“The Calm That Comes With Acquiring Another Rarity Never Lasts — You Immediately Set Off in Search Again”: Specialists in Antiques, Archives, and Archaeology

Mikhail Yadrov

expert in antiquarian books at the Litfond auction house and gallery in St. Petersburg

HOW DID YOUR WORK AS AN EXPERT IN ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS BEGIN? DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST RARE BOOK YOU FOUND?

With Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky… At some point, I wanted to read everything he had written — with a full, deep dive into the context of each publication. For all the abundance of modern reprints of the classics, not one of them satisfied my need for completeness, quality of edition, or design. I started looking for the one! And that was how the antiquarian and second-hand book world opened up: how books were published and by whom, how many editions there were in the first place, how they differed in content, which were valued more highly, and so on. Later, I began reconstructing the bibliography of every author I was interested in, and this small fascination gradually grew into professional and research work.

It is hard to retrieve the memory of a special first book: the charm of books is that, after all, there are so many of them! But Vladimir Nabokov’s "Spring in Fialta", published by the cult émigré press Ardis and given to me by a friend, definitely holds great value for me.

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING AT LITFOND, AND WHAT DOES YOUR WORK HERE INVOLVE? WHAT DOES IT CONSIST OF? WHAT DOES YOUR USUAL WORKING DAY LOOK LIKE?

I have been working at Litfond for two years. Every day, my colleagues and I evaluate and prepare for sale dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of books and works of art. They do not come to us out of nowhere: every object has its owner — someone who may have inherited the item, an experienced antiquarian dealer, or a serious collector for whom selling works and adding new ones to a collection has long been a way of life.

Our everyday task is to understand immediately what has been brought to us, what its context is, and what its current estimated value might be. After that, all the items go through a detailed description, with reference to scholarly sources, and are passed on for professional photography. The most difficult, interesting, and responsible part is to find and reveal their non-obvious value: auctions often receive things that no major researcher has ever seen, or things that were thought to have been lost altogether.

HOW ARE LOTS SELECTED FOR LITFOND?

In most cases, we select lots for auction directly at the office. We can assess them remotely through the form on the website, or examine them on site: we have a clear appointment system where you can choose the department you need to visit — books, manuscripts, photography, or decorative and applied arts, painting, and graphics. If there are many items, or if they are large, we come to the owner’s address.

WHAT, FOR EXAMPLE, CAN BE PUT UP FOR AUCTION FROM PRIVATE LIBRARIES, AND WHAT WILL MOST LIKELY NOT HAVE THAT KIND OF VALUE?

The most sought-after editions at our auctions are lifetime editions of classics from the Golden and Silver Ages of Russian literature, inscribed copies, books of the Russian avant-garde, illustrated children’s books, and much, much more. Each book has to be approached individually: the thematic range of items in demand on the antiquarian market is so vast and changes so dynamically that strict generalizations risk rejecting a potential treasure. I have formulated this rule for myself: never reject anything in theory — everything has to be seen, and whenever possible, in person.

HOW DO YOU DETERMINE THAT A BOOK IS OF INTEREST — HISTORICAL, ARTISTIC, OR COLLECTIBLE?

Through systematic knowledge, the ability to work with sources, reliance on sales history, and, of course, intuition — backed by practical experience and a trained eye. We try to keep expanding our working library with new publications that clarify information in the fields we deal with, we follow scholarly research, and in disputed cases we consult experts and collectors.

WHAT MATTERS MOST IN AN ANTIQUARIAN BOOK: ITS DESIGN, ITS CONTENT, THE PRINT RUN, OR PERHAPS THE STORY OF ITS OWNER?

If even one of these factors is present, we can already speak of collectible demand: unremarkable content can be eclipsed by brilliant design, while an outwardly modest copy may be of immense historical significance or come from a well-known, authoritative collection.

It is extremely rare for a single copy to combine all of these factors at once. Such books have a special radiance, and their appearance on the open market is always a miracle. We call them “museum-level copies.”

One example is the edition containing the first publication of Kazimir Malevich’s crucial theoretical text "The World as Non-Objectivity" (Munich, 1927), with an inscription to the artist Lev Yudin — one of Malevich’s most devoted students. The book was sold at our auction in October 2024 for 1.8 million rubles. This copy has everything: the fascinating context of publication — the book came out in the legendary Bauhausbücher series during Malevich’s trip to Europe — its “revolutionary” content, the modernist design by László Moholy-Nagy, the author’s unique inscription, and its addressee, who occupies an important place in the history of the Russian avant-garde. On the basis of this one copy, several detailed narratives could be built, each moving in a different direction.

