Catherine Palace, II

Posted on May 23, 2014 by fernholzg

Author’s note: Dilara has already written an excellent blog about this palace, but I’ll focus on some other aspects of the residence.
My impressions of the Catherine Palace in Pushkin (formerly known as Tsarskoe Selo) could be summed up in one word: GOLD!! After our weekends in Suzdal and then St. Petersburg, I became convinced that all the gold in the world is actually housed in Russian museums, palaces, and churches, but I digress. The Catherine Palace not only has a rich, interesting history, but is also incredibly beautiful.

The palace is built in the Northern Baroque style. As I understand it, Northern Baroque is distinguished from other Baroque styles by its prominent turquoise and light blue color scheme, which is usually offset with white columns and gold or brown accents. The Hermitage Museum / Winter Palace is another famous example of Northern Baroque.

The Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, photo from http://www.saint-petersburg.com/images/virtual-tour/hermitage3.jpg.

Both the Catherine and Winter Palaces were built by the famous Italian architect Rastrelli. To say Rastrelli left his mark on St. Petersburg would be an understatement. Almeda and I had a game in Petersburg: whenever we found a building we thought might be a Rastrelli [that is, topped with numerous unnecessary statues on the roof or featuring a Northern Baroque color palette], we’d find out for sure, shout “RASTRELLI!” and then tap the other on the shoulder. It was our version of “Slug Bug.”
Catherine, for whom the palace is actually named, came to find the place gaudy, instead preferring clean Neoclassicism. The Empress Elizabeth was the real mastermind of the project, and before her death, she had even made plans with Rastrelli to up the decoration even more. Though the facade is lovely now, all of the brown accents were actually plated gold, and it was probably quite a sight back in the day.

The most interesting thing about the Catherine Palace, in my opinion, is that it was taken over by Nazis during World War II and thoroughly ransacked.

The German Army was not kind to the lavish building. Photo from tsarselo.ru.

Photo from tzar.ru.

Being there today and not being aware of that story, you’d never guess that all that was left of the Catherine Palace was some rough foundation and sections of missing roof and smoldering ruins. The polished parquet floors and gold gilding on the walls shine impeccably, and almost all of the rooms are in order. A painstaking restoration continues to this day, room by room.

The Grand Ballroom has been restored fully.

A treasure from the original palace was the “Amber Room”, with its walls, decorated with designs made from different shades of amber in mosaic style. Incredibly, the team in charge of restoration had only a few black-and-white photographs and a watercolor painting of the room to base their new design off of.

The whole room is made of shining, liquid gold amber. Photo from http://www.guide-guru.com/files/File/amber_room_3(1).jpg.

While in the palace, I was pondering the idea of “authenticity.” In recreating the Amber Room, the artists stuck to the same, traditional methods as the original. But the fact remains that the walls are all different, all new. Much of the palace is new, but that doesn’t really detract from the experience of it. And if you leave something “original”, even with good, minimal upkeep, it will decay. So my question: should we be striving for preservation or restoration? In this case, restoration was the only option, but it’s interesting food for thought when visiting other historical landmarks in Russia and across the world.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Palace
Information given by our excellent tour guide, Valerii.

Shivering in Anticipation of the Winter Palace

Posted on May 22, 2014 by malnare

It was incredible (although initially underwhelming) to first behold the grand Winter Palace: it was the legendary place so frequently put forward by old friends as a dream, the most beautiful place in the world. It appeared again in high school when learning of the last days of the Tsar’s family, mentioned as the opulent seat of Romanov power. And perhaps my expectations were too high, at least for the facade.

The facade itself is very wide and entirely identical. My first impression was not ‘wow!’ but whimsical.

At only three stories, it appeared shorter than most buildings in Petersburg, and the entire front showed the same repeated patterns of Baroque style and mint-toothpaste-colored paint. I was hoping that it would just be the clouds that prevented the true color and gilding from standing out, and waited until we got inside to see the Hermitage.
The courtyard began to change my mind, but I was still not really convinced that this was a grand palace, the place from which a powerful family could hold sway over the broad expanse of Russian domain and snatch a place among the great rulers of Europe.

It still all looks the same! But one does begin to get the impression, “This is a big building.”

That impression did not arrive until we actually entered the museum and arrived at the Jordan Staircase. The mere amount of gold was impressive, but what caught me was the magnificent effect of the space: the extensive gilded woodwork all hand-carved, the enormous mirrors making the stair swallow its guests, the massive ceiling mural, and solid marble columns that provided a stern and impressive backdrop.

