Nikolai Khardzhiev
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nikolai Ivanovich Khardzhiev (ru: Харджиев, Николай Иванович, 26 June 1903, Russian Empire— 10 June 1996, Amsterdam, Netherlands) was a Ukrainian writer, literary and art collector.[1] He possessed an extensive archive and collection of Russian Avantgarde art and literature.[2]
Nikolai Khardzhiev was born in 1903 in Kakhovka, in present-day Ukraine, into a white-collar family; the surname, and Khardzhiev's features, bespeak Caucasian origins, but he was seemingly loath to discuss his own biography, of which few details are available. After graduating from school in Kakhovka in 1920, he briefly worked for his local section of the Commissariat of Enlightenment before studying law in Odesa from 1922 to 1925. Literature, however, was his true vocation, and it was on this subject that he lectured in Odesa workers' clubs and the city's State Institute of Cinema. Living in the garrulous, cosmopolitan city of Babel's tales, Khardzhiev befriended the poet Eduard Bagritsky, who was instrumental in his move to Moscow in the autumn of 1928. Bagritskii was linked to the Constructivist artists, writers and critics of Novyi lef, and it was through him that Khardzhiev met Osip Brik, Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eikhenbaum. Shklovsky — for whom Khardzhiev briefly worked as an assistant — and Brik were the two sponsors of Khardzhiev's application to join the Union of Writers in 1940.[3] Anna Akhmatova, the most famous Russian poet of the Soviet period, was a close friend during the war.[4] In 1953 he married for the second time, to a sculptor, Lidia Chaga.[4]
Suprematist movement
When Kazimir Malevich returned from Europe to Stalinist Russia, his works were confiscated, and he was arrested and banned from making art in 1930.[2] Khardzhiev preserved a large number of documents and memoirs associated with the avant-garde movement, and around 1,350 artworks. These included oil paintings, gouaches and drawings by Malevich; paintings by Pavel Filonov, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova and Olga Rozanova; and important drawings by El Lissitzky.[4]
