Portrait of Iuliia Zhukovskaia

Iuliia Zhukovskaia

Librarian. Author of Gallery Nocturne and Nocturne After Hours.

I am a librarian, and I graduated from the Khabarovsk State Institute of Culture (formerly the Khabarovsk State Institute of Arts and Culture). I make two YouTube projects about artists, and both are built on primary sources.

In Russia, my specialty is called “librarian-bibliographer.” In practical terms, that means two things I was trained to do: work with library collections, and compile and check lists of sources (bibliographies). The second part is what I bring to every article here.

I am not an art historian, and I do not present myself as one. I look at art history the way a librarian does: where did what we know about an artist come from? Who wrote about them first? What survives in letters, catalogs, and newspapers, and what appeared later in memoirs and legends?

Where this habit comes from

My degree thesis was a bibliographic index for the Primorsky State Associated Museum of V.K. Arsenyev in Vladivostok. Building one means tracing every entry back to who wrote it, when, and on what evidence. I now apply the same discipline to artists' biographies.

My projects

Gallery Nocturne. Single-voice stories about the lives of artists. The painting is evidence; the person is the subject, with their fears, obsessions, and contradictions.

Nocturne After Hours. A two-voice podcast that treats an artist's story as an investigation. We take an artist everyone thinks they know and ask who built the image that reached us, and when.

How I work with sources

Each episode starts from letters, exhibition catalogs, newspapers, obituaries, archives, and contemporary memoirs. A document is not the same as the truth: it has an author, a reason for existing, and its own history, so I always ask who wrote it and why.

When sources disagree, I show the disagreement, explain which source I trust more and why, and say what remains uncertain. I separate what documents confirm from what is only likely. The full method is on the fact-checking page.

Corrections

If you find an error in my work, write to nocturnegallery.partners@gmail.com. I will check the source and fix it, and note the change on the article.

Find me