centre of the city was finally rebuilt in the European style. The fire had cleared space for the expansive principles of classi-cism and, as Colonel Skalozub assures us in Griboedov’s drama
boulevards. The first of several planned ensembles, Theatre Square, with the Bolshoi Theatre at its centre, was completed in 1824, followed shortly after by the Boulevard and Garden Rings (still today the city’s main ring roads) and the Alexander Gardens laid out by the Kremlin’s western walls.8 Private money poured into the building of the city, which became a standard of the national revival after 1812, and it was not long before the central avenues were lined by graceful mansions and Palladian palaces. Every noble family felt instinctively the need to reconstruct their old ancestral home, so Moscow was rebuilt with fantastic speed. Tolstoy compared what happened to the way that ants return to their ruined heap, dragging off bits of rubbish, eggs and corpses, and reconstructing their old life with renewed energy. It showed that there was ‘something indestructible’ which, though intangible, was ‘the real strength of the colony’.9
Yet in all this frenzy of construction there was never slavish imitation of the West. Moscow always mixed the European with its own distinctive style. Classical facades were softened by the use of warm pastel colours, large round bulky forms and Russian ornament. The overall effect was to radiate an easygoing charm that was entirely absent from the cold austerity and imperial grandeur of St Petersburg. Petersburg’s style was dictated by the court and by European fashion; Moscow’s was set more by the Russian provinces. The Moscow aristocracy was really an extension of the provincial gentry. It spent the summer in the country and came to Moscow in October for the winter season of balls and banquets, returning to its estates in the countryside as soon as the roads were passable following the thaw. Moscow was located in the centre of the Russian lands, an economic crossroads between north and south, Europe and the Asiatic steppe. As its empire had expanded, Moscow had absorbed these diverse influences and imposed its own style on the provinces. Kazan was typical. The old khanate capital took on the image of its Russian conqueror - its kremlin, its monasteries, its houses and its churches all built in the Moscow style. Moscow, in this sense, was the cultural capital of the Russian provinces.
But oriental customs and colours and motifs were also to be seen on Moscow’s streets. The poet Konstantin Batiushkov saw the city as a ‘bizarre mix’ of East and West. It was an ‘amazing and incomprehensible confluence of superstition and
enlightenment’, which led him to the disturbing conclusion that Peter had ‘accomplished a great deal - but he did not finish anything’.10 In the image of Moscow one could still make out the influence of Genghiz Khan. This Asiatic element was a source of magic and barbarity. ‘If there were minarets instead of churches’, wrote the critic Belinsky, ‘one might be in one of those wild oriental cities that Scheherazade used to tell about.’11 The Marquis de Custine considered that Moscow’s cupolas were like ‘oriental domes that transport you to Delhi, while donjon-keeps and turrets bring you back to Europe at the time of the crusades’.12 Napoleon thought its churches were like mosques.13
Moscow’s semi-oriental nature was given full expression in the so-called neo- Byzantine style of architecture that dominated its reconstruction in the 1830s and 1840s. The term is misleading, for the architecture was in fact quite eclectic, mixing elements of the neo-Gothic and medieval Russian styles with Byzantine and classical motifs. The term was fostered by Nicholas I and his ideologists to signal Russia’s cultural turning away from the West in the wake of the suppression of the Decembrists. The Tsar sympathized with a Slavophile world view that associated Russia with the eastern traditions of Byzantium. Churches like the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, with its onion domes and belltowers, its tent roofs and
The opposition between Moscow and St Petersburg was fundamental to the ideological arguments between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles about Russia’s cultural destiny. The Westernizers held up Petersburg as the model of their Europe-led ideas for Russia, while the Slavophiles idealized Moscow as a centre of the ancient Russian way of life. The Slavophile ideal of a spiritual community united by homegrown Russian customs seemed to be embodied in the medieval contours of the town - the Kremlin walls so firmly rooted to the ground that they seemed to grow from it. The city’s tightly knit communities, its homely character, symbolized the familial spirit of old Rus’.
Moscow’s mythic self- image was all about its ‘Russian character’.
The Moscow way of life was more provincial, it was closer to the habits of the Russian people than the gentry’s way of life in Petersburg. Moscow’s palaces resembled small estates. They were spacious and expansive, built for entertaining on a massive scale, with large central courtyards that functioned as farms, with pens for cows and poultry, vegetable allotments, sheds for storing produce brought in from the country for the winter months and, in some of the larger mansions, like Zinaida Volkonsky’s on the Tver Boulevard, extensive greenhouses for growing exotic winter fruits.* The poet Batiushkov has left a good description of the old-world country atmosphere in a Moscow noble house:
The mansion is built around a big courtyard which is full of litter and firewood; behind there is a garden with vegetables, and at the front a large porch with rails, as they used to have at the country houses of our grandfathers. Entering the house, you will come across the doorman playing cards - he plays from morning until night. The rooms are without wallpaper - the walls are covered in large portraits, on one side with heads of Russian Tsars, and on the other Judith holding the severed head of Holofernes on a large silver dish, and a naked Cleopatra with a snake: marvellous creations by the hand of a domestic servant. We see the table laid with bowls of cabbage soup, sweet pea porridge, baked mushrooms and bottles of
The interior of the Moscow palace was arranged for private comfort rather than public display. ‘All the rooms are furnished with rich carpets,’ remarked Batiushkov, ‘with mirrors, chandeliers, armchairs and divans - everything designed to make one feel at home.’15 The Moscow mansion was cosy and domestic, almost bourgeois, by comparison with the more formal palaces of Petersburg. The Empire style, which in Petersburg was principally expressed in a grandiose public architecture, manifested itself in Moscow in the opulence of the orna-
* The ground floor of the Volkonsky (Beloselsky) house was later taken over by the Eliseev shop, the ‘Russian Fortnum and Mason’, which remains there today.
merit and furnishing of private noble space.16 The Moscow mansion of the Sheremetev clan, the Staraya Vozdizhenka, had no formal reception rooms as such. The living rooms were cluttered with furniture, plants and ornaments, and the walls all covered with family portraits and icons with their votive lamps.17 This was where the Muscovite love of comfort met the Victorian aesthetics of the European middle class. The Sheremetevs called their Moscow house the ‘family refuge’. Owning as they did their most ancient lands in the Moscow region (including the estate that is occupied today by the city’s main airport at Sheremetevo), they thought of the old city as their home. ‘All our family traditions, all our historical connections to Russia, drew me back to Moscow,’ recalled Sergei Sheremetev, the grandson of Nikolai Petrovich, ‘and every time I returned to Moscow I felt spiritually renewed.’18
Sergei’s feeling was a common one. Many Russians felt that Moscow was a place where they could be more ‘Russian’, more at ease with themselves. Here was a city that reflected their spontaneous and relaxed character. One that shared their love of the good life. ‘Petersburg is our head, Moscow is our heart’, went a Russian proverb. Gogol drew the contrast in another way:
Petersburg is an accurate, punctual kind of person, a perfect German, and he looks at everything in a calculated way. Before he gives a party, he will look into his accounts. Moscow is a Russian nobleman, and if he’s going to have a good time, he’ll go all the way until he drops, and he won’t worry about how much he’s got in his pockets. Moscow does not like halfway measures… Petersburg likes to tease Moscow for his awkwardness and lack of taste. Moscow reproaches Petersburg because he doesn’t know how to speak Russian… Russia needs Moscow, Petersburg needs Russia.19
2
The idea of Moscow as a ‘Russian’ city developed from the notion of St Petersburg as a foreign civilization. The literary conception of St Petersburg as an