TELL US ONE STORY ABOUT YOUR MOST INTERESTING FIND.

The format of this work does not really allow for personal finds. It would be more accurate to speak of unexpected encounters that lead to remarkable collections. The story with Kazimir Malevich’s inscription is precisely one of those cases. After that sale, we had the opportunity to organize a separate auction, "Lev Yudin and His Circle", which featured his book and magazine graphics, mock-ups and sketches for illustrations to children’s books, drawings and etchings from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his experiments with photography and paper sculpture. Together with the Joseph Brodsky Museum "A Room and a Half", we organized a two-week pre-auction exhibition, which was attended by many people — both those discovering Lev Yudin for the first time and those who had grown up with books containing his wonderful illustrations. Working with lots of this level leaves an extraordinarily strong impression.

IS THERE A BOOK YOU DREAM OF OWNING, BUT HAVE NOT YET MANAGED TO FIND OR ACQUIRE? AND HAS THERE EVER BEEN A FIND WHOSE SIGNIFICANCE YOU ONLY UNDERSTOOD LATER?

The sense of calm after acquiring yet another rarity never comes — you immediately rush on into the next search. But I would definitely single out El Lissitzky’s "Suprematist Tale of Two Squares".

I look for all editions deliberately, so chance finds are almost impossible. But I do have a story about a discovery inside my own library: on one of my trips to a second-hand bookshop, I bought a brochure published for the 70th anniversary of the émigré publishing house YMCA-Press, with articles by Anton Kartashev, one of the publishing house’s founders, and by Nikita Struve, its permanent director from 1978 onward, thanks to whom an enormous body of twentieth-century Russian literature was preserved. The book sat on the shelf for a long time — until the right occasion. And when I finally needed it, I discovered that Nikita Struve’s article was preceded by his autograph!

Natalia Alexandrova

head of the Manuscripts Department at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

HOW DID YOUR PATH INTO THE STUDY OF MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES BEGIN?

After finishing school, I decided to apply to the Moscow State Institute for History and Archives. It was a unique educational institution, where from the very first days we were taught how to work with primary sources. We had one of the best schools of source studies in the country. Our teachers taught us to work with documents professionally, to understand them from different angles, and, most importantly, to love them. I am proud of my specialized education — by profession, I am a historian-archivist.

WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO WORK AT THE PUSHKIN MUSEUM?

I have been working at the Pushkin Museum since April 1992. Today I head the department, although I took up this position quite recently, three years ago. I was offered a job at the museum because, for a long time, there had been only two people working in our department.

Alexandra Demskaya was one of the founders of our archive. The Scientific Archive Department was officially established in 1945 under Sergei Merkurov, our great reformer. The idea belonged to Nadezhda Klein, the widow of the architect Roman Klein, who designed the museum building. She gathered together scattered documents that had been kept in various departments and united them with a body of materials held by the research library — and for that, she needed a professional historian-archivist.

In 1951, Alexandra Demskaya came to the museum, and quite literally created our archive with her own hands: she formed fonds from loose sheets, arranged materials into inventories, and stitched files together by hand. We still do this by hand.

In 1991, Alexandra was preparing to retire, and she needed someone to take over. I was invited to attend her lecture on Olga Khokhlova, Pablo Picasso’s first wife and a Russian ballerina. The lecture, based on information about her origins and life that had been gathered piece by piece, made a strong impression on me. That was when I understood what fascinating tasks were being carried out at the museum, and decided to come here. In 2018, when Khokhlova’s grandson brought the exhibition "Picasso & Khokhlova" to the museum, we proudly published that lecture.

HOW DO YOU COMBINE RESEARCH WORK WITH HEADING THE MANUSCRIPTS DEPARTMENT? WHICH OF THE TWO FEELS CLOSER TO YOU?

The work of an archivist is inseparable from research, because producing a scholarly inventory of archival collections requires broad analysis. When we process a collection, we cannot leave a document “blind”: we have to reveal its essence, identify the correspondents, verify the dating, and bring in additional material.

Our department holds unique documents: materials on the history of the museum, archival collections of artists, collectors, and organizations, as well as the personal archives of our own staff members. This gives us an exceptionally wide range of interests and tasks. Research is the foundation of our work, and it would be impossible to give it up. On the basis of the sources we process, we prepare documentary publications, articles, lectures, and guided tours.

