In February 1997, a Russian artist named Aleksandr Brener was sentenced to 4 months’ imprisonment by a Dutch court. His offence was to have spray-painted a large, green dollar sign on the white surface of Malevich’s ‘Suprematism (White Cross)’, hanging in the Stedelijk Museum. In his defence, Brener claimed that his act of vandalism was intended as a protest against the merciless commercialization of art—a crude and misdirected gesture, to be sure; but the perpetrator’s argument was to a certain extent borne out by the fact that deliberations at his trial focused on a monetary assessment of the damage he had caused, rather than any aesthetic harm he had inflicted. Acts such as Brener’s have, however, done nothing to halt the seamless integration of Russia’s revolutionary art into the circuits of the contemporary capitalist market. Works by Malevich or El Lissitzky now fetch vast sums at auction—Malevich’s ‘Suprematist Composition’ (1919–20), for instance, sold for $17m in May 2000. Aware of the value of such paintings, Malevich’s descendants have also launched several legal claims disputing Western art institutions’ ownership—in one case successfully extracting $5m in compensation from moma.

The inflated prices and heightened litigiousness that now surround the Russian avant-garde are a function both of its increased art-historical status, and of the relative paucity of materials for sale: most of the key works are either in Russian state museums, or closely guarded by major Western institutions such as the Stedelijk. Any new discovery is apt to cause excitement in academia, and tremors in the market. Nikolai Khardzhiev, a Soviet scholar who amassed a vast collection of paintings, drawings and manuscripts by many of the key figures in Russian art and literature of the early twentieth century, became the cause of much upheaval when he emigrated to the West in 1993, along with half of his archive. Khardzhiev had been instrumental in the rediscovery of the avant-garde in the 1960s, and left the turbulence of Yeltsin’s Russia for Holland in an attempt to save his collection—only to find a morass of theft and corruption. A Legacy Regained is a huge and lavishly produced volume dedicated to his life and work, containing testimony from his acquaintances, articles written by Khardzhiev himself and texts he edited for publication, as well as materials from his archive. The core of the book is, in fact, based on a two-volume edition of Khardzhiev’s writings that came out in Russia in 1997, but almost all the material is presented in English for the first time. The editors refer to their selection as a ‘tantalizingly small sampling of the archive’, which is still in the process of being classified and itemized; even at this stage, however, it is clear that Khardzhiev’s collection will be of incalculable value to historians of the movement.

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 Odessa from 1922–25. Literature, however, was his true vocation, and it was on this subject that he lectured in Odessa 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 Bagritskii, 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 Shklovskii and Boris Eikhenbaum. Shklovskii—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; it was Eikhenbaum, meanwhile, who shortly after Khardzhiev’s arrival in Moscow took him to a reading by the absurdist writers Daniil Kharms, Aleksandr Vvedenskii and Nikolai Zabolotskii, where he met Malevich. Soon he was acquainted with what remained of the entire Russian avant-garde—artists such as Vladimir Tatlin and El Lissitzky, the poets Vladimir Maiakovsky and Aleksei Kruchenykh, and critics such as Nikolai Punin (see nlr 10).