A Philanthropist and His Ingrate Heirs

Every city (Kyiv being no exception) must preserve in its historical memory at least a few great names to be revered by those who come after. For these personalities condense in themselves the primordial meaning of notions that are dangerous to forget, no matter how outdated they might seem: honor, nobility, selflessness, and sacrifice. Before the current Museum of Occidental and Oriental Art is renamed the original Khanenko Museum (this is the only thing its founder asked in his will, handing all - I stress all - his assets and personal collection over to the city of Kyiv), our society will still be saying sponsors instead of philanthropists and using the artless word patronage for caring.

A grandson of the Hetman of Slobozhanshchyna (northeastern Ukraine), Bohdan Ivanovych Khanenko received his higher education in Moscow. As was customary in many mid-nineteenth century noble families, he graduated as a doctor of law and opened a practice in Saint Petersburg. It is not without the influence of his wife Varvara Mykolayivna (nee Tereshchenko) that Mr. Khanenko began collecting various engravings by the Western Old Masters. After retiring in 1881, he settled in Kyiv and got down to establishing showcase farming on his estates. Khanenko rapidly becomes an influential public figure in South Russia. The list of posts he held is impressive: by the age of 40 he had been Chairman of the South Russian Land Farming Society, member of the Kyiv Stock-Exchange Committee and the All-Russian Sugar Manufacturers Society board, and Chairman of the Kyiv Trade and Industry Committee. In 1888 Mr. Khanenko literally took upon his shoulders everything connected with establishing a city museum. This was, above all, funding the construction of the building now housing the National Museum of Ukrainian Fine Arts. Mr. Khanenko personally drew up and sent out about two hundred letters asking for money contributions, for the committee only possessed 70,000 rubles, instead of the estimated 300,000, out of which 25,000 had been donated by the Tereshchenko brothers. This is why Mr. Khanenko appealed to Minister of Finance Sergei Witte and Count I. I. Tolstoi, and in May 1897, after Tsar Nicholas II had visited Kyiv, the state treasury allocated 50,000 rubles for construction purposes. The City Museum, whose draft statute was also drawn up by Mr. Khanenko, was inaugurated and blessed on December 30, 1909. The Khanenko couple gratuitously donated to the museum works of art valued at 134,000 rubles.

They also turned their home into a museum. In April 1917, having already experienced the horrors of World War I and having foreboding of the future revolution, Mr. Khanenko bequeathed his grand collection to Kyiv. He thus not only repeated the gesture of Moscow's Tretiakov. Owing to the universal nature of the enlightening concept "collection not for personal benefit," all 15 halls of Khanenko's mansion became a Noah's ark for rescued world art. As a friend of mine confessed, "Kyivans simply used to go to their museum, brought guests to see Velasquez, showed children Japanese miniatures, and cared very little about what ethnicity or nation the culture belonged to. For we treated it as our own."

I will add that those who came to Kyiv from Ukraine's other cities, towns, and villages knew only too well that art is not a reproduction distorted by ugly printing. And the names and objects, so strange in the context of Soviet reality, remained alive here in this Kyiv house, thus vividly confirming that history and culture also existed well before 1917.

Today, after lengthy reconstruction, the Kyiv Museum of Occidental and Oriental Art (albeit without the Eastern section) has been opened at last. By returning to the museum the name of its founder, we would have made a step toward civil society and, as art expert Iryna Bilash noted wryly, we "would finally stop quoting Kipling, and East and West would take their proper places in a renewed public consciousness." Nor would we torment our conscience with the request of Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko, laid to eternal rest beneath tombstones at Vydubetsky monastery. For it is not only stones that should bear the embossed names of philanthropists and custodians of true values.