OF THE MANY styles encompassed by nineteenth-century Russian architecture, the one that was the most pervasive and enduring was classicism. Rooted in the romantic classical climate that conditioned European art at the end of the eighteenth century, Russian classicism faded before 1850 only to reappear briefly at the beginning of the present century and in rather grotesque forms during the late Stalin era.

The artifacts of classicism, much in evidence throughout the Soviet Union, are presently in varying stages of deterioration or restoration. While the buildings of central Leningrad and Moscow are continually spruced up in varied pastels, similar buildings in provincial cities are often ignored. Even classical Moscow suffered irreparable damage recently when an extension of the Kalinin Prospekt cut through the old classical city beyond the Arbat. All this notwithstanding, much remains of a classical Russia planned and built some two centuries ago.

ROMANTIC CLASSICISM

Romantic classicism came to fruition in a century that proved a watershed for architectural styles. The dissolution of the baroque, hastened by French rococo and English Palladian intrusions, did not result inevitably in romantic classicism. Rather than build upon a Renaissance-baroque continuum, romantic classicism claimed an authenticity based on historical and archeological research. It recaptured sublimity, elevation, dignity, and honor, where Renaissance classicism had accentuated beauty. Besides having an affinity for Roman and Greek models, romantic classical architects were attracted to Egyptian motifs. Reduced to pure intellect, basic geometric forms, and smooth surfaces, their edifices voided that organic articulation and ornament so commonplace with the baroque.

Basic to understanding romantic classical architecture was the constancy of romanticism. Initially, it was joined with classicism in a Roman revival, followed in the early 1800s by a Greek, and then in the 1830s by a more or less Roman one again. By 1840, when this last classical phase had spent itself, romanticism entered a medieval, or Gothic, revival. As if to cement this bond between the classic and Gothic, many practicing architects created in both styles.

If, indeed, the new classicism was both romantic and authentically antique, what was its genesis in the eighteenth century? Fiske Kimball regarded the early romanticism as that mode of feeling which contrasted with Enlightened reason and perceived the early eighteenth-century English garden as a logical forerunner of romantic classicism.¹ As designed by such “artistic amateurs” as Vanburgh and the Earl of Burlington, the jar din anglais had departed from the strict formality of that in France, though Grecian temples and Gothic ruins linked it to both the classic and the romantic. The classical temple appeared in it even before the excavations at Herculaneum in 1738 and Pompeii in 1748, events that greatly accelerated the acceptance and validity of romantic classicism.

Acceptance was also spurred by some remarkable publicists and architects. Johann Joachim Winkelmann (1717-68) proclaimed ecstatically the unsurpassed virtues of Greece and Greek art, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) etched romanticized Roman ruins, which inspired young architects to visit Italy. In France Louis-Etienne Boullée and Claude-Nicholas Ledoux, architects of the style Louis XVI, turned to forms that “captivate by simplicity, regularity, and reiteration.”² Although Boullée built classical monuments ranging from public edifices to triumphal arches, Ledoux achieved the wider reputation as an architect. Avoiding both the fanciful and the imitative in his severe style, Ledoux worked in a world of stark spheres, cubes, and pyramids. His new classic, admirably utilitarian, served the current need for banks, hospitals, barracks, stock exchanges, opera houses, and even factories. While neither Boullée nor Ledoux built extensively in Western Europe, their ideas were carried to Russia by an emigre architect, Thomas de Thomon (fig. 9.1), who subsequently designed and built the Petersburg Bourse.

Although in France the style Louis XVI surrendered to increased surface ornament during the Bonaparte era, the severe Greek mode prevailed elsewhere. In Germany Karl Langhans—whose Brandenburg Gate drew inspiration from the Propylaea—Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and Leo von Klentze were uncompromising Hellenists. In England this tradition was fostered by John Soane, John Nash, and Robert Smirke, while Benjamin Latrobe, who designed in 1799 an Ionic temple to house the Bank of Pennsylvania, was America’s principal practitioner in the Greek Revival Style. When Nicholas Biddle determined after a trip to Greece that “a chaste imitation of Grecian architecture” would be most appropriate for his new Bank of the United States, he obtained designs from Latrobe and William Strickland, both of whom had used the Parthenon as their model. After Europeans and Americans had tired of Greek Revival, they returned to an ornate and eclectic classicism, but by the 1830s and 1840s even eclectic classicism gave way to the Gothic.

CLASSICISM IN TOWN PLANNING

Just as European architecture entered the world of classicism, so indeed were Europe’s cities made to conform to the tenets of order and reason. Architects harkened to Vitrivius, who had much to say about the interaction of building and planning. His ideas, when joined with those of Alberti, particularly suited the tenor of both the baroque and romantic classicism. Among the precepts that most governed town planning since the sixteenth century was the straight line. Acquiring virtually a mystique, it was pronounced by Pierre Lavedan to be “the very expression of human reason and will.”³ Although present in the medieval town, the unwavering line received no theoretical affirmation until the sixteenth century, when acceptance came both in the dominance of the axis and in the new taste for gridiron design. The line as an axis both organized the environment and dominated the square, which served as an extension of the longitudinal axis. Uniform in both their façade elements and their unbroken horizontal roof-line, edifices along the radial streets accentuated this linear precision.

The public square, exemplary of organized space and essential for a monumental perspective, constituted a second invariable in baroque-classical urban design. The classical planner consciously molded this void rather than permit an indiscriminate building mass to arise. He determined that, irrespective of the plaza’s shape—oval, circular, rectangular, or square—the monument should be flanked symmetrically by important public buildings, uniform in character. Moreover, he reserved space for greenery that linked the monument to the spatial treatment of the plaza. He directed the radial streets, which converged upon the monument, to the open space in the middle of the square rather than to its corners.

A uniformity and harmony in façade elements, so crucial to the perspective, resulted from the third ingredient of classical urban design— the program. In Lavedan’s words, the program was “the obligation imposed on all the houses of a certain part of the town—street, square, district . . . to conform to a general design.”⁴ Besides this articulation of linear thoroughfares and squares, classical planners inserted bridges and stone embankments, straightened river beds, paved canals, and gridiron blocks into their programs. Landscaping followed the same urban formula of major and minor axes, which created beds of parterres and terminated at fountains or other monuments. In this instance, hedges or trees clipped to precision substituted for façade uniformity.

