William C. Brumfield
FROM PARIS TO SAINT PETERSBURG:
19th CENTURY PERCEPTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE
AS HISTORICAL TEXT
If nationalism is a secular religion, it should be noted that a salient aspect
of the revival of medieval styles in nineteenth-century European architecture is
the transposition of motifs from sacred to secular architecture. This is
especially so in Russia, for masonry architecture in that country before the
18th century consisted almost entirely of churches. Indeed, the church served as
the central expression of medieval Russian identity, exemplified by Moscow's
Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat, popularly known as Basil the Blessed
and also known, in the 16th and 17th centuries, as Jerusalem1. Built as a votive
church in 1555-61 in commemoration of Ivan the Terrible's victory over the
khanate of Kazan in 1552, the structure celebrates the coalescence of Russia and
Mus covy's role as defender of the Orthodox faith. While other Russian churches
rarely achieved such connotative density, church architecture (including
monasteries) continued to serve until the Petrine era as the repository of
national identity in architecture.
However, the rapid
secularization of Russian society during the eighteenth century led to
redefining of the role of the church2. This transformation was accompanied by an
equally radical change in the design of the church, whose form could be altered
to suit the latest imperial taste (itself a political gesture). The church thus
became one among many types of monumental architecture subordinate to the state
and dependent upon it for support. There were occasional concessions to national
tradition, as in Bartolomeo Rastrelli's sublimely beautiful Cathedral of the
Resurrection at the Smolny Convent, commissioned in the 1740s by the
Empress
Elizabeth3. But whatever the particular church design, the imperial court
remained the central culture-forming force in an enlightened autocracy.
The equation of state and nation in imperial Russian architecture culminated in
the late neoclassical monuments of Carlo Rossi. In 1805, having returned from a
study tour of Europe (Italy in particular), the young Rossi submitted a proposal
for the reconstruction of Admiralty Embankment. The project never materialized
and Rossi's drawings disappeared; but his note of explanation contains the
following passage: «The dimensions of the project proposed by me exceed those
accepted by the Romans for their structures. Indeed, why should we fear to be
compared with them in magnificence? One should interpret this word not as an
abundance of ornament, but rather grandeur of form, nobility of proportion, and
solidity. This monument must be eternal»4. Russia's greatness as a nation is
here affirmed by a comparison to the heart of western, Roman culture.
Rossi was one of the last of Petersburg's brilliant neoclassicists. As elsewhere
in Europe, the concept of a dominant architectural system— based on the
classical orders—yielded to ideas of local history embodied in architectural
style. Instead of universals, Russian intellectuals of the romantic era, like
their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, elevated the local, the
specifically
national5. Although classical models continued to be revered, particularly in
educational curricula, the competing claims for new tectonic and decorative
forms argued for a greater response to function and physical setting, both of
which stimulated an eclectic approach based on an appeal to the national
character and its cultural heritage.
Yet early students of Russian architecture often attributed native building
traditions to various foreign derivations, as exemplified in the impressionistic
generalities of a public lecture delivered in 1837 by Aleksei Martynov
(1820-1895), a student at the Moscow Court School of Architecture6. The surmises
and inaccuracies of Martynov and others are of less significance, however, than
their attempt to resurrect a cultural heritage that had for so long seemed
invisible. In 1838 the Petersburg newspaper Khudozhestvennaia gazeta (Arts
gazette) complained that Russian academicians were still preoccupied with the
monuments of the ancient world, to the detriment of an understanding of Russian
architecture and its relation to that of other cultures: «It would be desirable
if our architects also turned their attention to the monuments of various times
and tastes scattered throughout our provinces»7. An article published in 1840 in
the same source proclaimed that «Every climate, every people, every age has its
special style, which corresponds to particular needs or satisfies special goals»8. For a growing number of intellectuals, the folk, or narod. was the only
authentic base for a modern national culture.
This is a topic with many ramifications for Russian and European history.
Indeed, it is associated with the transformation of history as an
academic
discipline9. In architecture the uses of history in formulating a national sense
of identity led to such movements as historicism and eclecticism10. Yet by a
curious inversion of logic, the post-classical, eclectic age by definition
lacked a style of its own. The adaptation of ornamental motifs drawn from other,
often exotic, cultures coexisted with attempts to recreate «national» styles,
derived from a renewed appreciation of medieval (in Russia, pre-Petrine)
culture. Thus, perceptions of architectural form became increasingly linked to
literary interpretations of history.
