Preface
Russian architecture from the Great Reforms of the 1860s to the 1917 revolution constitutes a prolific episode in a tradition marked by sudden radical shifts in style. During this period Russian society experienced intense, if uneven, change that included among its several ramifications innovative developments in technology, engineering, and the art of building. Yet the period lacks the dominant architectural style that distinguished, for example, the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, when structure and ornamentation revealed the very spirit of an age.
The sixteenth and eighteenth centuries are not randomly chosen as exemplary periods, for it is precisely the idiosyncratic forms of sixteenth-century architecture, developed in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, and the post-Petrine classicism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that provided models for an architectural profession in search of a "unifying idea" at the end of the nineteenth century. Although the Russians developed construction methods to meet the needs of rapid urban expansion, Russian architecture, according to its many critics, produced only a formless, chaotic mixture of styles to conceal the monotonous designs of apartment blocks and commercial buildings.
By the turn of the century, however, architecture demonstrated a resurgent confidence, evident in the work of the protean "style moderne," or "new style." The style moderne, like much else in Russian culture of the period, developed from a mixture of tradition and innovation. In its very contradictions, it reflected the cultural disjuncture created by rapid change within the anachronistic social system of late imperial Russia. Although these developments paralleled those elsewhere in Europe during the industrial age, modernization (or "Westernization") in Russia operated with a force intensified by the country's material backwardness and—more important—by a perception of psychological and social differences between Russian culture and that of Western Europe. Even as Russia sought to assimilate the progressive features of a more highly developed technological society, the country both observed and reacted against the new age in Europe; attitudes included suspicion on the part of an officialdom that wished to contain European influence within narrow, technical boundaries and distrust of European spiritual values by certain segments of the Russian intelligentsia.
Yet for all its contradictory manifestations, the Russian reaction to modern European culture led to an extraordinary period of creativity represented by the work of Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, Turgenev, Repin, Mussorgskii, Rimskii-Korsakov, and other artists. Russian literature, music (including opera), and the visual arts rapidly passed beyond imitating and adapting Western forms and began to modify or even reject the conventions of European art. Challenged by the Western example, Russians redefined genre and method to convey what Dostoevskii called a "new word"—a refractory concept that included not simply a peculiar Russian perspective on Western civilization but also an affirmation of Russia's unique contribution to the development of a modern consciousness.
The tension between Russia's search for a national identity and its profound debt to Europe that created a productive environment in literature led also to a narrative emphasis in the other arts. In late nineteenth-century Russian paintings descriptive detail often contained a strong component of social criticism or historical commentary. Similarly, architecture created a text, in the form of a two-dimensional facade, to convey aesthetic criteria as well as to comment on the history and
values of past cultures—most particularly Russia's own. Despite frequent calls for rationalism in design and construction—a logical relation between material, structure, and ornamentation—the structure of major buildings in the late nineteenth century was usually obscured beneath a welter of pseudo-historical ornamental motifs that presumably expressed the national identity in architecture.
The Soviet scholar Elena Borisova interprets the Russian ornamental facade as an "encoded text," in which each decorative motif is a "word" in an "allegorical text." One need not equate text and image so rigorously in order to accept Russian architecture's subordination to textual interpretation during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Indeed, critical articles and project descriptions in architectural journals applied the textual approach by exhorting architects to incorporate in their work elements of the artistic heritage of the Russian people. Furthermore, public—and published— architectural criticism itself testifies not only to the status of architecture as an art form subject to analysis and interpretation, but also to the architectural profession's uncertainty about the meaning of style after the decline of neoclassicism.
Architecture thus had the worst of both worlds: stylistic features depended on expectations derived from a different, verbal, medium, and technical innovations were dismissed or concealed as irrelevant to creative expression. In fact there was no consensus as to what architecture should express. The buildings that received the most attention in the historicist Russian Revival style were theaters, museums, city government buildings, and churches—all of which had obvious uses for decorative references to the national past. Moreover, in Moscow the mercantile emporiums in the historicist style (such as the Upper Trading Rows on Red Square) reflected conservative or nationalist sentiments among the city's merchantry. But both eclectic and historicist styles were used most commonly in apartment buildings whose decorative stucco work conveyed only a sense of fashion and luxury in service to property owners and their tenants.
