The artist Zinaida Serebryakova in France: her destiny and documentary heritage

The article focuses on the documentary heritage of Zinaida E. Serebryakova, a Russian emigrant artist (1884 - 1967). The main attention is paid to the process of identifying the sources that reflect her life and artistic activity. The author also undertakes a retrospective analysis of the publications of the artist’s documentary heritage. The most large-scale publication appeared in the 1980s. However, the way the documents were selected and interpreted in terms of archeography was meant to emphasize the motif of a lack of demand for her art and the roughness of her life in emigration. The author shows that during the past few decades Russian researchers have been revealing new sets of documents facilitating a comparative historical analysis and the discovery of unknown details of the French period in Z.E. Serebryakova’s life and work. It is in this context that the author examines the publications of the artist’s documentary heritage of the last years and analyzes archive documents which, until now, were neither studied nor published by history researchers. It is concluded that the whole of Z.E. Serebryakova’s documentary heritage which is scattered around throughout Russian and foreign archives offers a fairly ample opportunity to carry out a complex research of her intellectual biography at large and of her lifeworld in emigration, in particular.