Collections : [Rare Book & Manuscript Library]

These papers consist of correspondence, manuscripts, documents, art works, printed materials, and a photograph, and relate chiefly to Russian artists and ballet personalities active in France in the 1920s and 1930s. Records of the Parisian World of Art (Mir Iskusstva) group, of which Shervashidze was the president, includes correspondence, documents, an exhibit program, clippings and a photograph of the artists involved. There is correspondence from Lev Bakst, Ivan Bilibin, Sergei Diagilev, Mikhail Larionov, Georgii Lukomskii, and Joan Mirʹo, and one letter each from Nikolai Roerich, and Nataliia Goncharova. There are also many letters from Shervashidze's family in the Soviet Union from the 1920s and 1930s. Illustrative materials by Shervashidze include programs, prints and water colors.

Popova's disjointed memoirs "Popovskaia khronika" discuss her family and ancestors, artistic and cultural life in pre-revolutionary Moscow, and the emigration in France. Among the people who appear in these memors are Sergei Diagilev, Savva Mamontov, Maksim Gorky, Serafim Sud'binin, Mikhail Larionov, and Nataliia Goncharova. Also included is a typescript biography (29 p.) of her cousin, Pavel S. Popov (1892-1964), by an unidentified Soviet author. Popov, who married a granddaughter of Lev Tolstoi, was the author of "Istoriia logiki novogo vremeni" (1960), and taught philosophy at Moscow University. This manuscript touches on his family, education, professional career in the Soviet Union, and, in great detail, his family troubles in the last years of his life.