Our materials are also in demand among external researchers. We have a reading room that is open to visitors twice a week, while museum staff work with the archive from Monday to Friday. Over the course of a year, we receive around 400–500 visits.

Heading the department is not difficult for me. I have worked with this team my whole life, and my colleagues are like-minded people — highly professional, erudite, and deeply devoted to what they do. We have developed a system that all of us follow. Working in such an environment is a real pleasure, and that is no exaggeration. We deal with the history of the museum, its cultural context, the archival collections of artists and collectors, and the archives of organizations connected with the museum.

WHAT MAIN PRINCIPLES DO YOU FOLLOW WHEN WORKING WITH ARCHIVES IN THE CONTEXT OF MUSEUM PRACTICE?

The main principle is the integrity of the archival collection. We preserve materials as a whole, even when they do not relate directly to the history of the museum — for example, family documents within personal archives. This is important for understanding the broader sociocultural context. The second principle is love and respect for the museum’s history. All of our colleagues have a humanities background — they are historians, archivists, and art historians — and possess broad cultural erudition, which helps enormously in our work. We strive to reveal the content of documents as fully as possible, so that they can serve researchers and enter scholarly circulation.

WHAT DIFFICULTIES OR CHALLENGES ARISE WHEN YOU BEGIN WORKING WITH LITTLE-STUDIED COLLECTIONS OR ARCHIVAL HOLDINGS?

One of the main challenges is the sheer volume of incoming archival collections. For example, in 2020 we received the archive of Olga Roitenberg, a well-known art historian who studied artists of the 1920s and 1930s, graduates of VKhUTEIN and VKhUTEMAS — a generation that suffered under repression and war. She began her research in the 1970s, and after her death, her friends published her book "Could Anyone Really Have Remembered That We Were…". The title came from the words of one of the artists, who was astonished by her attention to their lives and fates.

Roitenberg’s archive includes her personal, family, and research materials, as well as documents related to the artists she collected: diaries, letters, memoirs, photographs, grade books, and student identity cards. Since the archive came to us fifteen years after her death, it arrived as a mass of loose, unsorted materials. We divided it into two inventories: Roitenberg’s own archive and the artists’ materials. Now we are comparing handwriting, piecing together scattered fragments, determining authorship and dates, and identifying people in photographs. It is painstaking work, but it brings real joy when we manage to establish a person’s identity or the context of a document. Each document has to be described in detail: what kind of material it is, which event it relates to, and other relevant details. This takes time, but without this work, a document cannot enter scholarly circulation. Our goal is to create inventories and reference catalogues so that researchers can easily find the materials they need. When a document finds its researcher — that is the greatest reward for our work.

TELL US ABOUT SERGEI SHCHUKIN’S COLLECTION. HOW DID YOU COME TO WORK WITH IT? AND HOW DID THE DISCOVERY OF UNKNOWN PARTS OF THE COLLECTION AFFECT THE MUSEUM’S EXHIBITION AND RESEARCH ACTIVITIES?

In 1948, the State Museum of New Western Art was closed by government decree. Its holdings were divided between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage. The State Museum of New Western Art had been created on the basis of the collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, which were nationalized in 1918. In 1923, the two collections were merged into a single museum. When the holdings were divided in 1948, the Hermitage received most of the painting, while our museum received, along with paintings, the complete collection of works on paper, sculpture, decorative and applied art, posters, the library, and the archive. We consider ourselves the legal successors of the State Museum of New Western Art.

In the mid-1960s, Alexandra Demskaya began working with the archive of the State Museum of New Western Art. At the suggestion of Boris Vipper, the deputy director for research, she took up the study of the Shchukin and Morozov collections. At first, she thought each collector would take six months, but the research ended up taking thirty years.

There were very few documents belonging to the collectors themselves in the archive of the State Museum of New Western Art. Alexandra Demskaya separated them into individual collections with the aim of expanding the holdings. She searched for relatives, since both collectors had emigrated and almost none of their families remained in Russia. She managed to save the Shchukin family archive. She found Shchukin’s niece, Ekaterina Myasnovo, about whom all that was known was that her surname sounded like something edible and that she lived in the largest building on the Garden Ring. Alexandra Demskaya worked out the address, examined the mailboxes, found the name Myasnovo, met Ekaterina, and began recording her memories. Part of the family correspondence and photographs were acquired. After Myasnovo’s death, the archive almost ended up as waste paper, but Alexandra Demskaya managed to save it in time.

