Varvara Bubnova

Biography

In 1922 Bubnova meant to go to Japan only for a short time: mother and daughter were travelling to visit the younger sister, Anna, who had married a Japanese man. The trip, planned to last no more than two years, stretched to thirty-six.

Varvara Bubnova was born on 16 May 1886 (4 May, Old Style) in St Petersburg, into a noble family. Her father, Dmitry Kapitonovich, a minor bank clerk with the rank of collegiate counsellor, died in 1914. Her mother, Anna Nikolaevna, née Wulf, came from the Wulfs of Tver, friends of Pushkin, and had a fine voice. Childhood and youth were spent mostly on her maternal grandfather’s estate, the village of Bernovo in the Staritsa district. Her elder sister, Maria, became a pianist, the younger, Anna, a violinist. Sources disagree on the birth date: in New Style dates both 15 and 17 May appear.

She studied at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, and from 1907 to 1914 at the Academy of Arts under Nikolai Dubovsky. She received her diploma as a painter for the picture “Late Autumn”; according to other accounts it was “The Avenue of the Bernovo Park”. Part of the influence came from the Moscow collections of new French painting, those of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, which she saw in 1910, and from a trip to Italy in 1911. In 1912 Bubnova joined the Union of Youth, one of the most radical groups of those years, became one of its organisers and contributed to its journal. She exhibited alongside the Jack of Diamonds and the Donkey’s Tail, sometimes under the pseudonym D. Varvarova; in the catalogues her name stood next to those of Mayakovsky, Burliuk, Larionov, Goncharova and Malevich.

In 1913, together with Voldemārs Matvejs, she toured the ethnographic museums of Western Europe, collecting material and photographing African sculpture. Matvejs died suddenly in 1914; she prepared his book “The Art of the Negroes” for print, and it appeared in 1919. In 1915 she graduated from the St Petersburg Archaeological Institute.

In July 1915 Bubnova came to Moscow for the sake of the manuscript department of the State Historical Museum: she had been drawn to medieval Russian miniature painting. From May 1917 she worked there as a research fellow, first under Vasily Shchepkin, then, after his death in 1920, under the academician Mikhail Speransky. In 1918 she organised the first exhibition of medieval Russian miniatures. A humorous collage survives in which she drew herself, her colleagues and the daily life of the museum in those years. Later she recalled that she had seemed to be swallowed up “in a sea of colours and images”, and that she came to regard work on miniatures as the main aim of her life. At the same time she belonged to the Institute of Artistic Culture, alongside Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Falk, Lyubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko.

In the autumn of 1922 an exhibition of avant-garde art, with works by her, was already open in Tokyo. At the same time she published an article in the journal “Shisō” on trends in contemporary Russian art, chiefly Constructivism. She belonged to the Japanese artists’ groups Nikakai, Sanka and MAVO.

In 1923 Bubnova entered the Tokyo School of Applied Arts and took up lithography. There she developed her own method of autolithography on zinc. Her experiments noticeably influenced Japanese lithography, and the new possibilities of the technique found use, among other things, in posters. From 1924 she taught Russian language and literature at Waseda University, then at the Tokyo Institute of Foreign Languages and at the institute of the Japan–USSR Society. Several generations of Japanese Russianists grew up under her; the Japanese press said that without her, translations of Russian literature would hardly have reached such a level. For her contribution to Japanese-Russian cultural relations she received the Order of the Precious Crown, fourth class. She also illustrated books by Russian writers for Japanese publishers.

In 1927 she married an émigré, Vladimir Goloshchikov (1897–1947). In the mid-1930s she was deprived of Soviet citizenship for “links with an enemy of the people”: on an instruction from the embassy she had shown the sights to a Soviet official, who was arrested on his return to the USSR. His name is not given in the sources. In 1936, after the attempted coup by young army officers, the couple were declared undesirable foreigners and put under police surveillance; the Russian department at Waseda was closed, and Bubnova had to leave the Institute of Foreign Languages as well. Towards the end of the war they were evicted from Tokyo to Karuizawa. Their Tokyo house, with its library and lithographs, burned down in a bombing raid. After the war she taught and painted again, and her solo exhibitions in Japan took place in 1933 (two), 1938, 1948, 1954 and 1958. Among the paintings of these years are known “Portrait of the Translator Nikamura” (1927), “Chrysanthemums” (1943, Russian Museum) and “Traces of War” (1949).

In 1958 Bubnova returned to the USSR and settled in Sukhumi, where her elder sister lived. She took part in exhibitions of the Artists’ Union of Abkhazia and became a member of the Artists’ Unions of the USSR and of Abkhazia. Solo exhibitions were held in Sukhumi (1958), Tbilisi (1960), Moscow and Kharkiv (1961) and Leningrad (1962); in all, there were eighteen in her lifetime. In 1964 she was given the title of Honoured Artist of the Georgian SSR. In Sukhumi she acquired two pupils, Vsevolod Voronov and Alexander Lozovoy. After her sister Anna died in 1979 she moved to Leningrad, and in 1981 an exhibition was opened there for her ninetieth birthday.

Varvara Bubnova died in Leningrad and was buried in Sukhumi. In January 2024 a fire at the Abkhazian State Art Gallery destroyed most of her works held in Abkhazia; two were saved.