Regulated town design in baroque and classical Europe conveyed an unmistakable political message: order, power, absolutism, and secularism. The great palace in the central square stood for power and pageantry. Bureaucratic and military edifices, cloaked in columns and pediments, also occupied imposing sites in the new city, while ecclesiastical ones, by contrast, lost their primacy. This linear development of the city was more than symbolic: besides facilitating traffic flow, wide boulevards and thoroughfares inhibited street revolutionaries and otherwise impeded social intercourse. The new city ceased being the historic haven of the people that its medieval predecessor had been.

CLASSICISM AND RUSSIA

The term “romantic classicism” does not appear in the vocabulary of Russian architecture; rather the common designation is “Russian classicism.” Classicism, with its order, geometric urban design, and accent on masonry construction, was antithetical to old Russian building modes, and probably, for these very reasons, baroque classicism won approval from Peter the Great in his building of St. Petersburg, Russia’s Western “window.”

St. Petersburg, despite its baroque origins and subsequent rococo embellishment by Rastrelli, became by the early nineteenth century the fulfillment of classicism in Russia. Catherine II and Alexander I, in particular, built lavishly there. Catherine’s mark was left especially by her architects Giacomo Quarenghi, Ivan Starov, and Vallin de la Mothe, whose Academy of Fine Arts on the Neva (1764-88) was perhaps the initial stimulus to classicism in Petersburg. Alexander I, whose reign coincided with “Empire classicism,” inspired an ambitious undertaking that completed Winter Palace Square, the Nevsky Prospekt, and its related architectural ensembles.

Nor did classicism confine itself to the new capital on the Neva. Both Catherine II and Alexander I perceived themselves as builders of cities. Catherine’s classical Moscow, the creation of architects like Vasilii Bazhenov and Matvei Kazakov, became a “nest” for the emancipated nobility. Even the conflagration of 1812 struck a positive note: it offered Muscovites an opportunity to build a city to conform to Bazhenov’s and Kazakov’s ideal. It fell to Osip Bove, the Giliardis, father and son, and Afanasii Grigor’ev to continue the tradition of Catherine’s masters and make Moscow, like Petersburg, Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, an exemplar of romantic classicism.

That Catherine, whose interests were invariably far-ranging, dallied with city-building is often overlooked.⁵ In the second year of her reign she had to cope with the destruction of Tver (Kalinin) by fire (fig. 9.2). Her decision to reconstruct it along classical lines spurred her to similar undertakings in Tula, Kolomna, Kostroma, Kaluga, Iaroslavl, and Viatka. Encouraged by Voltaire, she dreamed of civilizing New Russia and the Ukraine. In new Ekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk) on the Dnieper, she envisioned a magnificent center of culture and commerce. On the northern shore of the Black Sea, where ancient Greek cities had once stood, she planted the new classical ones of Azov, Taganrog, Nikolaev, Odessa, and Sevastopol.

Catherine spurred both planning and building through a decree of 1775 intended to improve provincial administration. It directed her governors “to establish towns either where they already existed or in new places,” and divided the realm into fifty provinces, each of which consisted of a maximum of twelve districts.⁶ Besides “provincial” cities, 493 were designated “district” ones, and 86 were placed under the supervision of the state. Settlements with hardly more than 100 dwellings were often labeled cities. Such instant urbanization stimulated planning and building as nothing else could.

Not content to have decreed the presence of new towns, Catherine II imposed on them her own preference in style and design. In so doing, she resorted to her favorite pastime of appointing commissions. For example, in 1768 she charged the Commission for the Building of St. Petersburg and Moscow (Komissia dlia stroeniia stolichnykh gorodov Sankt-Peterburga i Moskvy), formed six years earlier, to undertake planning throughout Russia; by the end of the century it had completed more than 400 city plans. New town design usually conformed to one of, or some combination of, four types: radial-concentric, fan-shaped, rectangular, and diagonal. Because architects were ever cognizant of fire and hygienic problems, they conceived cities consisting of a center and suburbs with regulated streets and alleys, administrative and commercial squares, blocks, and plots. They designated certain squares for wooden construction, others for masonry. “Obraztsovye” or standardized, façade design assured a programmed classical city and at the same time reduced construction costs.

In Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, central plazas and the radials leading into them were the essence of the new design. Such grand monuments as a kremlin, cathedral (sobor), or palace terminated a radial thoroughfare in a central square. The radial, like the square, conveyed a new sense of space. Whereas old Muscovy’s wooden cities, silhouetted by tent spires and bulbous domes, were essentially vertical, the new classical towns, conforming to a required 2:1 or even a 4:1 street width-façade height ratio, projected a horizontal image. Masonry estate houses of the affluent usually occupied those streets leading into the administrative plazas. Separated from one another by fences and gates, these edifices achieved the effect of a continuous façade, which helped order the streets and plazas.

Catherine’s great city-building enterprises, although sometimes majestic, were frequently artificial. Instead of providing an environment for commerce, her “cities” most frequently mirrored aristocratic affluence or served as administrative centers for recently established provincial governments. Under such circumstances, planners often concentrated more on the needs of an aristocracy promenading than on vehicular traffic and envisioned squares for military reviews rather than for commerce. Nor is it a fiction that the classical façades of a regulated street often obscured the misery of old Russia behind it. To a very considerable degree, Catherine’s classicism was a façade, a vast “Potemkin village.”

Upon Catherine’s death in 1796 her son Paul set aside her ambitious city-building plans and abolished the St. Petersburg-Moscow Commission. This latter action greatly reduced the impetus for both developing new plans and implementing those already approved. Only after Paul’s assassination and the succession of Alexander I in 1801 was the pattern reversed and a new era of city building inaugurated.

