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ONE—Ruins and Modernity in Russian Pre-Romanticism
- Cornell University Press
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ONE Ruins and Modernity in Russian Pre-Romanticism t In the second half of the eighteenth century, all over Europe ruins suddenly came into view. The discovery of Herculaneum in 1738 and of Pompeii in 1748, followed by the beginning of excavations that are still ongoing, transfixed the imagination of travelers. Together with unearthed frescoes, well-preserved buildings from ancient times offered more than a mere glimpse into a vanished civilization, and Pompeii quickly became an obligatory stop on the aristocracy’s European Grand Tour. Neoclassicism, which was running its course throughout Europe, albeit at different times in different countries and different media, elevated Greco-Roman antiquity into an aesthetic canon, so that ruins, especially those in a good state of preservation, supplied a depository of models for imitation. Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s engravings radicalized the discrepancy between the grand structures of antiquity and what he felt were the petty aspirations of his times, thus offering a vantage point for a cultural critique of the present . Yet the visual proximity between Piranesi’s ruins and his carceri, along with the illogicality and conceitedness of his constructions of space, revealed the haunting, uncanny energy of ruins. Their monumentality is not simply the trope of a totality we can return to or imitate, as neoclassicism would advocate. The manifest interconnection of the past and the present sheds self-critical light on the Enlightenment project of modernization and thus ultimately traps the present in a self-reflective consciousness, from which there is no escape.1 Ruins were implicated in other discoveries. Vedute paintings of the Roman Campagna, inspired by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain’s depictions of mythological scenes set in the Roman countryside, depicted the 30 Architecture of Oblivion picturesque intimacy between ruin and nature, congruent with a pastoral longing for an idealized and essentialized nature. Yet at the same time, ruins also spoke to the imagination of stage designers and fostered a theatricalized sensibility, which put conceit and play at a premium. Indeed, their fanciful shapes could seem enticing and liberating, and a painter like Giovanni Pannini would make much of their appeal to a rococo-minded viewer. Ruins thus had an impact on both sides of the cultural divide between Rousseau-inspired proponents of natural authenticity and champions of theatricality. To the extent that they invited a reverie about time and mortality, ruins contributed to the “discovery” or, more precisely, to the invention of interiority and selfhood. As a visual incitement to melancholy, they encouraged beholders to set themselves apart from society and reflect on their own mortality. The construction of fake ruins, the so-called follies, became a standard device of landscape design.2 As Thomas Whately maintained in his widely popular compendium on the poetics of the English garden, “at the sight of a ruin, reflections on the change, the decay, and the desolation before us, naturally occur, and they introduce a long succession of others, all tinctured with that melancholy which these have inspired.”3 Finally, the imagination of ruins also colored meditations on the destiny of empires. Edward Gibbon conceded in the last sentence of his magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that “it was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life” and before analyzing the causes of the downfall of Rome, he drew a vivid picture of the “prospect of desolation,” the result of nine centuries of barbarism.4 The wisdom he gained from his analysis of Roman history left him under no illusion as to the vulnerability of Rome’s resurgence in the Renaissance.5 Constantin-François de Volney, a Jacobin, invoked the ruins of Palmyra at the beginning of his visionary description of a utopian secular society in Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les Révolutions des Empires (1791). Finally, Napoleon’s obsession with Egyptian ruins is well known. He commissioned Dominique-Vivant Denon to produce meticulous sketches of Egyptian ruins, a visual record of the remnants of a great civilization Napoleon hoped to emulate.6 This multifaceted passion for ruins did not pass Russia unnoticed. Interest in the poetic “message” of ruins dates back to the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. In 1763 the young poet Ippolit Bogdanovich published a translation of Voltaire’s controversial “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne,” which had exposed the vulnerability and insufficiency of all philosophical and religious systems in...