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Broken History and Crumbling Stones: The Romantic Conception of Architectural Preservation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Andreas Schönle
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Abstract

In this article Andreas Schönle explores the treatment of ruins in the Romantic period, in particular the propensity toward holistic reconstruction, rather than preservation of architectural heritage. He argues that the Romantic disregard of extant heritage harks back to the Sentimentalist infatuation with the fleetingness of life and dramatization of loss, that this melancholy feeling stoked a sense of national victimization, and that it legitimated an imaginary reinvention of the past and the constructedness of collective memory. The Church of the Tithe in Kiev serves as a case study illustrating that the Romantic commitment to totality has resulted in the significant destruction of architecture. Depictions of its ruins in travel accounts and in the writings of Vadim Passek and Andrei Murav'ev evidence a marked desire to exacerbate the sense of loss rather than to describe and valorize the remains. This disregard of heritage reprises the Sentimentalist infatuation with melancholy prominently deployed by Nikolai Karamzin. A comparison with Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in France and Augustus Pugin in England indicates that in Russia the invention of a national style of architecture required a much more radical imposition upon the historical landscape.

Type
Heritage Matters: (De-)Mobilizing Monuments and (MIS-)Shaping Identities
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , Winter 2012 , pp. 745 - 765
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2012

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References

I wish to thank my anonymous reviewers, whose queries and suggestions have contributed to sharpening my argument in important ways.

1. This article spans the periods referred to in traditional Russian periodization as Sentimentalism and Romanticism. These terms will be adopted here conventionally, as period labels more than content descriptors. Suffice it to say that for our purposes Sentimentalism explores the complexity of the self and of self-consciousness, while Romanticism seeks to embed, or dramatizes its inability to embed, this newly discovered self into some vision of totality, be it nature or the nation, for example, which fosters the elaboration of ideological constructs. The concept of Romanticism is itself highly fraught and disputed. It ranges from approaches that are affirmative and celebratory, emphasizing oneness with nature, the monistic texture of the world, its organicist evolution, healing, and reconciliation to theories that foreground alienation, irony, the infinite regression of self-consciousness, and the disjunction between language and the real. For a reasonably comprehensive discussion of the various understandings of Romanticism, see Simpson, David, “Romanticism, Criticism and Theory,” in Curran, Stuart, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 1–24.Google Scholar For a discussion of Russian Romanticism, see Leighton, Lauren G., “On a Discrimination of Russian Romanticism,” Russian Romanticism: Two Essays (The Hague, 1975), 1–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as Dmitrij Chizhevskij, History of Nineteenth- Century Russian Literature, vol. 1, The Romantic Period (Nashville, 1974). Emphasis in this article will be on the ideological dimensions of Romanticism, as “dramas of displacement and idealization,” in a critical vein adumbrated, for example, by Jerome J. McGann in his The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, 1983), 1.

2. Collective memory will be understood here in the sense pioneered by Maurice Halbwachs as a framework that both sustains individual memory and enforces a certain group unity by selecting among available recollections and reconfiguring their meaning dynamically in response to the needs of the present. See Apfelbaum, Erika, “Halbwachs and the Social Properties of Memory,” in Radstone, Susannah and Schwarz, Bill, eds., Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York, 2010), 77–92.Google Scholar

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4. See Wachtel, Andrew Baruch, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, 1994), 19–31.Google Scholar

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8. Ibid., 294. Emphasis in the original. In the story, Liza becomes the victim of Erast, a man raised on European Enlightenment literature, who, in his relations with her, initially forms the project of an asexual friendship based on rational self-control. This Enlightenment-inspired self-determining lifestyle wreaks havoc on Liza's existence. Erast represents the intrusion of western intellectual paradigms into Russia. For a reading of this story as a parable of the rise of modernity in Russia, see Schönle, Andreas, “Mezhdu ‘drevnei’ i ‘novoi’ Rossiei: Ruinyu rannego Karamzina kak mesto ‘modernity,'” Novoe literatumoe ohozrenie, 59 no. 1 (2003): 125-41.Google Scholar

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15. N. M. Karamzin, Pis'ma N.M. Karamzinak1.1. Dmitrievu (St. Petersburg, 1866), 154.

16. Vladimir V Izmailov, Puteshetvie v poludennuiu Rossiiu (Moscow, 1805), 42-48. For a discussion of the way this text treats and uses history, see Schönle, Andreas, Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 112-22.Google Scholar

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22. For a different discussion of the Russian Romantic treatment of ruins, emphasizing the importance of classical ruins, see Schönle, Andreas, Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia (DeKalb, 2011), 73–105.Google Scholar

23. Organicist views of history, which go back to the works of Johann Gottfried Herder and August Wilhelm Schlegel, became widespread in Russia through Mikhail Pogodin and subsequently Apollon Grigor'ev. See Steiner, Lina, For Humanity's Sake: The Bildungsroman in Russian Culture (Toronto, 2011), 101-2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Shchenkov, ed., Pamiatniki arkhitektury, 94.

