Its opening has been timed to mark the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. It tells not only about a particular member of the Hermitage staff – the art scholar, publisher and collector Fyodor Nothaft (1886–1942), but also about the museum itself, which saved and preserved his art and book collections.

“The siege has many faces. This Hermitage exhibition, placed alongside others devoted to the War and Victory, tells about the indissoluble fate of an intellectual and the fruits of his labour, about the way a legacy survives, where a person doesn’t, but that happens thanks to people,” Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, says.

The exhibition covers three main themes: the family, items from Fyodor Fyodorovich’s collection and, the gifts from Nothaft that came into the Hermitage library.

More than 150 exhibits from Fyodor Fyodorovich’s collection – paintings and graphic art, items from his postcard collection, numbered and named copies of books, publications with dedicatory inscriptions and autographs, ex libris and much else – make it possible to form an idea of the rich legacy that this collector left to the Hermitage. Personal documents, photographs and drawings also tell about Fyodor Nothaft himself, a Hermitage worker selflessly devoted to books and to the museum.

One further important component of the exhibition, which opens in the run-up to Victory Day, is the account of how in beleaguered Leningrad the Hermitage saved and preserved Fyodor Nothaft’s art and book collections.

The terrible time of the siege did not spare the Nothaft family. In April 1942, Fyodor Fyodorovich’s wife, Hermitage worker Yelena Georgiyevna Smakalova, died of starvation. Soon afterwards, in June, he lost his own struggle for life. Left behind in the couple’s empty apartment, however, were paintings, drawings, albums, postcards, documents, letters and photographs, as well as a unique library. Following Fyodor Fyodorovich’s death, the fate of the collection that he had been accumulating since his youth hung in the balance. In order to save it from looting, Leningrad’s State Inspectorate for the Preservation of Monuments and the Hermitage mounted a rescue and removed Nothaft’s collections to the museum. Using sacks thrown over their shoulders and sledges that still remained in the besieged city, members of the Hermitage staff spent several months transferring Fyodor Fyodorovich’s priceless acquisitions. Today, thanks to their heroic self-sacrificing efforts, we are able to see items from Fyodor Fyodorovich Nothaft’s collection, which has become an important part of the Hermitage’s stocks.

The Hermitage publishing house has prepared an illustrated catalogue for the exhibition.

The exhibition curator is Olga Georgiyevna Zimina, Deputy Head of the State Hermitage’s Research Library.