Architecture's confused loyalties did not, however, lead to a paralysis of creativity. The most florid of the eclectic buildings, such as Moscow's Historical Museum or the large apartment blocks of central Petersburg, played a part in making the colorful, exuberant architectural environment that still defines large areas of Moscow and Leningrad. Although excessive ornamentation was generally condemned as tastes and needs changed, tolerant observers—before the revolution and in recent Soviet scholarship—have noted that architectural eclecticism admirably filled the needs and aesthetic expectations of the times. Indeed, Russian modernist architecture in its early phases also showed a decidedly eclectic willingness to adopt decorative mannerisms from contemporary European styles of architecture and design: art nouveau, the Secession, Finnish "romantic nationalism," and others.
Furthermore, late nineteenth-century Russian eclecticism, despite its perceived irrationality, served as a point of departure for the development of new approaches to architectural design. The critical debates over the proper relation between style and function, ornament and structure, gave rise to far-ranging theoretical discussions whose ramifications would extend well into the twentieth century. Although it emphasized new materials and technology, and opposed ornate stuccoed facades, the style moderne in both Moscow and Petersburg was itself roundly criticized for a facile and indiscriminate borrowing of decorative fashions labeled decadent by conservative critics and superficial by representatives of the avant-garde. The Soviet Constructivist theoretician Moisei Ginzburg attacked all prerevolutionary architecture—that of the style moderne as well as the neoclassical revival—as idle inventions, with no firm sense of purpose or ideological base. From his point of view, prerevolutionary Russian modernism had squandered technological progress on an undirected aestheticism enthusiastic about decorative effects but unable to develop a concept of design for the new urban environment.
There is considerable justification for Ginzburg's view, quite apart from partisan politics. Isolated projects for suburban communities and garden cities, as well as designs for charitable institutions and hospitals, did little to alleviate the crushing needs of the poor in the major cities. In the absence of governmental funding for social reconstruction and public projects, Russian architects themselves depended on private capital. Moreover, with the attenuated development of Russian capitalism and the relatively small number of its middle-class beneficiaries, prerevolutionary architecture could do little to create the infrastructure for a modern, functional urban environment. Luxurious self-contained apartment houses and large commercial structures often relied on
their own sources of electricity and water and thus existed as enclaves of modernity within cities lacking some of the most basic public services.
Yet Russian architecture during the two decades before 1917 not only fulfilled the historical mission of all period styles but also embodied the aesthetic ideals that placed architecture firmly within the artistic revival of Russia's "Silver Age" and gave the art of building a distinctive voice of its own. In this respect one can speak of the parallels between architecture and the other arts, each one pursuing idealistic views of its relation to reality. Novels such as Andrei Belii's Petersburg and the poems of the Symbolists Konstantin Balmont and Aleksandr Blok portrayed a modern urban landscape of madness and alienation; but the new architecture complemented, instead of being defined by, literary Symbolism—which had itself rejected the linear narrative and socio-historical concerns of nineteenth-century realism.
The modern architectural style at its most distinctive combined a more versatile use of space (in both commercial and housing design) with an emphasis on structural decoration that had little to do with a historical program. Even the use of historical motifs in the "neo-Russian" variant of the style moderne appeared in a detached, "aestheticized," context. The aesthetic properties of building materials themselves were emphasized, and the crafts revival of the late nineteenth century led to such decorative devices as ceramic panels and elaborate mosaic work. Thus the new style paradoxically combined decorative aestheticism with modern technology and construction materials such as plate glass and ferroconcrete.
Although this paradox led some to criticize the style moderne as yet another architectural deception, the polychromatic fantasies and sculptured forms of the new architecture convey an extraordinary insight into the heightened emotionalism of Russian—and European—culture at the beginning of this century. Moscow's laroslavskii Station, rebuilt by Fedor Shekhtel in 1902 and still largely preserved on the exterior, and Shekhtel's Riabushinskii house are a part of that agitated spirit so perceptively described in the poetry of Blok and in Osip Mandelshtam's autobiography, The Noise of Time .