25. Ibid., 114. For a specific discussion of church reconstruction during the 1830s and 1840s, see ibid., 107-18.

26. Ibid., 86.

27. See Astolphe de Custine's famous account of having been deceived by the apparent ancientness of a church in Nizhnii Novogorod that had just been moved and rebuilt: Astol'f de Kiustin, Rossia v 1839 godu, ed. Vera Mil'china, 3d ed. (St. Petersburg, 2008), 575-76.

28. Shchenkov, ed., Pamiatniki arkhitektury, 45.

29. Ibid., 53-58.

30. The edict On the Prohibition to Restore Monuments of Antiquity without the Permission of the Emperor (1842) reveals the extent to which Nicholas I intended to control and shape restoration works. Shchenkov, ed., Pamiatniki arkhitektury, 97.

31. Kirichenko, E. I., Russkii stil': Poiski vyrazheniia natsional'noi samobytnosti (Moscow, 1997), 94.Google Scholar See also Wortman, “Solntsev,” 20-21.

32. The attempt to synthesize classicism with the vernacular tradition in various media was Olenin's lifelong aspiration. See Wortman, “Solntsev,” 21.

33. See Makarevich, Gleb V. and Komech, Aleksei I., Pamiatniki arkhitektury Moskvy: lugo-vostochnaia i iuzhnaia chasti territorii mezhdu Sadovym kol'tsom i granitsami goroda XVIII veka (Moscow, 2000), 136-50.Google Scholar

34. Stroganov, Sergei G. et al., Drevnosti rossiiskogo gosudarstva, vol. 6 (Moscow, 1853).Google Scholar Plate 39 depicts a belfry, but crucially it is represented in a display featuring at the same time a cross, a chair, a candlestick, and a lock—that is, as a material artifact, rather than a work of architecture.

35. Olenin instructed the architect N. E. Efimov to conduct a careful examination of the foundations, the techniques, and the materials used and to study extant parts of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev to propose a reconstruction based on analogical principles. His instructions reveal an interesting terminological fluctuation, as he glosses the term vozobnovit’ (to renew) with the French restaurer (to restore). Efimov's project was submitted to the tsar in 1827 but was rejected. See Shchenkov, ed., Pamiatniki arkhitektury, 78-82.

36. Shchenkov, ed., Pamiatniki arkhitektury, 45.

37. Quoted ibid., 112.

38. Izmailov, Puteshetvie, 38-41.

39. Dolgorukov, Ivan M., Slavny bubny za gorami Hi puteshestvie moe koe-kuda 1810 goda (Moscow, 1870).Google Scholar

40. Aleksei Levshin, Pis'mo iz Malorossii (Khar'kov, 1816), 128.

41. For a discussion of the “landscape of melancholy” and the vanitas motive, see Watanabe-O'Kelly, Helen, Melancholie und the melancholische Landschafl: Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte des UJahrhunderts (Bern, 1978), 73–99.Google Scholar

42. Kazamin, N. M., “Puteshestvie vokrug Moskvy,” Vestnik Evropy 7, no. 4 (1803): 282.Google Scholar

43. Batiushkov, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, 1:93-99.

44. Gavriil R. Derzhavin, Sochineniia (St. Petersburg, 2002), 412.

45. Other writers who expressed this sense of vacuity include Petr Chaadaev, who bemoaned in 1829 that in Russia there is “not even a home; nothing which attracts or awakens our endearment or affection, nothing lasting, nothing enduring,” and Nikolai Gogol', who concluded in his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (published 1847) that “our spaces remain just as empty, sorrowful, and unpopulated, everything around us is just as homeless and unfriendly, as if we still had no home, no roof of our own, but stopped homeless somewhere on a public road.” Petr Chaadaev, The Major Works of Peter Chaadaev, trans. Raymond T. McNally (Notre Dame, 1969), 28, and Nikolai Gogol, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, trans. Jesse Zeldin (Nashville, 1969), 100. Translation amended by me.

46. My reading here resonates with Giorgio Agamben's interpretation of Sigmund Freud's famous 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Collected Papers (London, 1950), 4:152-70. Focusing on Freud's admission that in melancholy it is not always clear what particular loss set off the melancholic withdrawal, Agamben contends that “melancholy would be not so much the regressive reaction to the loss of the love object as the imaginative capacity to make an unobtainable object appear as if lost.” In so doing, “the strategy of melancholy opens up a space for the existence of the unreal.” Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis, 1993), 20.

47. See Klibansky, Raymond, Panofsky, Erwin, and Saxl, Fritz, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London, 1964), 228-74.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., 242.