The Shchukin and Morozov collections include their personal materials. The administrative records of the State Museum of New Western Art, which reflect the movement of their collections in the 1920s and 1930s, are preserved in the museum’s archive. On the basis of these materials, curator Alexey Petukhov identified an unknown part of Shchukin’s collection. In addition to the well-known works of modern art from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shchukin collected Egyptian artefacts and Eastern art. His mansion also housed porcelain, icons, and sculpture, which were not shown publicly. These “non-core” objects were gradually transferred to other museums in the 1920s and 1930s.

Petukhov’s research revealed new facets of Shchukin’s personality, showing his passion for Egypt and for other forms of art. This discovery became an important contribution to the museum’s research and exhibition work, and underscored the significance of painstaking archival labour.

Ekaterina Volkova

head of the Painting, Graphics, and Decorative and Applied Arts Department at the Litfond auction house and gallery in St. Petersburg

HOW DID YOUR WORK AS AN EXPERT IN FINDING WORKS OF ART BEGIN? DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR VERY FIRST DISCOVERY?

Art surrounded me everywhere from childhood. My beloved grandmother’s porcelain collection and our home library became my first sources of inspiration. That was when my love of beauty was born, along with the desire to learn the history of objects and understand art.

But the real starting point was my first unexpected find. While I was still at school, I happened upon an old box in one of the city’s buying-up shops. It looked unremarkable — an ordinary wooden box covered with a fine layer of dust. And yet my attention was caught by a strange sound inside, as if something were moving around in there. Curiosity pushed me to solve the mystery. It took several days to find the key to the box’s secret, until one evening I finally opened the hidden lid. Inside were two astonishing objects: an old, yellowed love letter and a small silver pendant in the shape of an egg.

That chance discovery awakened in me a vivid interest in the world of antiques and the history of old things. Today, my work is connected precisely with finding rare works of art, uncovering forgotten stories, and restoring lost connections between objects of the past and the present. Thanks to this passion, every new encounter with a work of art becomes an exciting adventure — full of discoveries and wonderful surprises.

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING AT LITFOND? WHAT DOES YOUR USUAL WORKING DAY HERE LOOK LIKE?

I have been working in this field for just under a year. The days are very full! Sometimes they begin with a trip to an apartment or a gallery to examine and evaluate works of art. Other times, they start with office tasks: responding to incoming requests, accepting objects, drawing up an agreement, preparing them to be handed over to their future owner. And, of course, describing a couple of lots for the catalogue of an upcoming auction and getting them ready for photography.

TELL US ONE STORY ABOUT YOUR MOST UNEXPECTED FIND.

Well, there are many stories like that! Almost every object that appears at auction marked as a “top lot” is exactly that kind of unexpected find. Not only for us, but for the whole country — and sometimes for the world. Works of art are unique by their very nature, and simply preserving them and bringing them down to our time intact is already a major achievement. And how many stories are hidden behind them!

For example, Natalia Danko’s vase "Harvest", discovered in a private collection. It was created for the Second All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, which took place in Moscow in the summer of 1940, and was intended for sale in the Leningrad Pavilion. A large porcelain vase that survived all the upheavals in Leningrad and reached us with only one minor chip — that is a real stroke of luck!

IS IT DIFFICULT FOR YOU TO PART WITH THE WORKS OF ART YOU FIND?

Working in the field of art means being in close contact with unique cultural objects. I understand the value of each item not only for myself personally, but for society as a whole. That is why I see the process of handing an object over to a new owner not as a loss, but as part of an important mission to preserve cultural heritage. When an object finds a new home, I feel joy and satisfaction in knowing that the work has been done carefully and professionally.

WHAT DIFFICULTIES DO YOU ENCOUNTER IN THE PROCESS OF EXPERT EVALUATION? HAVE YOU EVER COME ACROSS FORGERIES?

Certain difficulties often arise during the expert evaluation of objects, especially those of historical or artistic value. We frequently have to deal with works whose provenance is known only partially — or not known at all.

Of course, there have been cases in practice when an object turned out to be a forgery. That is always unpleasant, but it is part of professional life. What matters is to learn from such situations, analyse mistakes, and constantly improve one’s skills. In the end, it is experience that helps minimise the risk of such cases happening again.

DO YOU HAVE YOUR OWN ART COLLECTION?

I would not call myself a collector, but I do have a few lovely little things from a bygone era. For example, a mahogany child’s chair from the first half of the nineteenth century, upholstered in silk; several painted Japanese porcelain sake cups; and a few works by well-known nineteenth-century masters, as well as graphic works by contemporary artists.