One of the earliest writers to consider the cultural significance of European
historicism was Victor Hugo, especially in his Notre Dame de Paris, first
published in 1831. His «Note Added to the Definitive Edition (1832)» comments
both on the decline of contemporary architecture and on the need to preserve
historic buildings until a worthier architectural era arrives:
While waiting for new monuments, let us conserve the old monuments. If it is
possible, let us inspire in the nation a love for the national architecture.
This, the author declares, is one of the principle goals of this book11.
Paradoxically, Hugo suggests in the book, set in the 1480s, that architecture
must inevitably lose the preeminence among the arts that it possessed before the
Renaissance. At the end of the first chapter of Book Five, Hugo's possessed
archdeacon Don Claude speaks of «reading one after another the marble letters of
the alphabet, the granite pages of the book». Having defined the great
architecture of the past as man's supreme act of creation and repository of
knowledge, he lifts his left hand toward the towers of Notre Dame, places his
right on a book printed in 1474 in Nuremberg, and says: «This will kill that.
... The book will kill the building» (172-173).
The meaning of this dark saying is given lengthy elaboration in the following
chapter, an authorial digression entitled «Ceci tuera cela». Hugo first
interprets this utterance in its most direct sense, as the inevitable conflict
between the church and Gutenberg, of the printing press breaking the church's
monopoly on the power of information. He then construes the words more broadly:
printing will destroy the transcendent power of architecture. «From the origin
of things until the fifteenth century of the Christian era inclusively,
architecture was the great book of humanity, the principle expression of man in
his various states of development» (175). Hugo relates the beginnings of textual
codes (in letters, hieroglyphs) to the design of ancient structures12. The most
extended of his examples is Jerusalem.
The temple of Solomon, for example, was not simply the binding of the holy book,
it was the holy book itself. Upon each of its concentric precincts the priests
could read the word translated and manifest before their eyes, and they followed
its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary until they grasped it in the
last tabernacle under its most concrete form, which was still architecture: the
Ark. Thus the Word was enclosed in an edifice, but its image was upon its
covering [enveloppe] ... (176).
With the coming of the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, architectural form
as the prime conveyer of a culture's knowledge of itself (as Hugo presents it)
yielded to the word, disseminated by a new technology and containing the seeds
of revolutionary, destabilizing ideas: «Human thought discovered means of
perpetuating itself not only more durable and resistant than architecture, but
also simpler and easier. ... The invention of printing is the greatest event in
history. It is the mother revolution» (182).
This redirection reduced the innate meaning of style in architecture: «Following
the discovery of printing, architecture little by little withers ... It no
longer expresses society in any essential way; ... from the Gallic, the
European, the indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman, from the true and the
modern [it becomes] pseudo-antique. It is this decadence that is called the
renaissance» (183). The irony underlying this passage is that the Renaissance
set in motion the development of a literary culture (leading ultimately to the
novel) whose literate perceptions of pre-Renaissance «indigenous»
architecture—as in Hugo's work—are necessarily his-toricist and
«pseudo-antique».
Like many other architectural critics of the nineteenth century, Hugo admits the
possibility of a new age, of a revival in modern architecture, even as he
decries its contemporary decline and advocates the preservation of the
remaining, indigenous artifacts of an earlier era. Hugo is, perhaps, unique in
the trenchant way in which he expresses his main point: «Let no one be mistaken:
architecture is dead, dead without return, killed by the printed book, killed
because it endured less; killed because it cost more» (186). «The great accident
of an architect of genius may occur in the twentieth century, as that of Dante
did in the thirteenth; but architecture will never again be the social art, the
collective art, the dominant art. ... And if, hereafter, architecture should
accidentally revive, it will no longer be the master. It will submit to the law
of literature ...»(187).
Hugo projects both a regret for the loss of medieval architecture's power and a
sense of superiority in the writer's ability to control the perception of the
authentic and inauthentic in architecture. But even more, the writer of the
nineteenth century has the power, Hugo suggests, to refashion national history
from the stones of ancient monuments. The first two chapters of Book Three of
Notre Dame are devoted to the layering of history in architecture, first in the
cathedral itself, and then in the city as seen from the cathedral. In both
instances Hugo describes a richness of time and texture, and then he states that
the greatest attributes of church and city have been lost to neglect and
indifference, just as architecture has been displaced from its central role in
human consciousness.
Hugo's comments on architecture are polemical, debatable, and passionately
engaged in the cause of preservation, which he sees as a means of preserving a
people's truth about itself13. The writer gives meaning to mute historic
structures in a literate age, and at the same time uses architecture as a
symbolic structure for meaning within his own work. Although the reputation of
Notre Dame has waned in this century, it was widely read in the nineteenth; and
one can assume that it was well known, particularly in the 1830s, to a Russian
literary elite that avidly read French novels14.