49. On melancholy themes in baroque culture, see Watanabe-O'Kelly, Melancholie, 75-76. For the evolution of this idea in the eighteenth century, see Schings, Hans-Jürgen, Melancholie und Aufklärung: Melancholiker und ihre Kritiker in Erfahrungsseeknkunde und Literaturdes 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. Karamzin was by far not the only melancholic in Russian literature and history. His Masonic friend Aleksei Kutuzov had succumbed to the black bile before, while Vasilii Zhukovskii, Gogol', and others explored its creative depths thereafter. See H'ia Vinitskii, Utekhi melankholii: Uchenye zapiski Moskovskogo kul'turologicheskogo litseia, n. 1310, Seriia: Filologiia, vyp. 2 (Moscow, 1997), 107-289. For a specific discussion of the “landscape” of melancholy in Zhukovskii's poetry, which sets off a dialectic of self-loss and self-invention akin to what we saw in Karamzin, see Schönle, Andreas, “Prostranstvo melankholii u Zhukovskogo,” Etkindovskie chteniia, vol. 1 (2003): 173-85.Google Scholar By the beginning of the twentieth century and especially in the period between the two revolutions, Russian melancholy had become a widespread social mood and significant historical force. See Steinberg, Mark D., Petersburg Fin de Siècle (New Haven, 2011), 234-67Google Scholar, and Steinberg, Mark D., “Melancholy and Modernity: Emotions and Social Life in Russia between the Revolutions,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 813-41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. Lotman, Iu. M., “Kolumb russkoi istorii,” Karamzin (St. Petersburg, 1997), 574-75.Google Scholar

52. See Fritzsche, Peter, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 92–130.Google Scholar

53. Karamzin, Istoriia, 1:20.

54. Passek, Vadim V., Putevye zapiski Vadima (Moscow, 1834), 26.Google Scholar

55. First-generation Slavophiles, who were generally not overly concerned about preservation, considered that Russian medieval churches had been built by “the life of the people in all its entirety.” A. S. Khomiakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1914), 3:94. Quoted by Kirichenko, Russkii stil', 89.

56. Passek, Putevye zapiski, 29-30.

57. Ibid., 33.

58. Ibid., 22-23.

59. Ibid., 35.

60. Ibid., 39.

61. Shchenkov, ed., Pamiatniki arkhitektury, 10.

62. Passek, Vladimir, “Kievskie zlatye vrata,” in Ocherki Rossii (Moscow, 1840), 2:140-41.Google Scholar

63. Hall, Stuart, “Whose Heritage? Un-Settling ‘The Heritage,’ Re-Imagining the Post-Nation,” in Fairclough, Graham J., Harrison, Rodney, Jameson, John H. Jr., and Schofield, John, eds., The Heritage Reader (London, 2008), 221.Google Scholar

64. Passek, “Kievskie zlatye vrata,” 146-47.

65. In her article on the representation of the past in Romantic historical novels, Irina Reyfman points out that writers were more concerned to overwhelm their readers with bright pictures than to convey an authentic understanding of history. Unwittingly they created an “exotic and alien” vision of the past for their readers. Irina Reyfman, “The Material World of Kievan Rus’ as Depicted in the Historical Novels of the Nicholaevan Era,” in Whittaker, ed., Visualizing Russia, 120.

66. A. N. Murav'ev, Puteshestvie po sviatym mestam russkim v dvukh chastiakh, 4th ed. (1846; reprint, Moscow, 1990), 2:109. Emphasis added.

67. Ibid., 2:107.

68. A. N. Murav'ev, “Razvaliny Korsuni,” Tavrida (St. Petersburg, 2007), 20.

69. Ibid., 25.

70. Ibid., 76.

71. Ibid., 77.

72. On the similarities between Solntsev, Viollet-le-Duc, and Pugin, see Lauren M. O'Connell, “Viollet-le-Duc and Solntsev: Publishing Patrimony in France and Russia,” and Robert Wright, J., “Echoes of Solntsev: Pugin and the Gothic Revival in England,” both in Whittaker, , ed., Visualizing Russia, 145-64 and 165-74.Google Scholar

73. Wortman, “Solntsev,” 40.

74. M. N. Zagoskin, Roslavlev, ili russkie v 1812 godu (Moscow, 1980), 198. For a more extensive discussion of this novel and its treatment of ruins, see Schönle, Architecture of Oblivion, 56-62.

75. Karamzin, N. M., “Istoricheskie vospominaniia i zamechaniia na puti k Troitse,” Vestnik Evropy, 5 no. 15 (1802): 218.Google Scholar

76. Maikov, A. N., “Progulka po Rimu s moimi znakomymi” (1848), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1914), 4:189-215.Google Scholar

77. Ibid., 4:205.

78. Quoted by Wortman, “Solntsev,” 23, from Solntsev, “Moia zhizn',” 16:290.

79. For the UNESCO Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites, see http://www.icomos.org/charters/venice_e.pdf (last accessed 21 September 2012). For an analysis of the recent destruction in Moscow, see Bronovitskaia, Anna, Cecil, Clementine, and Harris, Edmund, eds., Moscow Heritage at Crisis Point, vol. 2 (Moscow, 2009).Google Scholar For a discussion of the larger historical parameters of this vandalism, see Schönle, Architecture of Oblivion, 219-30.