View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Siberian Federal University Digital Repository Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 6 (2015 8) 1026-1036 ~ ~ ~ УДК 303.446.23 From Victor Hugo to Fedor Dostoevskii: 19th-Century Perceptions of Architecture as Historical Text William C. Brumfield* Tulane University New Orleans, Louisiana, USA Received 14.03.2015, received in revised form 22.04.2015, accepted 10.05.2015 The article examines the 19th-century European perception of architecture – and architectural style – as an expression of history and culture that can only be fully explicated through a verbal, literary text. This concept was particularly active in discussions of national identity. Architecture was both reflective on a national culture and at the same time called upon to further reflect and express that culture. On this basis arose critical interpretations of eclectic, historicist architectural styles. The article discusses the origins of this historicist concept in Victor Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris and its elaboration in the work of Nikolai Gogol, Fedor Dostoevsky and the Marquis de Custine. Keywords: architectural stylization, historicism, eclecticism, Carlo Rossi, Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, Nikolai Gogol, Aleksei Martynov, Fedor Dostoevsky, Paris, St. Petersburg, Moscow. Research area: culture studies. If nationalism is a secular religion, it to commemorate Ivan the Terrible’s victory is appropriate that the revival of medieval over the khanate of Kazan (1552), the structure architecture in 19th-century European eclecticism celebrates the coalescence of Muscovy’s role as involved the transposition of stylistic motifs from the defender not only of the Orthodox faith but religious to secular structures. This is especially also of Russia itself. While other Russian churches evident in late 19th-century Russia, whose rarely achieved such connotative density, church masonry architecture before the 18th century architecture (including monasteries) continued consisted almost entirely of churches. to serve until the Petrine era as the repository of Indeed, it can be argued that certain medieval national identity in architecture. monuments served as a defining expression of However, the rapid secularization of Russian Russian secular identity. The most visible example society during the eighteenth century led to is Moscow’s Cathedral of the Intercession on a redefining of the role of the church.2 This the Moat, popularly known as Basil the Blessed transformation was accompanied by an equally and referred to in the 16th and 17th centuries as radical change in the design of the church, whose “Jerusalem”.1 Built as a votive church in 1555-61 form could be altered to suit the latest imperial taste, © Siberian Federal University. All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: [email protected] – 1026 – William C. Brumfield. From Victor Hugo to Fedor Dostoevskii: 19th-Century Perceptions of Architecture as Historical Text from Baroque to neoclassicism. Consequentially, the competing claims for new tectonic and church architecture, like Baroque palaces and decorative forms argued for a greater response neoclassical government buildings, became to function and physical setting, both of which another category of monumental architecture stimulated an eclectic approach based on an subordinate to the state and dependent upon it appeal to the national character and its cultural for support. There were occasional concessions heritage. to national tradition, as in Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s Paradoxically, early students of Russian sublimely beautiful Cathedral of the Resurrection architecture often attributed native building at the Smolny Convent, commissioned in the traditions to various foreign derivations, as 1740s by the Empress Elizabeth.3 Yet the imperial exemplified in the impressionistic generalities court, rather than the church, remained the of a public lecture delivered in 1837 by Aleksei central culture-forming force in an enlightened Martynov (1820-1895), a student at the Moscow autocracy. Court School of Architecture.6 The surmises The equation of state and nation in imperial and inaccuracies of Martynov and others are of Russian architecture culminated in the late less significance, however, than their attempt to neoclassical monuments of Carlo Rossi. In 1805, resurrect a cultural heritage that had for so long having retunred from a study tour of Europe seemed invisible. (Italy in particular), the young Rossi submitted In 1838 the Petersburg newspaper a proposal for the reconstruction of Admitralty Khudozhestvennaia gazeta (Arts gazette) Embankment. The project never materialized complained that Russian academicians were still and Rossi’s drawings disappeared; but his note preoccupied with the monuments of the ancient of explanation contains the following passage: world, to the detriment of an understanding “The dimensions of the project proposed by of Russian architecture and its relation to that me exceed those accepted by the Romans for of other cultures: “It would be desirable if our their structures. Indeed, why should we fear to architects also turned their attention to the be compared with them in magnificence? One monuments of various times and tastes scattered should interpret this word not as an abundance of throughout our provinces.”7 An article published ornament, but rather grandeur of form, nobility in 1840 in the same source proclaimed that “Every of proportion, and solidity. This monument must climate, every people, every age has its special be eternal.”4 Russia’s greatness as a nation is here style, which corresponds to particular needs or affirmed by a comparison to the heart of western, satisfies special goals.”8 For a growing number Roman culture. of intellectuals, the folk, or narod, was the only Rossi was one of the last of Petersburg’s authentic base for a modern national culture. brilliant neoclassicists. As elsewhere in Europe, This is a topic with many ramifications the concept of a dominant architectural system – for Russian and European history. Indeed, it is based on the classical orders – yielded to ideas associated with the transformation of history of local history embodied in architectural style. as an academic discipline.9 In architecture the Instead of universals, Russian intellectuals of the uses of history in formulating a national sense of romantic era, like their counterparts elsewhere identity led to such movements as historicism and in Europe, elevated the local, the specifically eclecticism.10 Yet the post-classical, eclectic age national.5 Although classical models continued to by definition lacked a guiding system of stylistic be revered, particularly in educational curricula, rules. The adaptation of ornamental motifs drawn – 1027 – William C. Brumfield. From Victor Hugo to Fedor Dostoevskii: 19th-Century Perceptions of Architecture as Historical Text from other, often exotic, cultures coexisted with broadly: printing will destroy the transcendant attempts to recreate “national” styles, derived power of architecture. “From the origin of things from a renewed appreciation of medieval culture. until the fifteenth century of the Christian era Perceptions of architectural form became inclusively, architecture was the great book of increasingly linked to literary interpretations of humanity, the principle expression of man in history. his various states of development.” (175) Hugo One of the earliest writers to consider the relates the beginnings of textual codes (in letters, cultural significance of European historicism hieroglyphs) to the design of ancient structures.12 was Victor Hugo, especially in his Notre Dame The most extended of his examples is Jerusalem: de Paris, first published in 1831. His “Note Added The temple of Solomon, for example, to the Definitive Edition (1832)” comments both was not simply the binding of the holy book, on the decline of contemporary architecture and it was the holy book itself. Upon each of its on the need to preserve historic buildings until a concentric precincts the priests could read the worthier architectural era arrives: word translated and manifest before their eyes, While waiting for new monuments, let and they followed its transformations from us conserve the old monuments. If it is sanctuary to sanctuary until they grasped it in possible, let us inspire in the nation a love the last tabernacle under its most concrete form, for the national architecture. This, the which was still architecture: the Ark. Thus the author declares, is one of the principle goals Word was enclosed in an edifice, but its image of this book.11 was upon its covering [enveloppe] . ... (176) Paradoxically, Hugo suggests in the book, With the coming of the Renaissance in the set in the 1480s, that architecture must inevitably fifteenth century, architectural form as the prime lose the preeminence among the arts that it conveyer of a culture’s knowledge of itself (as possessed before the Renaissance. At the end of Hugo presents it) yielded to the word, disseminated the first chapter of Book Five, Hugo’s possessed by a new technology and containing the seeds archdeacon Don Claude speaks of “reading one of revolutionary, destabilizing ideas: “Human after another the marble letters of the alphabet, thought discovered means of perpetuating the granite pages of the book.” Having defined the itself not only more durable and resistant than great architecture