It was at this time that major Russian writers began their own forays into
commentary on architecture as a historical cultural record. Professional
literati and writers such as Nikolai Gogol, an amateur of architecture, and
Fedor Dostoevskii, trained as an engineer, were to produce the most incisive
Russian architectural commentary of the middle decades of the nineteenth
century. Concurrently, architectural style for the large number of buildings
required for urban growth became increasingly a matter of facade decoration in a
pastiche of historicist decorative motifs. With the rise, however tenuous, of a
capitalist society and an economy based on individual rather than state
initiative, the tastes of architect as well as patron were formed within a new,
literate awareness of the possible variety of distinctive styles.
Thus as we approach the theme of historicism in nineteenth-century architecture,
we are confronted with a paradox: on the one hand, historicist architectural
styles are expected to represent and embody a national image that ipso facto is
situated in a pre-Enlightenment, medieval era—whether in France, England,
Germany, or Russia. But if architecture's mission is to evoke historical
associations, the content of the decorative image must be provided not by
architects, but by the writer, the ideologue, the historian. At the extreme, the
building facade becomes a text whose representation supercedes tectonic clarity,
unity, or even practicality. In historicism the triumph of the printed word over
architecture is complete at the very moment in which architecture is exhorted to
imitate its distinctive pre-Gutenberg past. (In Russia books were printed by the
second half of the sixteenth-century, yet the medieval mentality is often
assumed to have persisted until the time of Peter I.)
Gogol provides the significant example in his essay, published in 1835, on
contemporary architecture, in which he writes of the fragmentation of social and
aesthetic consciousness in the new age: «Our age is so petty, its desires are so
dispersed, our knowledge is so encyclopedic, that we can not concentrate our
thoughts on one subject; and against our will we split all our creations into
trifles and charming toys. We have the marvelous gift of making
everything
insignificant»15.
Yet Gogol continues with an extreme architectural vision that is dispersed,
encyclopedic— and perhaps trivialized. In opposition to the universal measure of
neoclassicism, he appeals for a visually stimulating urban architecture composed
of all styles: «A city should consist of varied masses, if you will, in order to
provide pleasure to the eye. Let there be gathered in it more diverse tastes.
Let there rise on one and the same street something somber and Gothic; something
eastern, burdened under the luxury of ornament; something Egyptian, colossal;
and something Greek, suffused with slender proportions» (57). Function is
supplanted by the creation of an aesthetic cityscape to enlighten as well as
delight its inhabitants.
As for the person capable of designing this new environment:
The architect-creator should have a deep knowledge of all forms of architecture.
He least of all should neglect the taste of those peoples to whom we usually
show disdain in artistic matters. But in order to master the idea, he must be a
genius and a poet (57).
Gogol's romantic concept of the creative architect seems remote from Russian
practice, but his predilection for Gothic architecture was shared by a number of
Russiancritics and architects including Aleksandr Briullov, the one contemporary
architect whose work Gogol praised(61). Although an imaginative, idiosyncratic
form of pseudo-Gothic architecture had flourished in Russia during the reign of
Catherine the Great, the post-classical Gothic revival not only was more widely
applied, but also appeared specifically as an antidote to neoclassi-cism.
Indeed, the Gothic Revival can be considered the first stylistic development
after neo-classicism to lay claim to both aesthetic and historical significance
in its own right. For nineteenth-century historicism the Gothic Revival also
served as a stimulus for reinterpreting medieval Russian architecture16.
Gogol's essay concludes with a proposal for an architectural street in a nation
that still had the vaguest sense of its own architectural history. Traversing
the ages of civilization reflected in the art of building (cf. Hugo's perception
of Paris in Notre Dame), this ideal street culmi-nates in Gothic architecture,
the «crown of art» and the promenade ends with some yet undefined new style.
«This street would become in a certain sense a history of the development of
taste, and anyone too lazy to leaf through weighty tomes would only have to
stroll along it in order to find out everything» (59).
There is not in this fantasy one mention of medieval Russian architecture, in
any of its manifestations; and the article's references to Russian neoclassicism
are not flattering. Gogol praises the cathedrals of Milan and Cologne as well as
the Islamic architecture of India; yet the «everything» that Gogol's cultured
but indolent Russian might inspect includes nothing from eleventh-century Kiev
or Novgorod, nothing from twelfth-century Vladimir or sixteenth-century Moscow.