Pavel Nikulin

collections curator at the Department of Art and Archaeology of the Ancient World at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts; archaeologist

HOW DID YOUR PATH IN ARCHAEOLOGY BEGIN?

My story began with an expedition in 2012. I was a first-year student at Krupskaya Moscow State Regional University when, at the end of July, I went on an archaeological field practice to Kerch — to the ancient Greek polis of Panticapaeum. Since then, from 2012 to 2025, I have taken part in excavations at this site every year, under the direction of Vladimir Tolstikov, head of the Department of Art and Archaeology of the Ancient World at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

Until 2016, I worked on the excavations without an official position — essentially as a volunteer digger. I went on the expedition every August, combining it with my studies. After I defended my diploma, Vladimir Tolstikov offered me a position as a laboratory assistant in the department, and I began going on expeditions as a research staff member. The difference between a digger and a research staff member is that a digger is involved in removing and sifting soil and in the initial processing of finds, while a research staff member oversees entire excavation areas or squares, taking responsibility for broader tasks. At the same time, I still continue to dig — but now I do it more consciously, with an understanding of the characteristics of the soil and excavation techniques. These skills come with experience: in some places you need to carefully undercut horizontally; in others, you use a brush or even a toothbrush.

TELL US ABOUT THE HISTORY OF THE BOSPORAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPEDITION.

The Bosporan Archaeological Expedition has been working for more than eighty years, and this year it marks its anniversary. The idea of an expedition to Panticapaeum emerged in 1944, during the Great Patriotic War. Its main task was to identify and preserve the damaged cultural heritage sites of Kerch, where the museum of antiquities had been completely destroyed after the war. The aim was to carry out a structural analysis of the site and assess the damage caused by the war.

Panticapaeum is a site of global significance, the capital of one of the earliest state formations on the territory of present-day Russia. The expedition was headed by Vladimir Blavatsky, who in 1945 founded the Department of Classical Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the classical antiquities section at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. Until the early 1950s, the expedition worked jointly with the two institutions. After Blavatsky was sent to excavations in Histria, the expedition was headed by Irina Marchenko. Its main task remained the same: to identify, preserve, and study the archaeological heritage of the Northern Black Sea region, especially its ancient heritage, which connects Russia with Europe through a shared cultural code.

WHAT ARE THE MAIN DIFFICULTIES THAT ARISE WHEN WORKING AT PANTICAPAEUM AND DURING FIELDWORK ON SITE?

Panticapaeum is one of the most complex ancient sites on the territory of present-day Russia. It is located on Mount Mithridates, where the terrain makes the study of cultural layers more difficult. The present-day relief of the mountain does not correspond to the ancient one, which means that later layers — for example, from the third century BCE — may lie below earlier ones, such as those from the fifth century BCE. Panticapaeum, founded at the end of the seventh century BCE by Greek colonists on the western shore of the Cimmerian Bosporus, existed continuously for more than two and a half thousand years. This creates its own difficulties: building remains are badly damaged, since stone was often taken away for construction, especially in the nineteenth century, when marble and limestone were burned for new buildings in Kerch.

The traces of the Second World War add another layer of complexity: the excavations on Mount Mithridates are riddled with dugouts and trenches left by Romanian and German troops. Kerch was occupied twice during the war, and these “scars” are still visible today. For example, several years ago, in one of the excavation areas, we came across a mid-twentieth-century mortar crater right next to classical layers from the fifth century BCE.
Vladimir Tolstikov’s experience is invaluable: his deep understanding of the site and its stratigraphy helps us deal with these challenges.

There is an opinion that an archaeologist should not work on the same site for too long, but in the case of Panticapaeum this is not true. Here, one needs a kind of mastery that only comes with years. Like a fighter who knows one strike to perfection, an archaeologist who has devoted their life to a single site reaches a unique level of perception — even an intuitive understanding of the layers and finds.

The main difficulties of the expedition are not related to the climate, or to interruptions in electricity or water. The main obstacle is the human factor. Even people with many years of experience find themselves in different situations. Fieldwork requires psychological resilience. Living in a tent and working an eight-hour day in the heat is a serious test for those who are not used to such conditions. The expedition lasts forty-six days. Some people adapt quickly, but for many — especially those who value comfort — field conditions become a challenge, even with a shower, a kitchen, and a cook. Conflicts can also arise within the team, and it is important to resolve them in time. An experienced archaeologist partly becomes a psychologist: you have to be able to listen, support someone, or, on the contrary, give them space to reset. Even in a friendly team of thirty-five to forty people, forty days in the field inevitably create tension — and it takes a collective effort to overcome it.