The greatest urban endeavor in nineteenth-century Russia, perhaps Europe, occurred in St. Petersburg during the first third of the century. Success was counted not so much in specific monuments as in the transformation of the city center. The architectural program consisted in linking, one way or other, such expansive ensembles as Thomon’s Bourse, Zakharov’s Admiralty, Voronikhin’s Kazan Cathedral, Stasov’s Pavlovsky Barracks, and Rossi’s General Staff Building, Senate and Synod, Mikhailovsky Palace, and Aleksandrinsky Theater—to mention only the most important (fig. 9.3). Although Alexandrian Petersburg inherited impressive monuments varying from Trezzini’s Twelve Colleges on Vasilevsky Island and his Sobor of Ss. Peter and Paul, Starov’s splendid Tauride Palace, and Rastrelli’s colossal Winter Palace, the city had not achieved architectural coherence. Giving it that through the medium of classicism was the youthful Alexander’s aspiration.

To fulfill his charge, the Petersburg architects turned to the city’s topography. A natural axis was the Neva River, with the Admiralty, the Winter Palace, Vasilevsky Island, and the Fortress of Ss. Peter and Paul the principal compositional elements. Yet none of these surpassed the other as a focal point. Quarenghi had suggested placing a stock exchange in the eastern sector of Vasilevsky Island, but his design was rejected for something more profound; Thomon’s Bourse (1805-11), on the other hand, appeared to solve this crucial planning problem. Its location between two symmetrical columns on the “point” of Vasilevsky Island both established its centrality in the new urban design and gave a focus to central Petersburg itself. The exchange, placed high on an artificial terrace, was framed with forty-four Doric columns and crowned in its eastern and western porticoes with monumental allegorical sculptures.

Zakharov, Voronikhin, Rossi, and Stasov also took up the task of reorganizing this sector. In his main Admiralty (1806-23), Adrian Zakharov linked the triradial or fan-shaped street configuration in the city’s south end with the Neva ensembles. Voronikhin’s Kazan Cathedral (1801-11) and Rossi’s Mikhailovsky Palace and Square (1818-40) and his extended Aleksandrinsky Theater complex (1828-34) completed the vast Nevsky Prospekt ensemble below the Admiralty. Rossi, meanwhile, had reshaped Winter Palace Square with his General Staff Building and its magnificent arch, essentially tying it to the Nevsky. His Senate and Synod buildings, which framed Petrovskaia (now Decembrist) Square, fulfilled the ensemble west of the Admiralty. Continuation of the Sadovaia (Garden) Street to the Field of Mars, rebuilding the Mikhailovsky Palace area, and construction of Stasov’s Pavlovsky Barracks (1817-20) on the Field of Mars concluded the remaining ensembles in the city center. This grandiose building enterprise placed Petersburg and Russia in the vanguard of the entire neoclassical movement.

Planning a classical Moscow, although obscured by the building in St. Petersburg, proved a notable undertaking nonetheless. In the half century before 1812, planners had tried transforming the city’s traditionally wooden and baroque-rococo appearance to one of classicism. An essay in what might have been was the classical Kremlin project by Vasilii Bazhenov in the 1760s and 1770s. That enterprise did not progress beyond leveling some ancient structures on Kremlin hill before the Empress Catherine lost interest. An especially energetic planning endeavor resulted from the plague of 1771 and two destructive fires in 1773. On September 4, 1773, Catherine II stated her intention to create a masonry “city.” A so-called Separate Department (Otdelennyi) of the Commission for the Building of St. Petersburg and Moscow, noted above, was created to prepare a plan; a Bureau for Masonry Building (Kamennyi prikaz) was established to implement it.

The resulting “Project Plan of 1775” envisaged an enlarged and enriched central Moscow—three squares in the Kitai Gorod as well as an unaltered Red Square. In the Belyi Gorod the plan specified a semicircular chain of squares embracing the Kremlin and Kitai Gorod. Etched in a space cleared of ancient defenses and congested wooden buildings, these squares, originating and terminating with the Moscow River, were intended to reduce the fire hazard and beautify the “city.” The planners also intended to regulate the Neglinnaia from where it entered the Zemlianoi Gorod in the north to its confluence with the Moscow River beneath the Kremlin.

In addition, the planners called for a Boulevard Ring—lined with plantings and with plazas where the radial highways had pierced the old city gates—on the site of Belyi Gorod ramparts. While the ring and its squares were conceived for administrative and residential purposes, two commercial squares for the grain market were projected in Zamoskvorech’e, south of the Moscow River. The plan specified that these have necessary commercial stalls, granaries, and plantings as well as a good port and harbor.

Flooding of the Moscow River was a recurring problem. To facilitate drainage of the river’s right bank, opposite the Kremlin and Foundling Home, the 1775 plan allowed for a system of drainage canals. Projected from the Great Stone Bridge to the Krymsky Ford, it was to have been separated from the main channel of the Moscow River by two islands. As with the Neglinnaia, the planners contemplated ordering the Moscow River, reinforcing its embankments with stone, and leveling the banks alongside the newly planted thoroughfares (fig. 9.4).

The four decades from 1775 until the great fire of 1812 were years of revision, with some implementation but much inaction. The principal architect in Moscow during these years was Matvei Feodorovich Kazakov, Bazhenov’s successor in the Kremlin Department. Despite some notable accomplishments, Kazakov and his colleagues did not radically alter the city’s general appearance. It remained for the fire of 1812 to do so and, by so doing, to resurrect the 1775 plan.

That conflagration demolished the Kitai Gorod and the Belyi Gorod west of the Kremlin from the Neglinnaia River to the Boulevard Ring. Only parts of the far northern and northeastern sections remained intact; in the south Zamoskvorech’e lay devastated. Even substantial parts of the city beyond the Zemlianoi Gorod burned. Never in the city’s long history of fires had any been so destructive.

