Abstract

Evgenii Vasil'evich Mikhailovskii (1907-85?) was both a practicing restorer of Old-Russian church architecture and a scholar working for the Central Scientific Research Institute of the History and Theory of Architecture in Moscow (the Tsentral'nyi Nauchno-Issledovatel'skii Institut Teorii i Istorii Arkhitektury, or TsNIITIA). The influential introduction to his edited volume, The Methods of Restoration of Architectural Monuments, is presented here in a condensed translation. The book, an official reference tool for Soviet restorers issued in 1966, aimed to reflect and disseminate the state-endorsed position regarding the goals and methods of heritage-preservation activities in the Soviet Union. Mikhailovskii intended the new iteration of Methods to solidify the shift in Soviet restoration theory and practice from the complete stylistic restorations to the "analytic method" of strictly conserving the material authenticity of historic monuments. In this essay, Mikhailovskii introduced his theory of discontinuous restoration, through which he argued that Soviet restorers should carry out only restorations of selective elements of monuments; cleaning, consolidating, and above all reworking their context in order to create a new aesthetic frame for them that would make them recognizable as monuments by nonspecialist contemporary viewers.

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