WHAT DOES A TYPICAL DAY ON THE EXPEDITION LOOK LIKE?

A volunteer’s working day begins with getting up at 6:00 or 6:30, followed by a light breakfast. From 7:00 to 10:00, work takes place at the excavation site. Volunteers are always given guidance on the finds and their dating. At 10:00, there is breakfast back at the camp, followed by an hour’s break. From 11:00 to 15:00, the excavations continue, after which comes lunch. The volunteers then have free time. For those who are interested, lectures and field classes are held. Many young volunteers, especially students, prefer to spend their time by the sea after work, and that is taken into account too.

TELL US ABOUT THE EXPEDITION’S RECENT DISCOVERIES. WHAT WERE THEY LIKE?

On the Acropolis, the central part of the city, artefacts of Scythian culture connected with the Cimmerian circle were found, forcing us to reconsider existing hypotheses about the development of the region. By the end of the fifth century BCE, a crisis is recorded in the Bosporus, confirmed by archaeological evidence at sites such as Tyritake, Myrmekion, and Nymphaion, where traces of fires have been discovered. Previously, no such traces had been recorded at Panticapaeum for this period, but recently we found burnt layers with Scythian arrowheads and human remains, pointing to a destructive layer connected with conflict rather than an accidental fire.

The archaeology of the Bosporus is complicated by the scarcity of written sources. Unlike the Greek poleis of the Peloponnese or Magna Graecia, where more written evidence has survived, for the Bosporus we have only fragmentary references in Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. The Scythians, who were in close contact with the Bosporan Greeks, had no writing system, which makes archaeological research the only way to reconstruct the history of the region.

HOW ARE THE RESULTS OF YOUR WORK RECORDED? AND HOW DO THEY INFLUENCE THE RESEARCH ACTIVITIES OF THE PUSHKIN MUSEUM?

After the expedition to Panticapaeum, a year-long process begins: writing reports, reflecting on the finds, comparing materials, drawings, and plans. Our main work is connected with the museum. Unlike field archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology, we cannot spend eleven or twelve months of the year in the field, because we are, first and foremost, museum staff. Our fieldwork is closely tied to the museum’s research activity.

Exhibitions are organized regularly, and in November 2025 an exhibition marking the eightieth anniversary of the expedition will open at the Volga-Vyatka branch of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. It will present the latest finds, and a popular science publication is also being prepared. Vladimir Tolstikov says that archaeology is akin to surgery, but I feel closer to comparing it with detective work: we reconstruct history piece by piece, using a spade, a scoop, or a brush.

Archaeology in a museum intersects with art history, but the difference between a desk-based archaeologist and an art historian is minimal: both study objects, build typological sequences, and analyse iconography and style. Field archaeologists who work constantly on expeditions are different, of course, but the methodology of desk-based work is largely similar.

DO YOU HAVE A DREAM CONNECTED WITH FUTURE EXCAVATIONS OR RESEARCH?

My dream is connected with the study of ancient settlements located not by the sea, but inland. According to Alexander Maslennikov, head of the Field Research Department at the Institute of Archaeology, in the Soviet period, classical expeditions focused on coastal territories, since Greek culture was largely maritime and tied to trade. But this left a gap in our knowledge of settlements in foothill or forested areas, which are mentioned, for example, by Diodorus Siculus. Studying such places is a task for future generations of archaeologists.

Another dream is to receive an open permit granting the right to conduct archaeological excavations. This is a complex procedure that includes surveys without test pits — editor’s note: test pitting is the process of digging small pits to study the soil and assess the condition of foundations, marking out future excavation areas — then surveys with test pits, and possibly several further stages before a specialist with a degree receives permission from the Ministry of Culture to study a significant site. Even a qualified archaeologist is not granted this right immediately, which makes the process especially serious and responsible.

Anna Kanunnikova

head of the second-hand bookshop "Academy", a project by "Podpisnye Izdaniya"

HOW AND WHEN DID YOU BEGIN LOOKING FOR BOOKS? WHY ARE SECOND-HAND BOOKS INTERESTING TO YOU?

I have been working with books for a very long time — almost ten years now. I had always worked with new books, but at some point, when we were renovating the second floor at "Podpisnye", I was walking through the future rooms with an acquaintance, and we were discussing the possibilities opening up before us. We started thinking how wonderful it would be to meet people from the antiquarian book world.