A NEW PLAN FOR MOSCOW AFTER 1812

The architect charged with restoration of Moscow was a Scotsman named William Hastie. Hastie had arrived in Russia in 1784 and worked in the Crimea, Ekaterinoslav, St. Petersburg, and Tsarskoe Selo before his appointment in 1811 to coordinate planning for all Russian cities.⁷ Despite his other responsibilities, Hastie assumed personal direction for Moscow’s renovation. The plan that he completed by mid-July 1813 proved impractical and was ultimately set aside by the Commission for Building (Komissiia dlia stroeniia v Moskve). It did, however, precipitate a lengthy critique from the commission. Moving from this critique the commission finally submitted its own general plan on January 14, 1815. Altered several times before receiving approval on December 19, 1817, the Project Plan of the Capital City of Moscow of 1817 served as the basis for restoring and renovating the city.⁸

The conflagration of 1812, more than any calamity in Moscow’s torturous history, erased the old city. Although timber dwellings quickly reappeared, masonry—new and restored—greatly multiplied. Hastie’s plan and the Plan of 1817, both markedly influenced by the design of 1775, attested to the continuity of classical planning in Moscow for over a half century. The elimination of historic Moscow landmarks and the unfolding of a new urban design allowed for a flowering of new architecture. Classical Moscow, to the extent that it was to be, rose from the ashes of 1812.

RUSSIAN CLASSICISM IN ARCHITECTURE

The classical mode became the vehicle for buildings that identified with both old and new Russia.⁹ Such traditional structures as monasteries, cathedrals, belfries, churches, chapels, and clerics’ residences suddenly took on a “modern” look. The adoption of classicism for administrative and government buildings and courts, on the other hand, testified to the expansion of civil bureaucracy. In the same vein, guard houses, officers’ meeting houses, barracks, riding schools, arsenals, and warehouses reflected the current military emphasis. The accelerated construction of classical prisons, schools, theaters, post stations and turnpikes, fire stations, hospitals, bourses, almshouses, hotels, city halls, consistories, bridges, factories, post offices, banks, and commercial arcades related the style to Russia’s increasingly complex social fabric. Classical monuments also abounded: arches of triumph, columns, rotundas, fountains, monuments to individuals, mausoleums, and grave markers. Finally, Greek and Roman motifs continued to find the same fulfillment in private homes, country estates, pavilions, summer houses, palaces, governors’ mansions, and nobles’ meeting houses that they had in the previous century.

St. Petersburg evidenced Russia’s classical apogee in Thomon’s Stock Exchange and Zakharov’s new Admiralty. Considered by many scholars as the founder of “high classicism,” Adrian Zakharov fashioned an Admiralty that was really a reconstruction of existing buildings: he retained their old walls and merely added porticoes to them. The Admiralty’s principal function was ship building, which occurred in the interior buildings ringing the courtyard. Those exterior rooms and buildings which faced the city squares housed the Admiralty administration, college, library, auditorium, and other rooms—all splendidly furnished. The building’s marvelous simplicity was derived from its expansive façade articulated only by alternating six- and twelve-column Doric porticoes. At each end of this façade rose the Nevsky pavilions, beneath which a canal once passed. The columns of the porticoes, compactly arranged, were set against the flat surfaces of the walls. Zakharov actually used the base of the existing tower but changed both its outline and architectural finish. The building’s great mass forced the architect to design an original façade, symmetrical with the tower. In doing so he created a landmark in Russian classicism.

Another Alexandrian monument was Vorinikhin’s Kazan Cathedral on the Nevsky Prospekt. Although given an extended semicircle of quadruple colonnades at both the front and rear, the church acquired its distinction on the Nevsky side, where its portico as well as colonnades determined the space around the cathedral. Voronikhin’s death left the colonnade on the side opposite the Nevsky unfinished, and so it remained. The architect used the Corinthian order and induced Russia’s best sculptors to adorn the mighty edifice.

The Admiralty, Bourse, and Kazan Cathedral preceded the events of 1812 that heightened Russian nationalism and infused her arts with heroic sentiment. After the war with France a succession of majestic architectural ensembles and monuments were erected in St. Petersburg to extoll Russia’s victory over Napoleon and her military might. In the eyes of the Emperor Alexander an embellished capital city encapsulated this imperial glory. He established in 1816 the Committee of Buildings and Hydraulic Works “to raise this capital’s architecture to that level of beauty and perfection which, corresponding in all respects to its attributes, would unite the public and private good.”¹⁰ Placed under the direction of the French military engineer Augustin de Béthencourt, this committee undertook to change even more the face of central Petersburg.

Just as Zakharov and Voronikhin had dominated the Petersburg scene in the decade before 1812, Béthencourťs committee, which included Vasilii Petrovich Stasov and Karl Ivanovich Rossi, also left its mark on the city. Stasov’s versatility was evidenced in his barracks, court stables, cathedrals, food warehouses, triumphal arches, market buildings, palaces, and mansions. Having studied and apprenticed in Moscow with Bazhenov and Kazakov and sojourned in Italy, he returned to Petersburg, where before 1812 he worked with Voronikhin, Zakharov, and Quarenghi. In the postwar period he became the foremost architect on the Committee of Building and Hydraulic Works, reconstructing between 1817 and 1823 the old court stables of Peter near the Moika and building the Pavlovskie Barracks in the Field of Mars. Stasov’s barracks, in conjunction with Rossi’s Mikhailovsky Palace, effectively continued the Sadovaia to the Field of Mars.

Karl Rossi (fig. 9 5) was the other outstanding Petersburg architect of the postwar period. As a member of Béthencourťs committee, he built or planned many of the principal Petersburg architectural ensembles. The son of an Italian ballerina who had been invited to St. Petersburg, Rossi studied under the architect Brenna and learned from Bazhenov, Stasov, and Quarenghi. By 1801 he held the rank of architect and after that studied at the Academy of Florence. He subsequently worked in the Kremlin Department in Moscow, in Tver, and, after 1815, in St. Petersburg, where he spent the next decade and a half.

One of Rossi’s masterpieces was the Mikhailovsky Palace, built for the emperor’s brother, Mikhail Pavlovich. Rossi began his design in 1817; eventually a site between the Nevsky Prospekt and the Field of Mars was selected for it. The palace was oriented both toward the courtyard and plaza before it and toward the garden behind it. The majesty of this great Corinthian palace was accentuated by its marked contrast with the modest buildings in the square. The garden façade, like that in front, bore a colonnade, pediment, and sculptures and was visible from the Field of Mars. Finished in 1825, the palace became the Russian Museum in 1895, one of the two principal repositories of Russian art in the Soviet Union today.

