Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia

by Andreas Schönle

Overview

Despite attempts to promote the aesthetics of ruins in Russia—from Catherine the Great's construction of fake ruins in imperial parks to Josef Brodsky's elegiac meditations—ruins have never achieved the status they enjoy in Western Europe. While the Soviet Union was notorious for leveling churches, post-Soviet Russia has only intensified the practice of massive destruction and reconstruction. Architecture of Oblivion examines the role of ruins in the development of Russia's historical consciousness from the eighteenth century to the present. Investigating the meaning and functions ruins have acquired in Russian culture, Schönle looks at ideological reasons for the current disregard for the value of ruins and historical buildings, in particular by political authorities, and reveals how ruins have often become a site of resistance to official ideology and an invitation to map out alternative visions of history and of statehood. An interdisciplinary study of Russia's response to ruins has never been attempted, although the topic of ruins has garnered considerable interest in Western Europe and in the U.S. This original work from a leading authority on the subject will appeal to historians of Russian culture and thought, literature and art scholars, and general readers interested in ruins.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780875806518
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2011
Series:	NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Edition description:	1
Pages:	295
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Andreas Schönle is Professor of Russian at Queen Mary, University of London and author of The Ruler in the Garden.

Table of Contents

Illustration List ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 3

1 Ruins and Modernity in Russian Pre-Romanticism 29

2 Lessons of the Fire of Moscow in 1812 46

3 Aesthetics and Politics in the Romantic Fashion for Ruins 73

4 Between Erasure and Nurture-Ruins and the Modern City in the Depth of Times 106

5 Post-Revolutionary Urban Decay-From the Return of Random Beauty to the Dystopian Loss of Self 132

6 The Ruins of the Blockade of Leningrad and the Aesthetic Struggle for Survival 152

7 Ruin as Transition to Timelessness in Joseph Brodsky's Poetry 183

8 The Ruin as Alternative Reality-Paper Architects and the Vitality of Decay 194

Conclusion 219

Notes 231

Index 273

Editorial Reviews

This is a most important book, tracing the history of an idea so elusive yet so pervasive that only the most nuanced of approaches is capable of sketching its parameters without reducing it to cliché and caricature. Schönle dips deeply into literature and poetry, philosophy and history, architecture, painting, photography, prints, and the urban fabric itself in search of answers to a question of great relevance to all interested in the nature of modern Russia: what is it in Russia's attitude to its past that makes it so indifferent to ruins, so hostile to the preservation of that past's remains? This is intellectual history that is both imaginative and intellectually rigorous, a combination of historical sources and deeply personal aesthetic responses to the events of history.

Wendy Salmond

""This is a most important book, tracing the history of an idea so elusive yet so pervasive that only the most nuanced of approaches is capable of sketching its parameters without reducing it to cliché and caricature. Schönle dips deeply into literature and poetry, philosophy and history, architecture, painting, photography, prints, and the urban fabric itself in search of answers to a question of great relevance to all interested in the nature of modern Russia: what is it in Russia's attitude to its past that makes it so indifferent to ruins, so hostile to the preservation of that past's remains? This is intellectual history that is both imaginative and intellectually rigorous, a combination of historical sources and deeply personal aesthetic responses to the events of history."—Wendy Salmond, Chapman University"

From the Publisher