About the Book
From the royal pew of Ivan the Terrible, to Catherine the Great's use of landscape, to the struggles between the Orthodox Church and preservationists in post-Soviet Yaroslavl-across five centuries of Russian history, Russian leaders have used architecture to project unity, identity, and power. Church architecture has inspired national cohesion and justified political control while representing the claims of religion in brick, wood, and stone. The architectural vocabulary of the Soviet state celebrated industrialization, mechanization, and communal life. Buildings and landscapes have expressed utopian urges as well as lofty spiritual goals. Country houses and memorials have encoded their own messages. In Architectures of Russian Identity, James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland gather a group of authors from a wide variety of backgrounds-including history and architectural history, linguistics, literary studies, geography, and political science-to survey the political and symbolic meanings of many different kinds of structures.
Fourteen heavily illustrated chapters demonstrate the remarkable fertility of the theme of architecture, broadly defined, for a range of fields dealing with Russia and its surrounding territories. The authors engage key terms in contemporary historiography-identity, nationality, visual culture-and assess the applications of each in Russian contexts.
About the Author :
James Cracraft is Professor of History and University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture. Daniel Rowland is Director of the Gaines Center for the Humanities at the University of Kentucky and has published extensively on early modern Russian political culture.
Review :
"Although architectural history intersects with other disciplines, for example, history, anthropology, sociology, and politics, those fields have not traditionally made architecture a primary concern. In recent years, all that has changed. The essays in Architectures of Russian Identity are by historians primarily, but linguistics, literature, geography, and political science are also represented. Despite the diverse academic disciplines of its contributors, the book is remarkably seamless in tone and methodology, perhaps because architecture has long been understood as an art particularly rich in social and historical symbolism."-Janet Kennedy, Indiana University, The Russian Review Vol 63 No 3, July 2004 "This is a volume which engages with many popular scholarly concerns of recent times, for example the study of identity, nationalism, Orientalism, colonialism, memory, and the invention of tradition. It also illustrates very well the recent erosion of boundaries between academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Surveying a period of over four hundred and fifty years, from the age of Ivan the Terrible to the post-Soviet era, the fourteen contributors approach subjects such as architecture, town planning, painting, and sculpture from a variety of perspectives, including the perspectives of intellectual history, literary history, and political science as well as architectural history and the history of art. In the process they persistently explore the contexts in which various artifacts, buildings, gardens, designs, literary works, representations of landscape, and monuments were produced and the meanings that they may yield... The volume has a pleasing coherence. This merit is partly due to judicious editing and cross-referencing. However, it also stems from the consistency of the contributors' multidisciplinary approach and the recurrence of certain themes, notably the exploitation of buildings or other artifacts for political purposes and their function as a means of establishing, confirming or reformulating national identity. Moreover, the standard of scholarship (supported by plentiful black-and-white illustrations) is consistently high. Scholars working in this relatively unploughed territory are therefore likely to find the volume a useful source of reference and inspiration for many years to come."-Derek Offord, University of Bristol, Slavonica, vol. 11 no. 1, April 2005 "For the most part this is a book about the many identities of Russia's built environment and the truths that unfold from them... This is an important book; really the first of its kind, so far as this reviewer knows, to attempt interpreting Russian architectural history. Letting the artifacts speak for themselves is a splendid idea, one that could easily lend itself to other works of this type. These are scholarly essays, well documented and adequately illustrated."-Albert J. Schmidt, The George Washington University, Slavic Review vol. 64 no. 2, Summer 2005 "This fascinating, highly rewarding book performs a pioneering role in our fast-growing studies of national identity formation. It adds the largely hitherto ignored element-architecture-in the creation of a self-image for the Russian state, its rules, and citizens... This innovative and informative book is highly recommended, both for classroom instruction and individual enjoyment."-Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Columbia University, Canadian Journal of History, April 2005 "The quality of the essays in the Architectures of Russian Identity collection is remarkable. A number of the authors are well-known specialists in the area and fully live up to their reputations. Despite the variety of topics, the book forms a coherent whole: several pairs and groupings of essays interconnect and reinforce each other in interesting ways, demonstrating the editors' ability to unite diverse themes and approaches in one volume."-Robert Crummey, University of California, Davis "Architectures of Russian Identity, 1500 to the Present, opens a window onto a vast and little-known world. From St. Petersburg to Tashkent, from the time of Ivan the Terrible to the period of rebuilding after the collapse of the Soviet regime, architecture has played a key role in debates about religion, politics, and society across the far-flung Russian territories. James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland have done an excellent job of illuminating, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the importance of design in any assessment of the rich and turbulent history that gave rise to such things as Boris Godunov's fortresses, the magnificent country estates in the time of Catherine the Great, and the carefully preserved churches and palaces of post-Soviet Russia."-Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois at Chicago