Gogol's fascination with architecture and its history (he had at one time
studied the architecture of the ancient world) did not extend to Russia. His
boulevard of architectural history was a means of imagining that which Russia
apparently did not have—a history, not simply an architectural chronicle, but a
history of a people as revealed through its architecture.
And yet, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, expeditions to the Russian
countryside sought the artifacts of that history. In the 1830s the Academy of
Arts, a bastion of European training, had commissioned a survey of pre-Petrine
monuments to be compiled by the artist Fedor Solntsev (1801-1892), whose work
played an important role in publicizing early Russian architecture. During the
following decade the interest in rediscovering the Russian architectural
heritage received significant support from Ivan Snegirev (1793-1868), a
professor of Classics at Moscow University but also an amateur of medieval
Russian history. In 1848 Alek-sei Martynov and Snegirev began to publish their
influential series Russian Antiquity (Russkaia starina), which contained
detailed descriptions of medieval monuments17.
It is, therefore all the more curious that in the middle decades of the
nineteenth century, Petersburg—not medieval Muscovy—served more readily to
validate Russia's position as a nation with a significant history. This paradox
is illuminated in Fedor Dostoevskii's «Petersburg Chronicle» for June 1, 1847.
In commenting on the advent of spring to the northern capital, the flaneur (the
roving observer that is Dostoevskii's narrative persona) describes a city in the
throes of growth: «Crowds of workers with plaster, with shovels, with hammers,
axes, and other instruments dispose themselves along Nevskii Prospekt as though
at home, as though they had bought it; and woe to the pedestrian, flaneur, or
observer who lacks a serious desire to resemble Pierrot spattered with flour in
a Roman carnival»18.
Similar motifs of urban expansion and change reappear in the novelist's
post-exile work, most notably Crime and Punishment, where they form an integral
part of the psychological environment. The preceding passage, however, veers
into a discursus on the built environment as history, a text whose decoding
leads to the past as an expression of native identity. With summer approaching
and cultured society leaving the town:
What remains for those citizens whose captivity forces them to pass their summer
in the capital? To study the architecture of buildings, to how the city is being
renewed and built? Of course this is an important occupation and indeed even
edifying. Your Petersburger is so distracted in the winter, and has so many
pleasures, business, work, card-playing, gossip and various other
amusements—besides which there is so much dirt—that he would hardly have the
time to look around, to peer into Petersburg more attentively, to study its
physiognomy and read the history of the city and all our epoch in this mass of
stones, in these magnificent edifices, palaces, monuments [emphasis added—W.B.].
After all, it would hardly come into anyone's head to kill valuable time with
such an absolutely innocent and unprofitable exercise (24).
The irony here is ambiguous, since Dostoevskii's subsequent work uses
architecture as an extension and reflection of the contemporary mental state of
individual characters as well as entire collectives—hence the «Petersburg
theme.» Furthermore, by the time of Dostoevskii's early work, the city's
architecture reflected only slightly more than a century of history, and that
often in deliberate contrast to the cultural traditions of the pre-Petrine
period. Although sensitive to the psychological impact of urban architecture,
Dostoevskii showed little interest in architectural historicism as a means of
reclaiming a sense of Russianness that presumably resided in pre-modern (i.e.,
pre-Petrine) history.
Dostoevskii's ambivalent—or highly selective— attitude toward history is
developed in the subsequent passage of his June 1 entry in the Petersburg
Chronicle. At this point Dostoevskii presents the historical approach to
architecture through the comments on Russian monuments contained in La Russie en
1839. by the Marquis de Custine. Although been banned in Russia, the book was
nonetheless widely known in intellectual circles and is the unmistakable source
of Dostoevskii's references:
Incidentally, a study of the city is really not a useless thing. We don't
exactly remember, but sometime ago we happened to read a certain French book,
which consisted entirely of views on the contemporary condition of Russia. Of
course it is already known just what foreigners' views on the contemporary
condition of Russia are; somehow up to now we stubbornly do not submit to being
measured by a foreign yardstick. But despite that, the renowned tourist's book
was eagerly read by all Europe. Among other things, it stated that there is
nothing more lacking in character than Petersburg architecture; that there is
nothing especially striking about it, nothing national [Dostoevskii's emphasis],
and that the entire city is a hybrid caricature of several European capitals.
And finally, that Petersburg, if only in an architectural sense, represents such
a strange mixture, that one cannot cease to exclaim with amazement at every step
(24).