Wow!

It caught my breath in a way that made me realize it is not just a figure of speech. For the next few hours, passing from hall to hall of carefully carved wood floors, elaborate gilding, soaring ceilings, tall windows and mirrors, semi-precious vases, and stunning pieces of art, I simply could not regain my breath. It was far too much to believe that anyone could own such a place! Truly this could be the center of an empire, where the mightiest and wealthiest rulers could rule. The extravagant throne room only proved that this is the very seat of the empire!

If only I could have gone up to the throne!

Story of a Traveling Rock: The Bronze Horseman

Posted on May 13, 2014 by aldrichc

Люблю тебя, Петра творенье,
Люблю твой строгий, стройный вид.

These are two of the lines from the famous poem The Bronze Horseman, by Pushkin. They translate as follows:

I love you, Peter’s great creation,
I love your view of stern and grace.

The Bronze Horseman in stormy weather.
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Pushkin definitely thought of this monument as being fantastic, and the name for the monument comes from this poem. If there were any symbol of this city, the horseman would be it. The Statue of Liberty is to New York as The Bronze Horseman is to St. Petersburg.

The Thunder Stone below the Bronze Horseman.

However, I would like to draw your attention to the pedastal below the statue. Known as Гром-Камень (literally: Thunder Stone), it is touted by Russians to be the largest stone ever moved by man. It weighed nearly 1500 tons, and was called the Thunder Stone because it was said that thunder broke off a piece of the boulder. Not only that, but the boulder was nearly halfway submerged in a marsh not far from the Gulf of Finland. Naturally, no other average boulder would do for the monument that Falconet wished to design under the rule of Catherine the Great.

Initially, Falconet wanted to shape the stone at location, but Catherine the Great insisted upon moving the entire boulder before shaping it in St. Petersburg. And so it was. The engineers for the project had to develop the ancestor to the ball-bearing and had these large spheres run on track, which was constantly disassembled behind the stone and moved to the front, with nearly 400 men pulling just so they could move the stone. Meanwhile, carvers ceaselessly sculpted the stone as it was being transferred. Naturally, the massive scale of this project meant that progress was slow. All of these people only managed to move the boulder about 150 meters a day. Once the group managed to reach the sea, a special barge was built for the stone, and two warships were required just to keep the barge afloat. After nine long months, these men, with their everlasting resolve, brought the stone the six kilometers to its current resting place under the Bronze Horseman in Senate Square.

It is moments like this in history of daring to do what nobody has done before that awe me. However, if one were to just stop by the monument, one would never have known about the struggle and ingenuity required to make the Bronze Horseman a reality.

It was pretty cold.

A Formidable Foe

Posted on May 12, 2014 by akgundud

The overwhelming magnitude of the power the Romanovs held until the 20^th century is oppressively obvious in each building commissioned by the tsars. While I felt the tsar’s power walking from room to room in the Hermitage and seeing paintings that cost more than I will probably make in a lifetime, it was in a few of the rooms in the Catherine Palace, a summer residency located on the fringes of St. Petersburg, that I understood the extravagance of the Russian royal family.
The first room I saw there had furniture made of intricately carved wood with gold leaf and lapis lazuli. I do not even want to think about the cost of the matching chandelier for the room (you can see pictures below—the whole room was also restored after the damage and pillage incurred during World War II). The main ballroom was jaw dropping. Carvings plated in gold and massive mirrors decorate the entire hall. In the next room, as a guest, you had the pleasure of eating marzipan dipped in edible gold in the shape of apples. The entire palace is very much in tune with the fashion of Western Europe in the 18^th century.

Outside of the palace.

The main ballroom.

A wider view of the ballroom; not my own picture! When we went, there were so many tourists present in the palace that even our tour guide was astonished.

The beautiful lapis furniture!

Old, but relevant: Golden apple marzipan tree.

I mention the extravagance of the palace not to inform you about the excesses of the tsars and tsarinas in the 18^th century, but to help you imagine what your thoughts would be if you were a foreign dignitary or ambassador, for example maybe from Britain or France. Would you go to war with a country that had no problems displaying the strength and might of its empire through its lavish palaces while also managing to fund its many successful wars for expansion? The royal family had complete control over their vast empire during the 18^th century, and any sign of revolt against tsarist power was brutally put down and dealt with immediately (for example, the power struggle during the time of Peter the Great). The 18^th century was a time for the Russian Empire to signal to western Europe that is was more than capable of holding onto its power and land and that it was an empire that housed an Enlightened royal family and embraced western ideals. Russia was a formidable foe, and St. Petersburg was the symbol of its power. How many empires in the world have successfully built a city in the middle of nowhere and pulled it off so well that it looks like it has been a part of the landscape for centuries?

