Art Expert Loved By Uladzimir Karatkevich Dies In Moscow

The woman was 97 years old.

Nina Moleva, an art expert and widow of artist and collector of paintings Eli Belyutin, has died in Moscow, "Agency" reports. The woman was 97 years old, and among other things, she had a relation to Belarusian literature.

Nina Moleva was a teacher at the Higher Literature Courses in Moscow in the late 1950s, when the then young Belarusian writer Uladzimir Karatkevich was studying there. She became the prototype of Iryna Haravaya, the heroine of the novel "The Leonids will not Return to Earth", with whom the protagonist was in love.

Both in the novel and in reality, Moleva was married - to the artist Eli Belyutin. The "romancing" with her, admitted Karatkevich to his friend Uladzimir Kalesnik, was platonic.

And yet he - a romantic! - seriously intended to earn by the summer of 1960 200 thousand rubles (this is at a time when the teacher earned 700 a month) on screenplays and plays, buy a house near Moscow and a car, so that Nina, leaving her husband to him, did not live worse.

However, Moleva, of course, did not leave Belyutin and a comfortable flat in Mayakovsky Square. She saw in Karatkevich a provincial, who "came to me yet unformed man ... Much of what I said, was literally overturning something in his soul".

Still, Karatkevich was friends with her until the end of his life, buying and presenting her paintings. And in 2015, Moleva willed her and her late husband's collection of paintings ... to Vladimir Putin. There are, probably, the paintings presented by Karatkevich in that collection.

At first, however, Moleva wanted to leave the collection to the state. But, as she herself told Moskovsky Komsomolets in 2015, when drawing up the will, it was explained to her that she could specify to the heirs only an individual or an institution. This is how Putin's surname appeared in the will, according to Moleva.

Moleva says that the collection was started by her husband's grandfather Ivan Grinev in the 1870s, and after that it was inherited. Belyutin died in 2012, and Moleva became the keeper of the collection after that. It was claimed to contain works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Van Dyck, El Greco, Leonardo da Vinci and other classical artists.

There are different estimates of the collection's value: from 2 billion to "several tens or hundreds of millions of dollars".

However, not all experts believe that Moleva's collection is of great value. Thus, the former head of the department of painting of the Tretyakov Gallery Larisa Koshchuk claimed that she saw in the collection a copy of "Portrait of an unknown lady" by Van Dyck, and wrote that there could be other non-original works in Belyutin's flat.

Viktoriya Markova, the curator of the collection of Italian paintings at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, said that "the collection contains almost none of the big names announced by the owners... and many works do not correspond to the museum level at all and do not represent any historical and museum value".