have applied the language of classicism on a monumental scale. His contemporary Matvei Kazakov never studied abroad, as Bazhenov had done, but brought Moscow neoclassicism to its apogee in the Senate in the Kremlin (1776 -1787). Like its near contemporary in London, William Chambers’s Somerset House, the Senate building uses the authority of classical forms to signify power and public purpose.
Under Alexander I, neoclassicism, also known in this period as the Alexandrian or Empire style, became increasingly prominent in the public domain. Designed by the serf-architect Andrei Voronikhin, the Mining Institute (1806-1811) in St. Petersburg included a twelve-column Doric portico and pediment based on the Temple of Poseidon at Paestum, while Thomas de Thomon reconstructed the Stock Exchange (1805-1810) as a Greek temple. The most ambitious project was Adrian Zakharov’s new Admiralty (1806-1823), in which strong geometric masses and classical ornamentation coexist with specifically Russian refer1036
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ences. The great central pavilion is decorated with free-standing and low-relief sculptures and an open colonnade, and yet is topped by a golden spire which recalls that of the old Admiralty, while the frieze over the portal depicts Neptune presenting a trident to Peter the Great. These allegorical and structural references to the Russian past result in a distinctly national interpretation of the neoclassical style.
Not that the language of classicism was always suitable for Russian aims. The awkward proportions of the Cathedral of St. Isaac (1819-1859) by Auguste Montferrand is testimony to how disastrous some attempts to design an Orthodox church in a classical style could be. Far more successful during Nicholas I’s reign is the work of Carlo Rossi, whose concern with entire architectural ensembles in St. Petersburg underlines his flair for the classical organization of space, for example in the streets, squares, and buildings that he designed to complement his Alexandrinsky Theatre (1828-1832), or in the General Staff Building (1819-1829), which completed Palace Square. This interest in town planning reverberated in provincial towns such as Odessa, where boulevards parallel to the cliff-top benefit from the dramatic views over the Black Sea.
Painting and sculpture made a less distinguished contribution to neoclassicism in Russia than architecture, but certain artists stand out. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Mikhail Kozlovsky produced some notable sculpture on classical themes, and his monument to General Su-vorov portrayed the military leader rather improbably as an athletic young Mars. Ivan Martos, who had studied with Mengs in Rome, also attempted to invest his work with both Russian meanings and references to antiquity in his statue of Minin and Pozharsky (1804-1818) on Red Square, in which seventeenth-century heroes are clothed in a hybrid of classical tunics and the traditional Russian garb of long, belted shirts worn over trousers. Martos deployed the extravagant rhetorical gestures typical of much ancient sculpture, a device continued in Boris Orlovsky’s statues of Marshal Kutuzov and Barclay de Tolly in front of the Cathedral of the Virgin of Kazan in St. Petersburg. On a more intimate note, Fyodor Tolstoy designed bas-relief sculptures reminiscent of the work of the English neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman, while his acclaimed portrait medallions commemorating the Napoleonic War filtered patriotic sensibilities through the classical tradition of coin and medal design. In painting, Anton Losenko’s Vladimir and Rogneda of 1770 initiated a tradition of depicting Russian historical subjects in the so-called Grand Manner, the approved Academic approach which drew heavily on the classical practice of idealization, by the nineteenth century academic history painters were expected to work in the neoclassical style. In Fyodor Bruni’s painting Death of Camilla, the Sister of Horatio (1824), the classical hero, who has placed civic virtue above familial sentiment, strikes a suitably grandiloquent pose in the center of a composition arranged like a bas-relief. But the pictorial devices of neoclassicism were already being tempered by Romantic sensibilities, as is evident in Orest Kiprensky’s Portrait of Alexander Pushkin (1827) and Karl Bryullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii (1830-1833). Kiprensky may include a classical statuette in his portrait, and Bryullov may have chosen a classical subject, but the emphasis is now on the Romantic values of subjectivity and personal emotion, as opposed to the harmonic proportion and physical perfection of classical art. See also: ACADEMY OF ARTS; ARCHITECTURE; CATHERINE II; KREMLIN; MOSCOW BAROQUE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Auty, Robert, and Obolensky, Dmitri, eds. (1980). An Introduction to Russian Art and Architecture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brumfield, William C. (1993). A History of Russian Architecture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kennedy, J. (1983). “The Neoclassical in Russian Sculpture.” In Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. T. G. Stavrou. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sarabianov, Dmitry. (1990). Russian Art from Neoclassi-cism to the Avant-Garde. London: Thames and Hudson. Shvidkovsky, Dmitry. (1996). The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
The Treaty of Nerchinsk was a Sino-Russian peace treaty negotiated and signed at the Siberian border point of Nerchinsk in August and September 1689.
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Armed conflict in the Far East of Russia rose out of the advance of Russian colonists to Dahuria during the middle of the seventeenth century, since the Manchus claimed the Amur basin. The growing tension came to a head in the sieges of the fortress of Albazin in 1685 and 1686, when the Manchus ultimately forced the Russians to surrender. In a bid to settle the problem, in 1685 the Russian government appointed Fyodor Alexeyevich Golovin as its first ambassador plenipotentiary to China. His brief was to delineate a border on the Amur and gain the Russians a secure right to trade in the river valley.
After two weeks of negotiations with Songgotu and T’ung Kuo-kang, a peace treaty was signed in September 1689 and the preconditions created for a stable trading relationship. The Russians ended up ceding all rights to the Amur valley, as well as to Albazin, but gained a regularized and potentially lucrative commercial relationship. The Chinese, having secured the areas near the Ch’ing dynasty’s ancestral home, permitted the Russians to keep Nerchinsk, recognizing its potential for trade. Merchants from either side were to be permitted to visit the other with proper passports. The arrival of the Manchu delegation for the negotiations also marked the beginning of large-scale border trade: At least 14,160 rubles’ worth of goods were imported that year from China through the new frontier trading post.
The treaty envisaged Russian caravans traveling to Beijing once every three years, but during the decade following Nerchinsk, such trips were made more or less annually. In 1696 alone, 50,000 rubles’ worth of furs were exported via Nerchinsk.
The treaty put an end to Sino-Russian armed conflict for 165 years.
NERONOV, IVAN
(1591-1670), ardent worker for church reform, first in the provinces and later in Moscow. He opposed Nikon and church reforms he implemented and suffered for his opposition.
Neronov was of humble birth, but learned to read. He entered a church near Ustiug as a reader and chanter. Appalled by the lax manners and morals of the local clergy, Neronov complained to Patriarch Filaret, manifesting his zeal for religious reform. By the mid-1620s, Neronov had relocated to a village in the Nizhny Novgorod region. Many of those who would be energetic supporters of church reform in the second half of the seventeenth century were connected with this region. During the Smolensk War (1632-1633), Neronov moved to Moscow. In the mid-1640s he was associated with the Zealots of Piety, a circle of church reformers centered on the court and led by Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich’s confessor, Stefan Vonifatiev. In 1649 he was named archpriest of the Kazan Cathedral in Moscow. Early in 1653 Neronov was among the first to challenge the revised liturgical books printed under Patriarch Nikon. Retribution was swift: By the end of 1653 Neronov had been defrocked and exiled in chains to a monastery near Vologda. There he took monastic vows and assumed the name Grigory. Called before the Church Council of 1666, Neronov renounced his opposition to the new liturgies. Subsequently he was made archimandrite of a monastery near Moscow, where he lived out his days seeking reform within his monastery. See also: CHURCH COUNCIL; MONASTICISM; PATRIARCHATE; RELIGION; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
See also: CHINA, RELATIONS WITH; FOREIGN TRADE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
