The Boris Kustodiev House Museum presents a handmade notebook of Yulia Yevstafyevna Kustodieva, the artist’s wife. She started using it in 1927.

When Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev died at the age of 49, many Leningrad print media published notes, obituaries (short and long ones), articles about the work of the great Russian artist, announcements about the wake and funeral. It is obvious that the artist’s relatives and friends collected this information. According to the museum’s experts, there are two such notebooks. A similar notebook is kept in the Manuscripts Department of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. The notebook consists of 34 unbound sheets (68 pages). The middle part contains a sheet with a pasted poster of a posthumous exhibition of works by Boris Kustodiev. The poster was published by the art department of the State Russian Museum (Leningrad) with a print run of 1,000 copies on thin blue paper. Newspaper clippings from 1927 are pasted on each sheet. Some of them are anonymous, some are signed by the authors, including famous writers, journalists, and associates of the artist: Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Isaak Brodsky, Dmitry Mitrokhin, Vsevolod Voinov, Erich Gollerbach, critics Dmitry Aramovich, Ilya Grinman, Viktor Denisov, and others. Under some of the clippings, the artist’s wife, Yulia Kustodieva wrote in pencil the names of the newspapers and magazines from which they were taken. Unfortunately, there are few such inscriptions. The notebook contains articles from the “Literary Newspaper”, “Krasnaya Newspaper”, the magazine “Life of Art”, etc.

This notebook is a true historical testament to an important event in the history of Russian art. The articles describe a civil memorial service at their family apartment and the funeral of Boris Kustodiev in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. From the articles we learn that a carved cross was placed on the grave, and wreaths were laid on behalf of the Academy of Arts, the Directory of Academic Theaters, the Bolshoi Drama and the former Alexandrinsky Theaters, the Arkhip Kuindzhi Society and the society of individualists, the association “Group of Sixteen”, Professor Savinov and his students, etc. As a representative of the Academy of Arts, the Dean of the Faculty of Painting Pavel Naumov gave a speech. There is also a clipping that reads, “With deep gratitude from the Kustodiev family to all institutions, public organizations and individuals who honored his memory.”