Rossi’s reorganization of Winter Palace Square, begun in 1819, represented his most important accomplishment. In order to open a passage into the square opposite the Winter Palace, the architect built a monumental arch that joined the ministry and General Staff buildings. It spanned approximately fifty-six feet and rose nearly ninety-two feet discounting its sculpture. Crowned with a chariot carrying Glory and drawn by six horses and warriors, the General Staff arch became in every sense a triumphal one, the apotheosis of romantic classicism. That the square became a careful balance of Rastrelli’s rococo and Rossi’s classicism made it a splendid show place. The wholeness of composition, unity of scale, and the façade divisions easily compensated for the differences in architectural style.

Few architects had the opportunity to alter a city’s appearance as Rossi did in classical Petersburg. Perhaps his best ensemble creation was that which began with the Alexandrinsky Theater, an elegant building enhanced by splendid Corinthian porticoes on each of its sides. Designing a new theater on the Nevsky led Rossi to ponder the entire area flanked by the Fontanka and Sadovaia Street and extending from the Nevsky to present-day Chernyshev Square. He set the theater back from the Nevsky, placing before it a pleasant plaza. On one side rose the graceful Anichkov palace with two exquisite pavilions; on the other stood the public library.

Behind the theater Rossi created to a length of 722 feet Theater (now Rossi) Street, which he led into a new semicircular square intersected by various radial thoroughfares. Looking back along Theater Street, a viewer today will perceive how Rossi used the theater to close the perspective, the effect of which, incidentally, is enhanced by the horizontal divisions of Rossi’s buildings on both sides of this street.

Rossi’s Senate and Synod was less successful than his previous Petersburg ventures. Ill and unable to supervise construction of this massive complex between St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Neva, Rossi allowed another architect to substitute for him. This personnel switch resulted in the Senate and Synod’s having greater ornament and intricacy than was customary with Rossi’s creations. Yet, like his other structures, it was possessed with true magnificence. The arch over Galernaia Street and the glistening semicircular colonnade at the turn of the building toward the Neva made it memorable, whatever its other failings. Planned in 1828, this Senate and Synod was the last of Rossi’s works before he was forced into retirement.

Monuments reflecting martial glory consumed the energies and talents of Alexander’s architects. Both Rossi’s General Staff and Senate and Synod creations were in part triumphal arches faced and topped with heroic sculptures. The so-called Narva Gate, originally a wooden construction from a plan by Quarenghi, was an arch erected on the Peterhof road in 1814 to honor returning Russian troops. Between 1827 and 1833 Stasov was responsible for moving it to a new location, where it was enlarged, rebuilt of stone and brick, and lined with sheet brass. Thus, it received a monumentality that it previously lacked. Stasov was also responsible for a Doric victory arch of heavy proportions on the Moscow turnpike to commemorate Moscow’s defiance of the French. Perhaps best known of Petersburg’s war monuments is Montferrand’s Alexander Column in Winter Palace Square. Seen with greatest effect through Rossi’s General Staff Arch, this monolith of granite rests on a massive base and rises about 156 feet (fig. 9.6). That it should have been the central ornament in the midst of the great military reviews then held in the square further identifies classicism with martial pageantry in Alexandrian Russia.

Despite the scope of Moscow’s building problems after 1812, planning there exhibited neither the daring nor extravagance characteristic of Petersburg. Buildings and ensembles generally were smaller in scale and displayed greater warmth than those in Petersburg. Moscow required essentials; the measures taken to provide housing indicated as much.

The key to housing design in Moscow, as in much of Russia, was the model façade. Used sparingly early in the eighteenth century, it had become by late century an integral part of the entire classical planning and building endeavor throughout the empire. Standard designs prepared by Petersburg experts and backed by the force of law guided local builders, speeded production, reduced costs, and maintained high-quality building. When model façades combined with similarly standardized town, city, block, and plaza designs, the classical program was assured. The success and comparative speed in restoring Moscow after 1812 was traceable, in part, to this standardization.

The reconstruction of central Moscow after 1812 was on. a scale quite beyond standard designs. Removal of the Neglinnaia River and of the earthen bastions built by Peter around the Kremlin and Kitai Gorod made possible an enlarged Red Square, the Aleksandrovsky Garden, and a vast Theater Square. Besides these, Cathedral (Sobornaia) Square within the Kremlin and Resurrection Square, which linked Red and Theater Squares, also acquired new form. The plaza chain proposed in 1775 achieved a measure of reality. Spacious squares appeared at intersections of the boulevards and radial streets after both the Boulevard and Garden Rings were completed during the 1820s and 1830s.

Classical houses, both masonry and wooden, and splendid architectural ensembles increased beyond the number standing before 1812. The English traveler William Rae Wilson observed that the city was not so bizarre as formerly: “There is something captivating in this display of Grecian and Palladian architecture intermingled among the old national structures. . . . It would not be amiss if a few of our architects were to pay a visit to the two capitals of Russia which certainly contain many structures that deserve to be more generally known than at present.”¹¹

The rebuilding of Moscow brought forth a new generation of architects, the most prominent of whom were Osip Ivanovich Bove, Dementii (Domenico) Ivanovich Giliardi, and Afanasii Grigor’evich Grigor’ev. They undertook both broad city planning and design of specific buildings. Bove, in particular, was involved in shaping central Moscow. His work on Red and Theater Squares, the Bol’shoi Theater, and the Manezh determined the city’s character from that day until our own.

In Red Square (fig. 9.7) Bove supervised the razing of the shops along the Kremlin wall and around St. Basil’s and gave a classic façade to the bazaar along the east side of the square. He embellished the façade with twin columns, which appeared to support the arcade’s archivolt, and elevated the building’s center. Both portico and cupola, which served no functional purpose, formed a diametrical axis with the cupola of Kazakov’s Senate Building within the Kremlin across the square. In accenting the length of the building by introducing an architrave across the arcade and dividing it into three harmonious divisions, Bove remained faithful to the current architectural tenet that elegant commerical buildings should not be obscured. Work on this classical arcade was completed in 1815, and so it stood in Red Square until replaced later in the century by the Slavic Revival edifice that we know today as GUM.

