Nikolai Khardzhiev

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. He possessed an extensive archive and collection of Russian Avantgarde art and literature.

Early life 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. Anna Akhmatova, the most famous Russian poet of the Soviet period, was a close friend during the war. In 1953 he married for the second time, to a sculptor, Lidia Chaga. In 1992 the Khardzhievs were invited by Professor Willem G. Weststeijn of the Slavic Institute of the University of Amsterdam to visit the university. Part of the archive was found and confiscated. The cache contained manuscripts by the poets Khlebnikov, Mandelstam and Akhmatova and letters written by Malevich. This part of the archive was transferred to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. Gmurzynska filed a number of unsuccessful libel actions against many of those who helped to investigate the case.

Both Gmurzynska and Rastorfer later denied any involvement in the smuggling of the archive, stating that they had advanced a sum of money to the Khardzhievs for the couple's move.

On July 27, 1995, Khardzhiev made a will leaving everything to Lidia, with the instruction that she choose what part of his collection was given to the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation in Amsterdam. Lidia died in November of that year in suspicious circumstances after allegedly falling down the stairs at their home.