From a Grandmother’s Bookshelf to the Library of Congress: Nikita Mishin’s Lifelong Love Affair with Artist Mikhail Nesterov

I could not yet read, but I already knew I loved him.

As a child, I spent long stretches at my grandmother Valentina Pavlovna Khokhlova’s flat in Lytkarino, a small town near Moscow. It was a Khrushchev-era apartment — low ceilings, modest rooms — but her bookshelves rose from floor to ceiling and held more than 2,000 volumes. I would run my fingers along their spines, trying to puzzle out titles from the letters I was still learning. More than the books themselves, though, I loved the art albums. I would sit for hours turning pages, lost in images I could not yet explain to myself but could not stop returning to.

Among Russian painters, two held me. Viktor MikhaylovichVasnetsov, with his fairytale world of heroes and magic. And Mikhail VasilyevichNesterov — mysterious, quiet, unlike anything else. His paintings made me ask questions I had no language for. What was the Great Taking of the Veil? Why did his figures seem to belong to the landscape as much as to the earth itself, as though holiness and nature had simply grown together? I did not know. But I felt something.

That feeling never left me.

Eight years ago, a friend — the sculptor Alexey Morozov — introduced me to Dr. Pavel Klimov, a St. Petersburg art historian regarded as the foremost living authority on Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov. When Dr. Klimov described his vision for a comprehensive catalogue raisonné of Nesterov’s work, my decision was instantaneous. I had spent a lifetime as a fan and collector of this artist. Here was the chance to do something lasting: to systematize an enormous heritage, to put it in permanent form for scholars, for museums, for anyone who might one day stand where I once stood, a child turning pages, trying to understand.

What I could not have foreseen was the scale of the undertaking. Letters by the hundreds. Permissions negotiated across institutions and national borders. Agreements that took years to reach. Dr. Klimov led a team of experts through the full sweep of Nesterov’s output — a career spanning six decades, two political worlds and a transformation of Russian life so total it is almost impossible to comprehend from the outside.

That catalogue, two volumes, was published in 2020. This past May, it was accepted into the collection of the United States Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., presented to the Germanic and Slavic Division, Russia Section. For me, it was the capstone of something that began on a grandmother’s shelf in a small Soviet apartment. The boy who could not yet read has placed his artist in one of the world’s great libraries.

Who was Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov? He was born in 1862 and died in 1942 — a lifespan that brackets one of history’s most violent rupture. He came of age under the Tsars, painting religious murals and icons, including works in St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral in Kyiv. He became one of the first practitioners of Symbolist art in Russia, celebrated for fusing religious mysticism with the beauty of the Russian landscape. His most famous work, “The Vision of the Boy Bartholomew,” painted in 1890, depicts the young future St. Sergius of Radonezh receiving a divine visitation in a hushed autumn meadow. It remains among the most recognized and reproduced images in all of Russian art. Of it, Nesterov said: “I won’t be the one who lives. ‘Youth Bartholomew’ will. If in 30, 50 years after my death, he will still be telling people something — that means he is alive, which means, I am alive.”

Then came the Revolution. Tsarist Russia collapsed. The Orthodox Church was suppressed. The world Nesterov had painted — saints woven into serene landscapes, holy figures moving through birch forests as though sanctity were simply part of the air — became politically dangerous. Another artist might have broken. Nesterov adapted. He turned to portraiture, and became sought after in the new Soviet order, finding in the human face the same depth and interiority he had once sought in sacred subjects. He survived. He worked. He died in 1942, during the siege of Moscow, outlasting the Tsar and outlasting most of his contemporaries.

What attracts me to his work, in my unprofessional opinion, is that Nesterov was far from being a saint himself. Yet his creative superpower was to portray holiness as an ideal, as a goal, as a hope. The enigma that always accompanies true holiness — that sense that it cannot be fully grasped, only approached — gives his work its particular softness and depth.

My grandmother, Valentina Pavlovna Khokhlova, was born in 1927 and died in 2006. She raised me with care and love, and she sparked in me an interest in art that I have carried my whole life. This catalogue is dedicated to her memory.

She could not have known what those art albums would set in motion. I am glad they did.