Moscow’s second great plaza, Theater Square, finally became a reality after 1812. Although long contemplated, the actual sculpturing of this expanse had been delayed by the meandering Neglinnaia. After the fire the Commission for Building in Moscow decided that insufficient water flow and pollution warranted enclosing the stream in an underground pipe. This was done between 1817 and 1819; shortly thereafter work on the Theater Square commenced. Theater Square (fig. 9.8) surpassed even St. Peter’s and the Place de la Concorde in size. On its two long sides this square was enveloped by four low buildings, which, except for the Malyi (Little) Theater on the northeast side of the square, have been demolished. Their corners, where the streets pierced the square, were cubed, their middle floors had shallow loggias with half columns, and the lower story, a small arcade.

In designing Theater Square, Moscow architects had an unusual opportunity; they dealt with vast and hitherto unused space, thereby avoiding the need to reconcile their creations with existing ones. Bove and Andrei Alekseevich Mikhailov conceived of a monumental theater dominating the square. The height of the projected edifice — 98 feet—was based on a 1:6 ratio with the square’s length. By lowering all lateral wings and buildings to a uniform height, the architects balanced the plaza’s horizontality against the verticality of the theater.

The Bol’shoi Theater, built between 1821 and 1825, was originally rectangular in plan and embellished in front with an eight-column Ionic portico, some fifty feet in height. Its low lateral parts were divided into three stories with plain façades except for horizontal rustication. The middle of the building was heightened and overlapped by a hip roof, beneath which a straight cornice traversed the entire building. On the main façade, this elevated portion of the corpus possessed a blank wall with a deep semicircular niche in the center. From the depths of this arch burst forth Apollo in his chariot, crowning the portico. A grand staircase, main foyer, five-tier audience hall, and stage completed the interior. When the theater burned in the 1850s, basic changes were made in its structure. The simple Ionic portico was transformed into a more intricate façade by adding windows and pilasters to the lateral parts and rusticating the entire lower portion; all the detailed outer trim was replaced, and the hip roof was exchanged for a gable with a pediment.

The hand of Osip Bove was also involved in changing the environment along the Kremlin’s west wall. There, on what had been the banks of the Neglinnaia, he set out the Aleksandrovsky Garden, called by Robert Lyall “a magnificent ornament and an elegant promenade.”¹² These grounds, nearly twenty-two acres in all, took their name from the tsar, who, after visiting Moscow in 1820, determined that such a garden should be laid out; eventually three were, each of which opened in the early 1820s. An iron gate and fence bordered the garden in Resurrection (Voskresenskaia) Square, where a decorative paving of the walks and cobblestone streets also enhanced the entrance. Beneath the Arsenal Tower, Bove constructed a small Doric grotto that became an integral part of Moscow classicism.

Opposite the Aleksandrovsky Gardens rose the expansive Manezh, central to a new plaza. Intended by Alexander I to house and drill an infantry regiment and provide space ample enough for cavalry to exercise their mounts, it was perceived by the rest of Europe as a kind of secret Russian weapon. As a building, the Manezh was massive in scale, although quite simple in design. Conceived by Béthencourt, it was constructed by another French general, P. L. Carbonier. According to plan, it measured 545 by 147 feet. Thick walled, especially at its foundation, where the columns rested, this building was distinguished by an enveloping Doric colonnade (the walls being between the columns) and an expansive ceiling, which from within had no columnar support. Powerful, arched apertures, either windows or doors, pierced the thick walls between the columns. In 1824 and 1825 Bove added sculpture and stucco ornament to both the inside and outside of the Manezh. The martial theme in these decorations reflected the usual heroic and romantic sentiment of the era.

Opposite the Manezh, as part of the greater Resurrection Square ensemble, stood restored Moscow University. Initially designed and built by Matvei Kazakov in the 1780s, it was remarkably restored in 1817 to 1819 by the architect Dementii Giliardi. He strengthened and raised the central portico and topped it with a flat cupola. More notably, he substituted an eight-column Ionic colonnade for a Doric one with raised parapet. By removing the pilasters, the architect left the great façade expanses smooth except for columns, cubicles, and bas-relief sculptures. Giliardi’s masterful restoration of the university overshadowed such elements in that classical assemblage as Grigor’ev’s University Pharmacy and Evgraf Dmitrievich Tiurin’s University Church at the corner of the Mokhovaia and Nikitskaia. The latter’s “crown of columns,” a colonnaded Doric half rotunda, compositionally linked the semicircular wing of Giliardi’s main building to the Manezh across the plaza. In this sense, Tiurin’s work consummated this entire ensemble.

Central Moscow’s radial thoroughfares, long occupied by the nobility and the wealthy, changed variously after 1812. Burned palatial mansions were replaced or reappeared in much altered form. On the Prechistenka the homes were among the most elegant in Moscow, although they differed from those designed by Bazhenov and Kazakov a generation earlier. The Seleznev mansion, supposedly the work of Grigor’ev, was perhaps the most splendid of Moscow’s Empire residences. In its Prechistenka setting, it was notable for the asymmetric composition of its central structure, wings, and auxiliary buildings. The main corpus, located at the street corner, had two street façades. The one on the Prechistenka, which carried a six-column Ionic portico resting on the lower half story, acquired a monumental appearance. Conversely, the alley façade was one of greater intimacy, enhanced by a decorative portico of eight columns arranged in pairs, and a metal grille that followed the line of the verandah. A pediment, level with the roof of the first story, crowned the alley portion. The street portico contained, in place of a pediment, an open balcony with a receding mezzanine, which was covered with a two-slope roof. The garden façade engendered warmth and simplicity, both of which were accentuated by a small garden pavilion nearby.

At the other end of the radial network from the Prechistenka lay the Solianka, and on it rose a building of a different sort. This was the Adoption Council, a loan bank for financing the nearby Foundling Home, built between 1823 and 1826 by Dementii Giliardi and probably Grigor’ev. Facing the Solianka, this ensemble consisted of three two-story buildings, the main corpus and two wings. These wings, linked to the central structure by a stone wall and smaller buildings in back, approximated a square. The main section, which boasted a massive eight-column portico stretching across a bare wall, was capped by a flat cupola. Notable for its simplicity and clarity, this building rested on a rectangular base and lay latitudinally on the regulated line of the street. Steps led into the portals at the base of the massive portico, while the striking cupola enveloped the vestibule rather than the main hall. The building’s plain texture was balanced by sculptures on each side of the stairway and bas-reliefs behind the columns, in the frieze, on the pediment, above the window in the cupola drum, and over the windows of the building’s lateral façade. Moscow’s radial thoroughfares, beginning with the Prechistenka and ending with the Solianka, exhibited the best of Moscow’s classical artifacts, of which the Adoption Council was one.