Indeed, the era seemed to express itself in a frenzy of sound, as in the music of Scriabin with its ecstatic and Promethean themes. No less appropriate as an expression of Zeitgeist are Schoenberg's post-Romantic compositions, performed in Petersburg with considerable success in concerts organized by the brilliant pianist Aleksandr Ziloti (the Petersburg premiere of Pelleas and Melisande , for example, occurred in December 1911). For many listeners, however, this music—and that of Stravinskii—would have testified to the collapse of aesthetics; and by the same token architectural critics during the decade before 1917 frequently described the proliferation of modern building styles as a cacophony.
Thus the period of this study ends as it began, in search of a monistic idea that would resolve social issues in architecture as well as questions of artistic identity. The all-encompassing idea proved elusive; but in the course of endless critical discussions architects in Moscow and Petersburg demonstrated a receptivity to new currents from the West and an ability to refashion them ingeniously to suit local conditions as well as the aesthetic ideals of architect and patron. Although the results were often picturesque or even trivial—if not positively grotesque—the stylistic revival at the beginning of the century nonetheless bequeathed heroic vitality and individualism to an age dominated by the monotony of social engineering.
A study of the evolution of Russian architecture and the origins of modernism inevitably requires certain choices—some of them difficult—of material. The stylistic movements discussed in the following chapters were represented in most sizable cities in the European part of the Russian empire, and major cities like Kiev, Nizhni Novgorod, and Kazan showed the pervasive local influence of these styles. Nonetheless, this study concentrates on Petersburg and Moscow as the centers of modern architectural development in Russia. Russian architects began their professionalization in these cities, where, moreover, the most varied and distinctive manifestations of both eclecticism and the Russian Revival (or pseudo-Russian) style occurred.
The critical discussions of historicism and eclecticism are the subject of chapter 1; these led at the turn of the century to a new stylistic era, whose pretensions were welcomed or reviled as a harbinger of social change. The cultural and architectural journals surveyed in chapter 2 not only publicized the work of Western architects such as Olbrich, Behrens, Guimard, and Mackintosh but also contributed to the development of Russian thought on the relation between architecture and society.
The polemics and ideas on the new architectural aesthetic often bore scant relation to the dynamics of construction in the modern style. As the material on Moscow in chapter 3 demonstrates, building projects during the period under study were usually funded by private capital, and the construction of apartment and commercial buildings often involved a contradictory relation between aesthetic idealism and financial gain. Yet the variety of innovative architectural forms testifies to the creative vigor that grew out of the relation between private patronage and talent in Moscow at the beginning of the century. The benefits of this relation and the accomplishments of the new style (as well as the onset of its decline) are most amply revealed in the career of Shekhtel, examined in chapter 4.
The style moderne in Petersburg differed considerably from that in Moscow, despite similar forms and the aesthetic ideas shared by the architects of the two cities. Chapter 5 traces the new style as it was influenced both by the capital's distinctive pattern of urban development and by the example of the remarkable Finnish school of architecture. Many of Petersburg's influential critics and architects viewed these developments with serious reservations, however, and chapter 6 is devoted to the reaction against modernism, exemplified by the revival of neoclassicism. Moscow had a similar movement, also discussed in these pages, but the ideology and the major impact of the neoclassical revival were very much products of Petersburg.
There is a balance in the course of this book between Moscow, the center of an idiosyncratic new style in architecture, and Petersburg, which ultimately rejected the style moderne through a renewal of Palladian or Empire forms ranging from the delicate and refined to the pompous and grandiose. Whatever the dominant, "unifying," idea, there is an undeniable pathos in the persistent attempts to create an architecture for a new society (based on capitalist or vague socialist principles) while the old was still in the throes of disintegration and the possibilities of revolutionary transformation were only dimly perceived. In this context the ideas, as well as the buildings, of Russian architects at the beginning of the century acquire a resonance that extends beyond the peculiarities of a local (and long-neglected) style to the central issues of architecture in our time.