In Dostoevskii's paraphrase, Custine portrays Petersburg as an architectural
hybridization similar to the one Gogol had envisioned, but had not found in
Petersburg: «Greek architecture, Roman architecture, Byzantine architecture,
Dutch architecture, Gothic architecture, architecture of the rococo, the latest
Italian architecture, our Orthodox architecture—all this, according to the
traveler, whipped up and shaped into a most entertaining form, and in conclusion
not one genuinely beautiful building!»19.
Dostoevskii would later publish similar views on the hybrid nature of Petersburg
architecture as a barometer of social confusion in his Diary of a Writer. Of
more immediate interest, however, is his reaction to Custine's claim that the
architecture of Petersburg lacks an authentic, appropriate style. Despite his
defensive manoeuvre («we know what foreigners' views of Russia are worth»),
Dostoevskii seems to revel in Custine's description of the city's architectural
palette. Although Custine criticized the aesthetics of Petersburg, he was also
amazed at the city's appearance, which combined stylistic variety with
monumental uniformity20.
Furthermore, Custine saw the building of Petersburg as both validated by history
and anticipating it:
Elsewhere great cities are made in memory of great deeds of the past. Or, while
cities make themselves with the help of circumstances and history, without the
least apparent cooperation of human calculation, Saint Petersburg with its
magnificence and immensity is a trophy elevated by the Russians to their power
yet to come; the hope that produces such efforts seems to me sublime! Not since
the Temple of the Jews has the faith of a people in their destiny wrested from
the earth something more marvelous than Saint Petersburg. And what renders this
legacy made by a man to his ambitious country truly admirable is that it has
been accepted by history (267-68).
The reference to the Temple in Jerusalem is particularly apt in view of the Zion
motif in medieval Russian culture and architecture, as well as in Dostoevskii's
own subsequent work. Yet the more peculiar aspect of the preceding passage is
its comment on Petersburg as a city both preparing for history and having been
accepted by it. In this scheme there are two levels of history: a universal
history of established civilization and culture, and the history of Russia,
existing in tenuous relation to the former.
Custine, like Dostoevskii, sees historical meaning in the stones of Petersburg.
In commenting on the forbidding form of the Mikhailovskii Castle, in which the
Emperor Paul was assassinated in 1801, Custine notes in his ninth letter: «If
men are silent in Russia, the stones speak and speak in a lamentable voice. I am
not surprised that the Russians fear and neglect their old monuments: these are
witnesses of their history, which more often than not they would wish to
forget.» (259) Yet there were, in fact, no «vieux monuments» in Petersburg: the
Mikhailovskii Castle, for example, was completed less than four decades
before Custine's journey21. Furthermore, it is clear from subsequent parts of Custine's
narrative—particularly in Moscow—that much had indeed survived from Russia's
distant, turbulent architectural past.
Throughout Custine's account the specific meaning of «histoire» can only be
determined by context—in the preceding case, the recent political history of the
imperial regime. In the same sense, no doubt, Dostoevskii advised his readers in
1847 to ponder the history of their city, whose imperial architecture—despite
its recent provenance—can be defined as a historical text begun by Peter and
decipherable by the contemporary resident or visitor. Yet Custine also describes
Peter's great vision, whose tangible form derived from so many foreign sources,
as an aggression directed toward the West («contre l'Europe une ville ... pour
dominer le monde»). Even in its approach toward integration with Europe, even in
its new western-style capital, Russia is potentially hostile, alien, and
separate.
The ramifications of Custine's thought will achieve their greatest complexity
only when he reaches Moscow, and begins a sustained, often deliberately
contradictory, dialogue on the fate of Russia—notably as interpreted in the
architecture of the Kremlin and other monuments. Paradoxicafly, it is Custine,
not Dostoevskii, who reads medieval Russian architecture as Hugo had read that
of fifteenth-century Paris. That, however, is the topic for another paper.
Whatever Custine's ultimate fascination with Moscow, the counterpoint of Custine
and Dostoevskii in 1847 demonstrates that Petersburg is modern Russia's first
«historical» city, \ with an architecture that reveals purpose and development
toward a concept of nationhood. Dostoevskii realized that Russia's existence as
a great nation—and therefore its identity, cultural as well as political—
depended on the Peter's turn to the West22. This may explain the scant «reading»
that the Russian writer gave to medieval Russian architecture, picturesque and
stimulating for foreign travelers such as Custine, but of faint relevance—so it
then seemed—to Russia's destiny.
3. Brumfield, History, pp. 251-53.
16 T. A. Slavina, Issledovateti russkoi arkhitektury, (Leningrad, 1983), pp. 42-44.