Two of Moscow’s most successful projects after 1812 were the Boulevard and Garden Rings. Although the Belyi Gorod walls and gates had disappeared around 1750, it remained for the fire to clear the mushrooming structures that were an obstacle to a Boulevard Ring. Within two decades the ring and its squares became a reality. New and restored masonry houses also lined this spacious boulevard to make it an ever popular place for strolling. The Garden Ring rose on the ramparts of the Zemlianoi Gorod. After 1812 the authorities decided to replace the decayed or partially dismantled fortifications with a regulated and concentric boulevard with great plazas; however, translating ramparts and moats into such a Garden Ring proved long, arduous, and expensive. Such a spectacular enterprise involved a major financial commitment, even before the Boulevard Ring was completed. Projected for 197 feet in width, the Garden Ring required paving, lighting, cleaning, and maintenance. The economic question was finally resolved by laying streets and sidewalks that were only 69 to 82 feet wide. The remaining footage was left for residents to use for flower gardens— hence, the Garden Ring.

Demolition of the Zemlianoi Gorod fortifications in the 1820s invited construction of architectural ensembles in the cleared space. One of the most important was Vasilii Stasov’s group of provision warehouses near the Krymsky rampart. The provision warehouses, so crucial for the well-being of the populace, consisted of three virtually identical buildings. The central one faced the street with its longitudinal side, the others with their latitudinal façades. Large doors, semicircular windows, and rustication enlivened their smooth walls, yet these same walls, doors, and a precisely etched frieze and cornice accentuated the buildings’ mass. The Stasov warehouses exemplified a unique utilitarian application of the classic in restored Moscow.

Garden Ring mansions superbly displayed Empire elegance. Bove completed one for Prince N. S. Gagarin in 1817, and another for the Volkonskies in 1809. The latter, distinguished by a four-column Doric portico and bas-relief sculptures on its main façade, has retained its original charm amidst the bustle of the ring today. East of the expansive Hostel for Indigents (Strannopriimyi Dom) rose an exquisite estate house, High Hills (Vysokie Gory). Backing on the Iauza River, this mansion and park of the Usachevs was the creative effort of Dementii Giliardi and Grigor’ev in 1829-30. In their work they combined the features of a town and rural estate house. Characteristically, this Empire edifice lay astride the Garden Ring rather than in the rear of the park. The architects gave to it a severe main corpus, also typical of the time. Closed, elongated, and two stories in height, the house possessed a rusticated lower story and a very plain upper one, where the windows were without jambs. An imposing eight-column portico was accentuated by a background of smooth-textured walls. Among the most pleasing aspects of the Usachev house was its setting on the high bank of the Iauza. Giliardi planted a magnificient park, which descended toward the river by means of terraces and stone staircases. Along the axis of the main lines of trees the architect placed pavilions richly adorned with sculpture. A teahouse, resembling a toy, contained finely drawn columns that formed colonnaded porticoes, or a semirotunda, and decoration in sculpture. With such mansions as this, the ring unfolded in a certain elegance in the quarter century after the great fire.

The Garden Ring was perhaps the most extensive and visionary undertaking by Moscow planners and architects at this time. When completed, it became a delightful garden area with diverse buildings. The squares and the boulevard, more spacious than the Boulevard Ring, were less conducive to aristocratic promenades. The great breadth of the Garden Ring, with its traffic-bearing potential, looked to the future, and, like the boulevards of Paris, imposed a measure of control on the populace.

Beyond the Garden Ring the fire of 1812 had destroyed perhaps 70 percent of the buildings, most of which had been of wood. Within five years many of these had reappeared, again wooden. There were, however, some notable classical exceptions. One such exception was a triumphal arch, designed by Bove, commemorating Russia’s victory over Napoleon. Placed on Moscow’s main arterial highway, the Tverskaia, this arch (1827-34) gave Moscow a monumental entrance from Petersburg. Constructed of brick and faced with white stone, it was embellished with pairs of Corinthian columns on all four sides. The capitals and bases, the carved friezes and cornices, architraves, and the sculptured figures were all of cast iron. The sculptures consisted of warriors between the columns, flying glories on the sides of the arch, female figures in the background of the high parapet, and a group symbolizing Victory on a six-horse chariot crowning the entire structure. This complex, until it was removed and subsequently relocated during the Soviet period, stood in the middle of a small oval plaza and closed the perspective of the Tverskaia from Red Square.

Near the Garden Ring on the Kaluzhskaia Highway, a new City Hospital rose between 1828 and 1833. Planned by Bove, it was intended as an integral part of Kazakov’s Golitsyn Hospital ensemble. Bove initially projected a main corpus with two wings embracing a central court. The wings were to have matched the central building in severity, except for a massive eight-column Ionic portico and a broad staircase. A flat cupola for the hospital chapel at the main entrance and circular hall ringed with an Ionic colonnade beneath a windowed cupola were other prominent features. Because Alexander’s mother, Maria Fedorovna, was dissatisfied, the plan required numerous changes. When Bove’s hospital was finally completed in the summer of 1833, it fell short of the elegant complex that he had originally envisioned; nevertheless, it stood impressively beside Kazakov’s Golitsyn on the Kaluzhskaia.

THE WANING AND CONSTANCY OF CLASSICISM IN RUSSIA

Classicism in Russian architecture, as in that of Western Europe, had run its course by the 1830s and 1840s. While in Europe an increasingly eclectic classic bowed to a more vibrant Gothic, in Russia even the Gothic was overshadowed by a not very original Russo-Byzantine revival. This tastelessness in architecture was compounded by diminution of architectural talent and a lessening of interest in city building on the part of a new tsar. Russia’s future by the second third of the nineteenth century, moreover, was determined less by the aristocrat than by the new men in commerce and industry. With the rise of the entrepreneur, the beauty of both central Petersburg and Moscow became subordinated to the needs of industry, St. Isaac’s notwithstanding.

