Author:
Brumfield William Topics: Culture
01.02.2007
THE MARQUIS DE CUSTINE AND DOSTOEVSKY
If nationalism is a secular religion, it should be noted that a salient aspect
of the revival of medieval styles in nineteenthcentury 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 Jerusalem.[1] 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 Muscovy
’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 a redefining of the role of the church.[2] 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 Elizabeth.[3] 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 retunred from a
study tour of Europe (Italy in particular), the young Rossi submitted a
proposal for the reconstruction of Admitralty 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 national.[5] 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 Architecture.[6] 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
discipline.[9] In architecture the uses of history in formulating a national
sense of identity led to such movements as historicism and eclecticism.[10] 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 principal goals of this book.[11]
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.” (pp172-173)
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 principal
expression of man in his various states of development.
” (p175) Hugo relates the beginnings of textual codes (in letters, hieroglyphs)
to the design of ancient structures.[12] 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].
… (p176)
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.
” (p182)
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.
”(p183) 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 historicist 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.
” (p186) “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
…”(p187)
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 itself.[13] 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 novels.[14]
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
Feodor Dostoevsky, 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 supersedes 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
encyclopaedic, that we cannot concentrate our thoughts on one subject; and
against our will we split all our creations into trifles and charming toys. We
have the marvellous gift of making everything insignificant.
”[15]
Yet Gogol continues with an extreme architectural vision that is dispersed,
encyclopaedic
– 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 sombre and Gothic; something eastern,
burdened under the luxury of ornament; something Egyptian, colossal; and
something Greek, suffused with slender proportions.
” (p57) 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. (p57)
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 Russian
critics and architects including Aleksandr Briullov, the one contemporary
architect whose work Gogol praised. (p61) 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
neoclassicism. Indeed, the Gothic Revival can be considered the first stylistic
development after neoclassicism 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
architecture.
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 culminates 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.
” (p59)
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 artefacts 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 Feodor Solntsev (1801-1892), whose work
played an important role in publicizing early Russian architecture.[16] 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 Aleksei Martynov and Snegirev began to publish their
influential series Russian Antiquity (Russkaia starina), which contained
detailed descriptions of medieval monuments.[17]
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 Feodor Dostoevsky
’s “Petersburg Chronicle” for June 1, 1847. In commenting on the advent of spring to the northern
capital, the fl
âneur (the roving observer that is Dostoevsky’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 Nevsky Prospekt as though at home, as
though they had bought it; and woe to the pedestrian, fl
âneur, 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, and how the city is
being renewed and built? Of course this is an important occupation and indeed
even edifying. Your Peters-burger 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.
” (p24)
The irony here is ambiguous, since Dostoevsky’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 Dostoevsky’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,
Dostoevsky showed little interest in architectural historicism as a means of
reclaiming a sense of Russianness that presumably resided in pre-modern (ie
pre-Petrine) history.
Dostoevsky’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 Dostoevsky presents the
historical approach to architecture through the comments on Russian monuments
contained in La Russie en 1839, by the Marquis de Custine. Although it had been
banned in Russia, the book was nonetheless widely known in intellectual circles
and is the unmistakable source of Dostoevsky
’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 [Dostoevsky
’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.
” (p24)
In Dostoevsky’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]
Dostoevsky 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”), Dostoevsky 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 uniformity.[20]
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 marvellous 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.
” (pp267-68)
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 Dostoevsky
’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 Dostoevsky, sees historical meaning in the stones of Petersburg.
In commenting on the forbidding form of the Mikhailovsky 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.
” (p259) Yet there were, in fact, no vieux monuments in Petersburg: the
Mikhailovsky Castle, for example, was completed less than four decades before
Custine
’s journey.[21] 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, Dostoevsky 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.
Paradoxically, it is Custine, not Dostoevsky, 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 Dostoevsky
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. Dostoevsky realized that Russia
’s existence as a great nation – and therefore its identity, cultural as well as political – depended on Peter’s turn to the West.[22] This may explain the scant “reading” that the Russian writer gave to medieval Russian architecture, picturesque and
stimulating for foreign travellers such as Custine, but of faint relevance
– so it then seemed – to Russia’s destiny.
NOTES
[1] For an analysis of the design and symbolism of the Cathedral of the
Intercession, see William Craft Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 122-29.
[2] An example of this process of secularization within the church itself is
James Cracraft,
“Feofan Prokopovich,” J.G. Garrard, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford, 1973), pp. 75-105.
[4] On the Admiralty Quay project, with Rossi’s statement, see V. Kochedamov, “Proekt naberezhnoi u Admiralteistva Zodchego K. I. Rossi,” Arkhitekturnoe nasledstvo, 4 (1953): 111-14.