Beauty of Peterhof

Posted on May 10, 2014 by eisenthall

Considering what the builders of St. Petersburg have been able to achieve working with water and stone, what the architects, sculptors, and engineers who lived in Peterhof created comes as no surprise. Peterhof is often called St. Petersburg’s most beautiful suburb, and when we visited it last Saturday I could understand why.

a view of the Grand Palace

Peter the Great chose this spot in the early 18th century, and in only ten years two parks (Upper and Lower) and three palaces (Monplaisir, Marly, and the Grand Palace) were completed, along with an amazing collection of fountains and sculptures. People often draw comparisons between Peterhof and Versailles, but we learned from our tour guide that there is a key difference between the fountains at each palace complex. While the fountains of Versailles spew water thanks to pumping from nearby water sources, the fountains of Peterhof depend only on gravity and pressure. Many of the fountains feature wonderful sculptures, and some of them are “trick” fountains that will spray you when you least expect it. (Apparently Peter the Great liked to play pranks.)

Triton

Rastrelli’s Oak fountain – nearby a hidden trick fountain sprayed tourists

I first learned about Peterhof in our Conversation class at MSU. The parks and fountains seemed totally beautiful, and seeing them in real life was even better than I had expected.
A collection of short clips of some of the fountains in motion (plus the Baltic Sea), with Reinhold Glière’s Hymn of St. Petersburg, which played while the Grand Cascade was turned on:

"The Most Abstract and Intentional City"

Posted on May 5, 2014 by browninj

There was something I missed when I visited St. Petersburg the first time around. In the bright summer weather, the city felt like an artificial copy of any other European capital. But the dramatic clouds, cold, and rain during this first week of May reminded me that this was not just another European city. St. Petersburg was built on willpower and immense human sacrifice in the image of a dream, and it rose as a hyper-rational city on, perhaps, the most irrational of locations. Petersburg is indeed artificial, but that was the intent from the very beginning. The “intentional city” was constructed as an idealistic view of what Peter I wanted Russia to be.[1] It was a window hacked into Europe and, from what was a once Swedish swamp, Peter I and his successors projected the image of a vast empire. It was the Russian Empire as it wanted to be seen; a third Rome with the world’s largest army eventually controlling 1/6^th of the world’s landmass; ordered, precise, and equal in every way to the European empires.

Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great. It is known as the Bronze Horseman due to Pushkin’s 1833 poem of the same name.

For this abstract idea, the city is beautiful. At first, I took its order and European style as a sort of cold soullessness, particularly when compared to the hodge-podge of golden cupolas and skyscrapers bursting out of Moscow. In comparison, St. Petersburg seems almost like a dead city, but in a sense it was never living. Up until the revolution, it was a hope and a dream belonging to the ruling classes that first sought to follow the West and then a more particular Russian path. The city and what it represented were illusory and somewhat intangible. Russian literature is rife with examples of Petersburg inducing hallucinations, playing party to supernatural visions, and simply playing tricks on viewer’s eyes.[2] In a more concrete sense, her gleaming aristocratic facades concealed slums, shanties, disease, and poverty. But the despite all of this, the imperial vision remained. Before the revolution, it was a hopeful vision of the present and the future and now it seems a monument to the dreams of the past.

A view of the Griboedov Canal near Haymarket Square, demonstrating the typical size, shape, and style of most of the buildings near the city center.

There is a Japanese expression, “mono no aware” that can be translated as a “sensitivity to ephemera”. It is a melancholy, nostalgic beauty that arises from an awareness of the transience of things. It is hard to walk along the Nevsky Prospekt and through the Hermitage without acquiring a certain degree of wistfulness for the unrealized projections of Imperial pomp and wealth that collapsed in 1917.

[1] and title source: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes from the Underground; translated and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993). 6.

[2] Just looking at the literature for this course, Crime and Punishment, The Nose, The Bronze Horseman, and The Overcoat all contain elements of the city inducing hallucinations or harboring supernatural events.

Carleton Moscow & Beyond 2014

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Category Archives: Seat of the Empire