East is West

The land of onion-domed churches and hirsute priests kowtowing to icons may have seemed exotic to Renaissance Westerners, but in terms of architecture at least, Russia cut its window through to Europe long before the reign of Peter the Great. Indeed the Petrine myth of transformation in the 18th century obscures a long historical process that led to the famous watershed in Russian culture.

The architectural historian Dmitry Shvidkovsky believes that, to understand Russia, you have to take a long view of its buildings. Lavishly illustrated with photographs by Yekaterina Shorban, his new book, "Russian Architecture and the West," begins with Kievan Rus, not with Peter the Great. Kiev and Moscow matter more than St. Petersburg. With the adoption of Christianity by Vladimir I in 988, Kievan Rus converted to stone and brick building. Until then, its fortresses, dwellings and pagan shrines had been built exclusively of wood. Masonry architecture is one of Russia's most important traditions but, unlike timber, it was always linked to new ideas that came from abroad.

The medieval period gave expression to these ideas in a variety of ways, from the epic "Igor Tale" to the Novgorod school of church architecture, but the Muscovites still identified their world as "orthodoxy." (There is in fact no word in Russian for Christendom as a society.) The Greek word "orthodoxy," of course, means the "right opinion or doctrine," and, after being coined in Byzantium to combat the Iconoclasts, it was employed to set the Greek East apart from the heresies of the Latin West after the schism of 1054.

Nevertheless there is something iconoclastic about Shvidkovsky's view of Russian architectural history, which is often divided into broad periods of aesthetic evolution without reference to political factors. By contrast, he takes the three major turning points in a thousand years -- the Byzantine conversion, the founding of the Russian Empire after the reforms of Peter the Great, and the October Revolution of 1917 --and shows how the new type of state or ideology led to architectural change.

Yale University Press The Church of the Ascension at Kolomenskoye unites Renaissance and Gothic motifs.

The Latin West cast a long shadow in Russia because the re-conquest of Byzantium was an old dream, even if that New Rome -- known to the Russians as Tsargrad, or "city of Caesar" -- had been superseded. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, the Russian church proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." To underline the succession, Ivan the Great married Zo-- Palaeologus, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, at the Kremlin in 1472. His grandson, Ivan the Terrible, became the first tsar in 1547 at a coronation ceremony based on its Byzantine precursor. "For two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there shall be no fourth," wrote the monk Filofei of Pskov. It was a prediction that stood until the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703.

In tracing the historical path of Russian architecture, Shvidkovsky takes up the questions famously asked in the 12th century by the Russian Primary Chronicle: Who are the Russians, and where and what is Russia? "Does Russian culture belong to Europe?" he writes. "Or to one of the Eastern traditions, its closeness to the Western world being only a matter of geography? Or perhaps, as has often seemed to be the case, Russia is without analogue and has its own destiny, belonging neither to East nor to West?" Then, over more than 400 pages, he builds up a picture of Russia's national identity by unearthing the ways in which Russian architects have answered these questions for themselves, and by examining how they modeled a world.

Each of the seven chapters takes a different style: Romanesque, the Moscow renaissance, post-Byzantine mannerism, imperial baroque, the Russian enlightenment, neoclassicism and the Soviet era. Every chapter is a kind of brilliant sketch; the author draws on an extraordinarily rich and diverse range of material to illustrate his subject. The various stabs at his topic can be read as seven largely distinct essays. Yet each is written with a keen awareness of how its theme interconnects with other styles dealt with elsewhere in the work.

Shvidkovsky also draws attention to those times when Russian architecture, at least in the east of the country, withdrew into itself and became distanced from any foreign influences. Under the Mongol empire, in the 13th and 14th centuries, Rus responded least to architectural movements occurring in the West. Here was a period of difference between the styles of building in Russia and in Western Europe, and one reflected in the almost complete absence of Gothic in Rus, despite the powerful influence, before and after, of Romanesque and the Renaissance. Only in cities such as Novgorod, which was active in Baltic trade, did certain ornamental features of brick Gothic appear in the style of the Hanseatic cities.

Yale University Press The richly carved 12th-century Cathedral of St. Dmitry in Vladimir challenged Byzantine traditions.

Talk of the Renaissance is unusual in Russian architectural history. Many scholars argue that, in contrast not only to the West but also to Poland, Hungary and the Czech-Slovak republics, the Muscovites simply missed out. Yet, as Shvidkovsky makes beautifully clear, the influence of the Italian Renaissance on Russian architecture was felt from the moment at the end of the 15th century when a group of Lombard craftsmen arrived in Moscow. Around 1486, Pietro Antonio Solari and two other Italian masters known in Rus as Marco and Onton Fryazin were given the task of constructing new walls and towers for the Kremlin.

Emigr? architects and gardeners transformed Russia during the 18th century. One wishes that Shvidkovsky had been able to set this crucial moment in the history of Russian architecture in a wider context, but then he has already done so in an earlier book, "The Empress and the Architect," about Catherine the Great and patronage at the court in St. Petersburg. From the year of that city's foundation, the architectural myth of Peter I creating "paradise" from the void was set against predictions of the imminent demise of the whole diabolical enterprise. In this countermythology, the "northern Eden" was a gloomy artificial place built on corpses, a phantom city haunted by ghosts seeking revenge for the victims of the tsar's folly.

Both myths feature in Shvidkovsky's account of Russian neo-Gothic architecture, a strange hybrid style which passed through many transformations after its English pattern-book origins. Russian architects such as Vasily Bazhenov or Matvei Kazakov tried to make it nationalistic. But its sources were often obvious, as in Adam Menelaws' Arsenal at Tsarskoye Selo, which was derived from the Belvedere in Windsor Great Park.

The Soviet Revolution transformed architecture with its mixture of 19th-century utopian ideas (imported form the West) about the living environment and the radicalism of the Russian avant-garde. Inevitably the figure and personality of Lenin bulks monumentally large. Everything created was the direct result of a decision taken by leadership.

The Moskva Hotel, built just before World War II on Okhotny Ryad, is a case in point. The architects Aleksei Shchusev, Leonid Savelyev and Osvald Stapran came up with a design for a hotel the size of a block. The lower stories unravel spectacularly upward but the wings of the hotel follow two completely different designs. One explanation of this oddity is that Shchusev produced a single drawing with two variations for the side wings, divided by a thin pencil line. For whatever reason, Stalin signed right across the middle of the drawing, and no one dared build anything other than the authorized version.

Hugh Barnes' "The Stolen Prince," the story of Alexander Pushkin's African great-grandfather, was published last year.