The Russian Art Collection of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace

ABSTRACT

Though well known for its historical and political collections, the Hoover Institution Library also has a small but valuable collection of books and periodicals on Russian art, which was collected by Professor Frank Golder in the Soviet Union in 1925. The collection consists basically of items from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on subjects ranging from painting to illustrated travel accounts. It also includes some older books with unusual bindings of considerable value, some of which are from imperial libraries.

KEYWORDS:

• Collection
• Frank Golder
• Hoover Institution Library
• Russian art books
• serials
• Stanford University Libraries

Acknowledgments

I should like to express my gratitude to the following scholars for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this paper: Lazar Fleishman, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University, for his most generous advice and much needed encouragement; Alexis Klimoff, Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Vassar College, for his perceptive suggestions and for arranging a consultation with his father, Professor Eugene Klimoff; Professor Eugene Klimoff, Historian of Russian art at Montreal, for his expert evaluation of the collection; and Dr. Jack Kollmann, Executive Director of the Center for Slavic and East European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, for providing historical perspective for this survey. Without their gracious cooperation this paper would not have been possible.

Notes

^1. Frank Golder (1877–1929), American historian and specialist in Russian history, Professor at Stanford and Curator of the Hoover War History Collection, was instrumental in building the collections of the Hoover Library and Archives. He documented his experiences and travels to Russia and the Soviet Union in many books. Excerpts from his diaries were published in War, Revolution, and Peace: the Passages of Frank Golder, 1914–1927 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1992). His papers are in the Hoover Institution Archives, with a finding aid in the Online Archive of California and a smaller collection in Stanford’s Green Library.

^2. This statement is based on the assessment of Professor Eugene Klimoff.

^3. “Hoover War Library,” earlier known as the “Hoover War History Collection,” was initially used to identify the materials acquired for the future Hoover Institution Library using funds provided by Herbert Hoover, beginning in 1919. The collection moved into the newly constructed Hoover Tower in 1941.

^4. Frank A. Golder to Nina Almond, 2 October 1925, box 148 B, Frank Alfred Golder Papers, 1861–1929, Hoover Institution Archives.

^5. Nina Almond, Special Collections in the Hoover Library on War, Revolution and Peace (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1940), 63–64.

^6. “Russian Art Vault Collection,” in Stanford University. Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Catalog of Western Language Collections (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1969), 62: 568–589.

^7. Personal conversation with Professor Lazar Fleishman.

^8. “Satiricheskie zhurnaly 1905–1908 godov” [Satirical journals 1905–1908], in V. F. Botsianovskii, Russkaia satira pervoi revoliutsii, 1905–1906 [Russian satire of the first revolution, 1905–1906] (Leningrad: Gos. izd-vo, 1925), 210–[222].

^9. John E. Bowlt, “Rare Russian Art Books at the Fogg Museum,” (unpublished paper, [1976?]), 21.

^10. L. I. Iuniberg, “Iz istorii moskovsko-petersburgskikh khudozhestvenno-izdatel’skikh sviazei nachala XX veka (I. N. Knebel’ i khudozhniki Mir iskusstva)” [From the history of Moscow-Petersburg artistic-publishing connections at the beginning of the twentieth century (I. N. Knebel’ and the artists of Mir iskusstva)], in Knizhnoe delo Peterburga-Petrograda-Leningrada [Book studies of Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad] (Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi institut kul’tury imeni N. K. Krupskoi) [Collection of scholarly works of the N. K. Krupskaia Leningrad State Institute of Culture], 58 (1981): 97–102.

^11. Archipentura was Archipenko’s 1924 innovation, in which the painted image changes over time by means of a motorized mechanism rotating painted strips.

^12. Bowlt, 6.

^13. See the article “Piatnitskii Mitrofan Efimovich,” in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia [Great Soviet encyclopedia] 3rd ed. 21: 293.