Nikolai Khardzhiev

Nikolai Khardzhiev was a Ukrainian writer, literary critic, and art collector. Between the 1930s and the 1960s he amassed an unrivaled collection of avant-garde art and rare literary manuscripts, amounting to hundreds of works by the leading figures of modernism in the Russian and Soviet Empires, including Kazimierz Malewicz, El Lissitzky, and Vladimir Maiakovskii, among many others.

Khardzhiev was born and raised in Kakhovka, a port city in Southern Ukraine. Because he was fiercely private when interviewed, few details of his early biography are known. He studied law at the University of Odesa from 1922 to 1925 before abandoning his legal career in 1928 to relocate to Moscow and pursue his true passion: literature.

Moscow remained a hotbed of modernist culture in the decade following the revolution, home to myriad artistic groups with often contrasting and fiercely debated theories about the function of art and literature in the still-new Soviet state. Khardzhiev befriended many of the ringleaders of these movements, working in editorial and publishing roles with Viktor Shklovskii and Roman Jakobson (the fathers of Russian formalist theory), and with Osip Brik, a prominent literary theorist and director of several Soviet cultural institutions. He also forged personal relationships with many artists and writers, particularly those of the Futurist movement. Political affiliations further aided his literary undertakings. During the Soviet period, writers were required to have official accreditation or affiliation to be published. Khardzhiev’s work was implicitly authorized through his employment history, which included a period at the Commissariat of Enlightenment, membership in the Union of Soviet Writers, and a role on the academic council of the Maiakovskii Museum.

Khardzhiev’s passion project was a written history of Russian Futurism. He was uniquely situated to undertake it, having personal connections with its protagonists, sanctioning from Soviet cultural administrators, and—above all—a preternatural talent for primary research. Despite spending many years preparing it, he never completed the project.

While Khardzhiev’s collection is famed today for its hundreds of important paintings (perhaps primarily Malewicz’s Suprematist works, such as Suprematist Composition with Blue Triangle and Black Rectangle, 1915; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), which Khardzhiev was able to purchase cheaply due to low demand), it also contains numerous significant examples of so-called minutiae. The collector was extraordinarily skilled at finding and preserving rare documents, obscure editions, and biographical ephemera. Among the jewels of his collections are an near-complete set of manuscripts from Malewicz’s time in Vitebsk, alongside hundreds of drawings that reveal how his Suprematist aesthetics evolved from an earlier Alogist phase (a semi-abstract artistic mode and precursor to Suprematism). Khardzhiev obtained sections from the personal diary of artist Natalia Goncharova, the original handwritten draft of poet Aleksei Kruhcenkyh’s iconic zaum (transrational) manifesto, an exceptional hoard of rare Futurist publications, and hundreds of private letters exchanged between members of the avant-garde, brimming with details about their lives and work.

Khardzhiev’s prolific activity as a collector did not translate into the biographical projects that his collections were amassed to serve. Although he edited and published several significant anthologies, including collections of verse by Vladimir Maiakovskii and Osip Mandelshtam, many other planned projects, such as biographies of Malewicz and Velimir Khlebnikov, remained unfinished. This diminished output was partly circumstantial: public interest in the pre-revolutionary avant-garde declined drastically in Russia during the 1930s and did not begin to revive until the 1960s. In the following decades, some 1,600 artworks stored in Khardzhiev’s house began to rise in value, at first slowly and then stratospherically.

Along with 172 works by Malewicz, Khardzhiev owned paintings by Vasily Kandinsky, Gustav Klucis, Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, and many others. These names grew in international stature toward the end of the Cold War, and the renewed interest in early Soviet modernism sparked several international exhibitions. This public prominence coincided with a surge of Russian buyers emerging onto the capitalist contemporary art market following the fall of the Soviet Union. As auction prices for modern Russian art skyrocketed, the market was flooded with fakes and forgeries. This was the context in which Khardzhiev’s archive became a valuable commodity.

In 1993, convinced of imminent attempts to steal the collection, Khardzhiev fled Russia for The Netherlands, his priceless manuscripts packed into suitcases. These were seized at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport; customs officials confiscated half of his holdings, which were reappropriated to the Russian State, where they remain, mostly in State archives. Khardzhiev’s final years in Amsterdam were plagued by controversy and his allegations of fraud on the part of the dealers and gallerists who orchestrated the sale of the remainder of his collection, which was acquired by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.