The thing is, if you work in a bookshop for a long time, all the editions become familiar to you. There is no longer that sense of surprise, no process of searching. That experience of accidental discovery could only happen in bookshops abroad, which are not easy to visit, or in second-hand bookshops. As a bookseller, I understood that there one could find many interesting texts and editions that are no longer available.

Then we opened the second floor, while my trips to second-hand bookshops remained a hobby. Around the same time, quarantine began, and everyone was anxious and uncertain. I thought it would be worth visiting second-hand bookshops and offering them the chance to sell some of their books through us. For me, it was an opportunity to gain access to shelves of books; for them, it was a way to find readers. We took books from second-hand dealers on commission: we sold them and transferred the profit to the bookshops. It became clear that there was interest! A year later, several times a month, I was already putting together large boxes of books, transporting them, describing them, categorising them, and fully curating the second-hand shelves. Then I got a small team, and we were gradually able to start accepting books ourselves.

The first large book archive I worked with looked like this: a van pulled up in our backyard with what, at the time, seemed like an absolutely mad number of books. It was the collection of a man who had been artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic. These were books on music, from both the USSR and other countries. He was a true book collector, and his family understood that the books were now lying unused and that a way had to be found for them to keep being read.

It might seem that I simply travel around apartments, sort through book archives, and that is it. But less than a year later, the "Akademkniga" bookshop next door to "Podpisnye Izdaniya" closed its space on Liteyny and moved to the 9th Line of Vasilyevsky Island, closer to the First Academic Printing House Nauka — and the premises were put up for auction. We decided to continue the tradition of the place, bought the space, and chose to give it over to our new second-hand book direction.

IS THERE ANY PART OF THE WORK THAT FEELS LIKE A CHALLENGE FOR YOU?

Yes, the first thing that comes to mind is that you cannot save every book. A certain emotional distance is necessary, because space is limited too. I suppose this is a problem for all book people — the lack of room. I am not a collector myself; I have a calm relationship with owning books. I like giving them away and passing them on.

My work is, of course, closely connected with memory. When we receive a book archive, we usually understand that it belonged to someone who is most likely no longer with us. And relatives may have very different thoughts about that person’s books. In St. Petersburg, there are these narrow rooms with a single window at the end — we call them “railway carriages.” Sometimes you come across rooms like that, carriage-rooms, completely filled with books, from floor to ceiling, in four rows from the wall. And in between, there is just a passage, with, say, a couch in it — and that is all. I have seen more than one such room. From that picture alone, you immediately understand that the person spent a great deal of time there and, most likely, left this world there too.

WHAT DO YOU PAY ATTENTION TO WHEN CHOOSING BOOKS? ARE THERE ANY NUANCES THAT HELP YOU MAKE A DECISION IN MOMENTS OF DOUBT?

It is all personal experience. A trained eye, knowledge, book intuition, and persistence. Sometimes something special can be found on the floor under a layer of dust.

It is important to be able to switch off scepticism: sometimes you arrive, see the bookshelves, and it seems as if everything is already clear. But to me, it is like meeting a person — from a first impression, you may think one thing, and then, after some time, it turns out they are completely different. I think libraries work in the same way.
I also want to say that I have been lucky with my team. In many ways, we are on the same wavelength — we pay attention to reading practices associated with particular books. We preserve all the notes and finds that people often leave inside books. Naturally, diaries turn up quite often. When we understand that we are dealing with something from a family archive, we return it all to the owners and ask them to take it back. But if there are no owners, or if they cannot be identified, then we preserve the diaries or old photographs ourselves.

Of course, it is a never-ending stream of finds, because a book is an object in which people often keep things. The question we are asked most often is whether we find money. Yes, that happened once — but the person had forgotten it literally the day before yesterday and came back for it straight away. More often, people leave tickets, business cards, advertisements for places that no longer exist. All of this fascinates us, and that is why we keep it. A few weeks ago, we even made a little cabinet in the shop where we put all these things, just so we can look at them ourselves.

We have had experience working with large archives. Once, we were given the library of two philologists: the literary scholar and cultural historian Elena Dushechkina and her husband, the folklorist Alexander Belousov. At the time, it felt like an insane volume to us — around 8,000 editions. We described every single one and created a catalogue so that we could navigate it. As we worked, we stayed in touch with the heirs and thought together about how all these books could be united. In the end, we made an ex libris — a stamp that collectors often use to mark their collection. Now this book collection will never cease to exist, because it is united by a single sign.

HAS THERE BEEN A BOOK FIND THAT, OVER ALL THIS TIME, SURPRISED YOU THE MOST?

