw, when Dombrovsky’s books finally appeared in print. Among his correspondents and people mentioned in the letters are N. Anov, I. Ehrenburg, N. Mandelstam, S. Markov, Y. Kazakov, and others. Interestingly, the collection contains a letter where, without naming the author and paraphrasing the book’s title, Dombrovsky offers his view of the recently published Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [Odin den Ivana Denisovicha].

Yury Dombrovsky’s complaint to the Prosecutor General of the USSR

Yury Dombrovsky did not leave any journals or memoirs. His life story can be gleaned from letters, criminal case files and other official records, as well as reminiscences of his friends and autobiographical prose and poetry. This publication of a previously unknown complaint is highly significant: first of all, it contains the writer’s description of his personal odyssey during the Stalin era and offers a concise yet informative summary of events spanning a long period of time (1920s–1940s) and their background; importantly, it covers his time in the labour camp, of which very little is known. With few exceptions, e.g., the extract entitled ‘From the Notes of Zybin’ from his novel The Keeper of Antiquities [ Khranitel drevnostey], Dombrovsky avoided remembering this period or writing about it. The complaint to the Prosecutor General of the USSR survived in the case file of the fourth criminal proceedings started against Dombrovsky in 1949. The complaint mentions famous personalities, writers and literary critics. The comments to the publication draw on a vast body of documents including Dombrovsky’s criminal case files.

An English Alabaster at Muret, Haute-Garonne

In 1957 I published a note in the Antiquaries Journal on a small alabaster sculpture of the Virgin and St. Anne, which I considered to be of English origin, from Montpezat-de-Quercy, Tarn-et-Garonne, and noted that its subject was also represented on an English alabaster in the Hildburgh collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum that was believed to come from Bruniquel, also in Languedoc. The importation from England of alabaster sculptures of St. Anne teaching the Virgin to read is confirmed by yet another such group in the parish church of Saint-Jacques at Muret, Haute-Garonne. Its existence was revealed to me by M. Mathieu Meras, Directeur des Services d'Archives and Keeper of Antiquities at Montauban. He included it in an exhibition of “Tresors d'Art Gothique en Languedoc’ held at the Musée Ingres, Montauban, from June to September 1961.

Some Attic Fragments: Pot, Plaque, and Dithyramb

The only common factor shared by the fragments of vase and votive plaque discussed below is that all are Attic. The plaque fragments seemed to deserve individual treatment outside the general study of votive plaques from the Athenian Acropolis on which I am engaged. The vase fragment with the Marsyas scene which is published here with some comment on the possible literary treatment of the myth is in the possession of Mr. John Leatham. To him I am indebted for permission to study and publish the piece, and to Mme. S. Karouzou, Prof. O. Broneer, the Keeper of Antiquities in the Ashmolean Museum, and the Director of the Thorvaldsen Museum for permission to publish pieces in Athens, Oxford, and Copenhagen.I. Marsyas and MelanippidesThe fragment which is here Illustrated on Plate I, 1, 3 is at present in the keeping of Mr. John Leatham. Unfortunately its provenience can be defined no more nearly than as ‘from Greece’. On the photograph reproduced on Plate I, 3 I have added in white the painted details on the sherd which the camera could not record. It is from the rim and wall of a calyx crater, part of whose lip decoration, a palmette scroll, is preserved. From the figure scene below we see the upper part of an Athena who holds her spear upright in the right hand while her arm hangs at her side, perhaps with the hand on the rim of a shield which rested on the ground beside her. She wears an aegis over her peplos, and an Attic helmet with raised cheek-pieces. She is looking to her left and slightly down towards a figure before a tree with white painted leaves. The figure is apparently seated, and his snub nose shows that he is a satyr or silen, and not a young one to judge by his shaggy white hair.

An Open-Work Bronze Disc in the Ashmolean Museum

The linear patterns on British mirrors and other bronzes show with what zest the Celtic craftsmen of the first centuries B.C. and A.D. copied and adapted the triquetral design in relief exemplified on the well-known bronze plaque from Llyn Cerrig Bach, Anglesey (fig. 1).On the other hand, the evidence for the continued use and development of this attractive asymmetric motif in plastic art is but slight, and any additional example of fine metalwork thus decorated is welcome.Such a specimen, an open-work disc in cast bronze, is here figured (pl. I). It is mentioned by our Fellow Mr. E. T. Leeds in his Celtic Ornament (p. 56), and this led the writer to ask our Fellow Mr. D. B. Harden, Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum, for facilities for its study, and thereafter for permission to publish, both requests being readily granted. The Museum number is N.C. 448. The disc appears, Mr. Harden tells me, in a catalogue of c. 1879–80, at which time, apparently, its origin and date of accession were unknown, as they were left blank in the catalogue.

Archæological Studies in Ireland

IRELAND, for long not so much a neglected corner in the archæological field as the victim of a provincial outlook, is to come into her own as an element in the mosaic of European prehistory. She is at last to take her proper place in the pattern which a band of workers closely in touch with one another is rapidly piecing together, more especially in the north-western sector of Europe, of the early movements of cultures and peoples, from which has emerged the complex of modern Western civilization. To say this is not to ignore the achievement of Ireland's archæologists and historians in the past, many of them, like Sir William Wilde and George Coffey, of international repute. Granting these exceptions, in little more than a decade there has been a change in the spirit and orientation of Irish archæology which has diverted interest from exclusive preoccupation with Ireland as a unitary region, or as an appendage of Britain only, in such studies, and their bearing on the identification and history of the mythical races and peoples of early Ireland, to the wider horizon of the correlation of her development in civilization With that of Great Britain and the Continental mainland. The story of this change has been told recently by Dr. Adolf Mahr, keeper of antiquities and director of the National Museum of Ireland, in his presidential address for 1937 to the Prehistoric Society, of which a digest appears on another page of this issue of NATURE (see p. 1041).