New Materials for B. N. Zasypkin’s Biography

Abstract

This article continues the author’s series of publications on the history of organization and participants of the studies in Eastern culture in the Crimea in the mid-1920s. A page of the expeditionary activities of the team of the Central State Restoration Workshops in the Crimea is revealed. This work was a part of large-scale archaeological and ethnographic expedition for the study of the Crimean Tatar monuments. It was commissioned and funded by the Crimean ASSR and carried out by researchers from the academic centres of the USSR. The article has analysed the participation of Boris Nikolaevich Zasypkin (1891–1955), a well-known restorer and the organizer of the archaeological monument protection in different regions of the USSR, in the study of the Crimean cultural heritage. It has introduced into the scholarship previously not known documents from the collections of the Central State Restoration Workshops now residing in the Moscow Central State Archives. These materials shed light on new aspects of the architect-restorer B. N. Zasypkin’s works in the Crimea in 1926 and 1927. The texts of Zasypkin’s reports on his works on the peninsula in 1926 are supplied. Informative but little-known letters of P. I. Chepurina, the head of Yevpatoria Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum, and K. E. Grinevich, the director of the State Museum of Tauric Chersonese, to B. N. Zasypkin uncover tough personal communications of the researchers of the Crimea and Zasypkin’s role in the said process. Zasypkin’s activities for the preservation of the museum in Yevpatoria has been demonstrated. He arranged the intercession of the museum existence and preservation of its storage from the Head of the Museum section of the Glavnauka (Supreme Administration of Scientific, Scientific-Artistic, and Museum Establishments) at the People’s Commissariat for Education of the RSFSR N. I. Sedova, the Head of the Glavnauka F. N. Petrov, and the Chair of the State Academy for the History of Material Culture N. Ia. Marr. The Central State Restoration Workshops’ expedition under the supervision of I. E. Grabar to the peninsula has been reconstructed. It included the head of the Commission for the Preservation and Discovery of Ancient Paintings in Russia and the art historian A. I. Anisimov, the restorer G. O. Chirikov, and the photographer A. V. Liadov. The 1927 expedition was aimed at the inspection of architectural monuments where paintings survived and the development of necessary measures to protect and maintain these architectural sites. Zasypkin’s work for the recording of Chersonese monuments has been shown.