[5] For a broader discussion of this process of local revivalism in western
Europe, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), with particular reference to Prys
Morgan,
“From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period,” pp. 43-100. For an example of the growing Russian literature on this topic,
particularly as it pertains to architecture, see E. I. Kirichenko,
Arkhitekturnye teorii XIX veka v Rossii (Moscow, 1986), pp. 37-48.
[6] Aleksei Martynov, “Rech’ ob arkhitekture v Rossii do XVIII stoletiia, govorennaia uchenikom pervogo
klassa Alekseem Martynovym,
” in Otchet Moskovskogo Dvortsovogo Arkhitekturnogo uchilishcha za 1836 i 1837
gody i rechi, govorennye na akte onogo (Moscow, 1838), pp. 1-12.
[7] Khudozhestvennaia gazeta, 1838, 12:393-94. See also E. A. Borisova, Russkaia
arkhitektura vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow, 1978), p. 92.
[8] Khudozhestvennaia gazeta, 1840, 3:17. Although unsigned, the article may
have been written by Nestor Kukolnik, an editor of the paper who frequently
commented on architecture. See A. L. Punin, Arkhitektura Peterburga serediny
XIX veka (Leningrad, 1990), p. 17.
[9] For a theoretical and historical examination of these developments in
nineteenth-century historiography, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The
Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973).
[10] The relation between architecture and the larger context of literary
criticism and scientific positivism in Russia during the nineteenth century is
explored in E. I. Kirichenko,
“Problema natsional’nogo stilia v arkhitekture Rossii 70-kh gg. XIX v.,” Arkhitekturnoe nasledstvo, 25 (1976): 135-37; and idem, “Problemy stilia i zhanra v russkoi arkhitekture vtoroi chetverti XIX v.,” Arkhitektura SSSR, 1983, Nos. 3-4, pp. 112-15. A broader analysis of the
literary aspects of the relation appears in E. A. Borisova,
“Nekotorye osobennosti vospriiatiia gorodskoi sredy i russkaia literatura vtoroi
poloviny XIX v.,
” in G. Iu. Sternin, ed., Tipologiia russkogo realizma vtoroi poloviny XIX veka
(Moscow, 1979), pp. 252-85. In English, see William Craft Brumfield, The
Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (Berkeley, 1991), pp. xix-xxii;
1-46.
[11] Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 8. Page
references for subsequent quotations from this edition are given in
parentheses. English translations are by the author.
[12] A attempt to define a connection between edifice and text, architecture and
verbal language, from antiquity to the present, is John Onians,
“Architecture, Metaphor, and the Mind,” Architectural History, 35(1992): 192-207. Although the article shows no
dependence on Hugo
’s work, it includes a number of examples from ancient cultures similar to those
in the chapter
“Ceci tuera cela.”
[13] On Hugo’s interest in architecture as visual record and potential text, see Philippe
Hamon, Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France,
translated by Katia Sainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire (Berkeley, 1992), pp. 7,
53-55.
[14] Hugo’s reception in Russia is analyzed in M. P. Alekseev, “V. Giugo i ego russkie znakomstva,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 31-32 (19—): 777-915. Dostoevsky wrote the preface for the first complete Russian
translation of Notre Dame in 1862. See Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati
tomakh, vol. 20 (Leningrad, 1980), pp. 272-78.
[15] Gogol’, N. V. “Ob arkhitekture nyneshnego vremeni,” in Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, vol. 6. (Moscow, 1959), p. 51.
Subsequent references to this source are given in parentheses in the text.
[17] The first volume of Russkaia starina appeared in 1848, the last (No. 6)
appeared in 1860. Thereafter Martynov and Snegirev continued to collaborate on
similar publications until the end of the 1880s. See Slavina, Issledovateli, p.
70.
[18] Peterburgskaia letopis’,” in F. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, vol. 18
(Leningrad, 1978), p. 23. Subsequent references to this source are given in
parentheses in the text.
[19] Dostoevsky probably refers to the opening passage of Custine’s eighth letter, in which he presents his initial impressions of Petersburg.
Similar views are presented in a description of the palaces and buildings of
the central squares in the eleventh letter. Dostoevsky would likely have known
the second,
“corrected and expanded” edition of Custine’s work, which appeared in 1843 and was rapidly smuggled into Russia. See
Dostoevsky, Polnoe Sobranie, 18:226n24; also P. V. Annenkov, Literaturnye
vospominaniia (Moscow, 1960), pp. 256-57. The reaction of Vissarion Belinskii,
Alexander Herzen, and Dostoevsky to Custine
’s work is analyzed in E. I. Kiiko, “Belinskii i Dostoevsky o knige Kiustina ‘Rossia v 1839’,” G. M. Fridlender, ed., Dostoevsky. Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. 1
(Leningrad, 1974), pp. 189-99.
[20] See Le Marquis de Custine, La Russie en 1839, second edition (Paris, 1843),
1:pp 225-28; pp344-49. Subsequent references to this source are given in
parentheses.