This question comes up quite often, but I still never quite know how to answer it. On the one hand, it could be a rarity I never expected to hold in my hands — an album from the beginning of the century, for example. But many things can be surprising. Sometimes you look at a book and think: once, these people came together, wrote it, published it — and then it disappeared, and no one will ever see this book again. Sometimes we come across print runs with censorship, where the names of “enemies of the people” have been crossed out.

Still, perhaps the most surprising of our finds was a two-volume edition of Olga Berggolts, inscribed to a literary critic, in which we found her letter. She writes that she has fallen slightly ill and will not be able to come and visit the addressee, so she is sending her housekeeper instead.

There were also the working copies of Dora Livshits, a translator from French and English — it is thanks to her work that we have "The Three Musketeers". In these books, you can see the translator at work: all her notes, proofreading marks, corrections, reflections. It is something incredible.

And I will also mention one handwritten diary addressed to a child who had only just been born and was growing, growing — and would read it only as an adult. We hope, at least, that this is what happened.

Igor Sazhin

volunteer archivist at the "Revolt Center"

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING AT THE "REVOLT CENTER"?

I process Revolt Pimenov’s archive on a volunteer basis, because I am interested in being his biographer. I have been working with archives for a long time and in different directions: I have researched my own family, the history of several settlements in the Komi Republic, and worked with the archives of the city of Syktyvkar for the "Peshkom" project on Ust-Sysolsk.

HOW DID YOU FIRST LEARN ABOUT REVOLT PIMENOV, AND WHY DID HIS FIGURE BECOME IMPORTANT TO YOU? WHICH DISCOVERIES OR DOCUMENTS FROM PIMENOV’S ARCHIVE PROVED ESPECIALLY UNEXPECTED?

I knew Pimenov personally in the 1980s. I attended his lectures and visited his home once. His personality had interested me for a long time, because, although he was a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, he understood history and presented it in a very engaging, conceptual way, working with sources extremely well. As a historian, I was interested in a person who could present the subject so fascinatingly and handle sources with such professionalism. Later, I became interested in his fate. When the "Revolt Center" received Pimenov’s archive from his relatives, I took it upon myself to sort through it — and got completely drawn in.

Research has shown that Pimenov very meticulously collected everything that surrounded his life, related to it, and reflected the era. This meticulousness helps reconstruct the history of Soviet Syktyvkar in the 1970s and 1980s. What proved unexpected was his extensive correspondence with the whole world, as well as the sheer range of his work — not only in geometry, but also in various other fields: biology, linguistics, history, and philosophy.

WHAT, IN YOUR OPINION, SHOULD WORKING WITH PERSONAL ARCHIVES BE LIKE?

In this kind of work, you have to take into account everything the source of your research has left behind: every detail, every element that may seem insignificant at first — until you realise that this insignificance is only apparent. A personal archive is not about one person. It is about an era, about connections between people; it is about the absence of bad people and good people, and about people in general. The only thing that saves history is an honest approach to the person you are studying, rather than mythologising them. The person you are researching is both bad and good at the same time — that has to be remembered. Pimenov is striking in his honesty toward the reality around him and in his scrupulous attention to detail.

WHAT, IN YOUR VIEW, HAPPENS WHEN THE ARTISTIC AND THE DOCUMENTARY COME TOGETHER IN A SINGLE PROJECT — FOR EXAMPLE, IN THE EXHIBITION "DIVIDED"?

Any union of aesthetics and fact is, first and foremost, a story about the people who carry that aesthetics, not about the fact itself. A fact is the basis for continuous creativity. Afterwards, you can walk through the exhibition and keep making discoveries anew, finding something close to you. Perhaps it will come through something seen, heard, or felt. I think this is even more contemporary than it may seem. An exhibition about history can be an exhibition about the present day, if one brings together fact and aesthetic acts.

WHAT PERSONALLY KEEPS YOU IN YOUR PROFESSION? DO YOU HAVE A MAIN GOAL OR MISSION?

To some extent, with this exhibition, we achieved that result. Those who came were surprised by the scale of the special settlers in the Komi region in the 1930s to 1950s. And the main result of any creative act is surprise. People were surprised: they discovered something that had been nearby all along and yet unknown to them, something that had seemed ordinary and eternal, but suddenly appeared in a new light. Our goal was to return to a view of the past that clarifies our future, our present. The world standing around us suddenly turned out to be different. And that goal was achieved. Turning the world upside down is not our aim.