“He Got to Italy and He Got Caught Forever”: Dating Pavel Muratov’s First Italienische Reise

Abstract

The question of dating Pavel Muratov’s first travel to Italy (the crucial milestone in his biography) turns out to be unexpectedly complicated, so its solution may also have a methodological interest. Scholars point to 1907 or 1908, with the former date prevailing. In 2019, shortly before her death, Xenia Muratova, Muratov’s grandniece, informed Rita Giuliani that she had found in her home archive some documents that testify in favour of 1908. On the other hand, Ludmila Pravoverova, a biographer of the painter Nikolai Ulyanov, who was a companion of the Muratovs on this journey, defended the 1907 date: according to her, in 1908, Muratov and his wife went to Italy again without the Ulyanovs, and this fact caused the confusion. At first glance, it seems convincing: in fact, both Ulyanov in his autobiographical notes (1924) and Muratov in his essay Nikolai Pavlovich Ulyanov (1922, published in 1925) attributed their voyage to 1907. For the first time involving several archival documents, proposing a conjecture to the text of Muratov’s essay, and arguing that Ulyanov’s Italian postcard was misdated by its editor, the author hopes to demonstrate that the validity of the earlier chronology is deceptive and the journey began in September / October 1908.

Keywords

• pavel muratov
• nikolai ulyanov
• italian journey
• biographical research
• dating.