There remains, however, a positive postscript for Russian classicism. Two generations after this demise of romantic classicism a notable revival occurred.¹³ Classicism’s reemergence in the early twentieth century, its eclipse again during the 1920s, when constructivist ideas prevailed, and its overbearing return during the late Stalin era link the architecture and planning in this century to that of the early nineteenth. Nor surprisingly, classicism revived at the beginning of the twentieth century because a sprawling and unplanned industrialism menaced central St. Petersburg. In the city where Peter I had banned wooden construction, 65 percent of the new construction in 1890 was of wood! Artists and architects like Alexander and Leontii Benois and Ivan Fomin promoted classicism as a bulwark once again against disoriented building—this time in the city’s historic center. Like their predecessors a century earlier, they also believed that imperial greatness should be expressed through the monumentality of Russia’s cities, large in size and rational and ordered in design.¹⁴

NOTES

1. “Romantic Classicism in Architecture,” Gazette des Beaux Arts XXV (1944): 95-112; Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Baltimore, 1967); and Robin Middleton and David Watkin, Neoclassical and Nineteenth Century Architecture (New York, 1980). The debate over the meaning and validity of the term Romantic Classicism is endless and highly controversial. While I have used the term, I have no wish in this essay to focus on stylistic theory; rather the stress is on classical architecture as an artifact in nineteenth-century Russia.

2. Boullée, as quoted in Emil Kaufman, Three Revolutionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, and Lequeu, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., vol. 423, pt. 3 (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 471.

3. Pierre Lavedan, French Architecture (Baltimore, 1956), p. 237.

4. Ibid., p. 238.

5. See especially Hans Blumenfeld, “Russian City Planning of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians IV (1944): 22-33. Hereafter cited as JSAH.

6. See ibid., p. 27.

7. See Miliza Korshunova, “William Hastie in Russia,” trans. Larissa Haskell, Architectural History XVII (1974): 14-21; and Albert J. Schmidt, “William Hastie Scottish Planner of Russian Cities,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society CXIV, iii (1970): 226-43.

8. Hastie had proposed enlarging Red Square, creating a semicircular chain of squares enveloping the Kremlin and Kitai Gorod, and planning anew the Zemlianoi Gorod. Squares beyond the Zemlianoi Gorod, like those within, were to have served commercial, transportational, and decorative functions. Unique features of the plan were eleven squares projected where the radial highways pierced the gates of the Zemlianoi Gorod, and the emphasis placed on the area beyond the Zemlianoi Gorod. Many of the twisting streets and alleys there were given precision and proportion. Besides the eleven Zemlianoi Gorod squares, Hastie argued for fourteen more where the main arterial roads passed through the Kamer Kollegia wall. Although such extravagance did not deter Emperor Alexander (who approved the plan on September 29, 1813), it did the commission. The commission pointedly criticized Hastie’s transportation scheme and rejected many of his squares on the two outer rims of the city. In fact, it regarded all fourteen squares along the Kamer Kollegia wall as superfluous. Their remoteness from the city center suggested that Hastie had emphasized decor more than utility. Squares nearer the center were similarly scrutinized and modified. In all, the commission recommended the elimination of twenty-six of Hastie’s forty-seven squares; conversely, of those it allowed, most already existed and required only altering. The commission concurred with Hastie in razing the shops and filling the moat along the Kremlin wall but recommended retaining in the north end of the square the wooden buildings that defined the limits of the squares at the Resurrection Gates. It questioned the disposition of buildings around St. Basil’s. Whereas Hastie had planned to open the basilica on all sides and clear the area to the river, the commission advised demolishing only those buildings adjacent to St. Basil’s and those shops which encroached upon the Execution (Lobnoe) Place.

9. The varieties are discussed in George K. Lukomskii, Arkhitektura russkoi provintsii (1916).

10. Ocherki Istorii Leningrada, 2 vols. (Moscow, Leningrad, 1955), I, 574.

11. Travels in Russia, 2 vols. (London, 1828), I, 52-53.

12. The Character of the Russians and a Detailed History of Moscow (London 1823), p. 525.

13. For an inclusive bibliography, see S. Frederick Starr, “Writings from the 1960s on the Modernist Movement in Russia,” JSAH XXX (1971): 172-74 especially. See also S. Frederick Starr, Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society (Princeton, 1978), pp. 23-30.

14. In 1916 Alexandre Benois took before the Duma a proposal “On the Question of Planned Development of the Construction of Petrograd and Its Surroundings.” Initially intended to save the city’s center, Benois’s plan eventually embodied the entire metropolitan region. Although, unexpectedly, the Duma approved it, the action proved inconsequential because of the war. Afterwards, classicism received no sanction from the Bolsheviks; instead, the constructivists dominated the 1920s. Classicism’s eclipse was, however, brief; Stalin’s triumph spelled doom for experimentation. Fomin and his students were called back, this time to build monuments of steel and concrete to extoll the New Class and the proletarian state. Formal squares and soaring pseudoclassical edifices, albeit often ill-proportioned and grotesquely eclectic, reappeared. Classical architects and planners once again stamped their mark on urban Russia, especially Moscow, in the 1930s. Ivan Fialko’s axial walks and Roman temples in restored Stalingrad (Volgograd) and eclectic Moscow University, unfolding in the 1950s in the midst of geometric street and garden patterns and with a classical portico, strikingly exemplified the trend. And what Soviet city today does not possess wide thoroughfares, parks, squares, and columnar edifices—both old and new? Those which survived and those recently constructed all reflect classicism’s durability two centuries after Russia’s initial essay in romantic classicism. See also S. Frederick Starr, “The Revival and Schism of Urban Planning in Twentieth Century Russia,” in The City in Russian History, ed. Michael F. Hamm (Lexington, Ky., 1976), 222-42; and Kathleen Berton, Moscow: An Architectural History (New York, 1977), pp. 192-93.

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