blogfromgog / блогизгога: Pushkin

On Saturday we went to Pushkin (or Tsarskoe Selo), which was only about 50 minutes outside of Petersburg. I was still drunk/hung over from the night before, so waking up at 6:30 am to the bucket bath again wasn’t the most pleasant. Ah well. It made for a punchy day.

Morning light on the way to the metro:

In general, I like Pushkin more than Peterhof, as far as imperial palaces and their grounds go. We didn’t get to see all the interesting things that were there (due to time and weather), which was too bad. Perhaps if I had been able to walk around the place alone and away from the decadent brilliant blue and gold palace shining so strangely against the gray sky, I would have enjoyed it more. So like Peterhof, this was a kind of summer palace for the tsars and their families, although Pushkin was more for personal use than for political purposes. So the place is on a more “modest” scale (if one can even use such a word to describe these places). The tourists weren’t quite so annoying, although one could still feel the presence of the 15000 visitors a day, instead of what this place may once have felt like to Pushkin or Akhmatova or even Tolstoy (all who were fans of it—Pushkin even went to school in Pushkin, hence it later being named after him). Once we escaped into the park a little more one felt better. The grounds were not quite as groomed to perfection as at Peterhof, but one still felt the controlled and guided hand of man in creating the park.

Pushkin has been touched by three different architects, but most significantly perhaps by the Italian Rastrelli, who created the palace in its baroque style, (under Elizabeth). When Catherine inherited the palace she didn’t like and so hired Charles Cameron to redo some parts and add on sections. Her son Paul did some bad stuff to the palace, such as taking out many of its treasures to bring them to his own palace. But this stuff is boring, so here are some pictures.

Outside of the Palace:

I can’t show you pictures of the amber room since photographs are prohibited, but if you’re really interested you can no doubt find some online. The amber room is of course made entirely out of amber (a really popular stone in Russia), and all the amber came from rich deposits of it along the Baltic Coast. The room is made up of these huge amber panels (pieces together by various size pieces of the stone). There are also these really amazing small mosaics made from precious and semi precious stones that look like real paintings. So Elizabeth first installed these amber panels in the winter palace (now part of the Hermitage) and later moved them to the Catherine Palace at Pushkin. Rastrelli oversaw their implementation, creating 48 square meters of mosaics. The whole thing was completed in 1770. During WWII the Nazis dismantled and stole all the panels (despite the Russians failed attempt to disguise the room by covering it over with wallpaper). The palace was bombed horribly and little was salvaged of the place. The amber panels were never located and there is much speculation about where they could be, if they’re not completely lost or destroyed at this point. So in 1982 the amber room’s restoration began, and ultimately cost over 12 million dollars. The room was finished in 2003 right in time for Petersburg’s 300th birthday. Alisa’s host mother told her that she remembers seeing the original amber room before it was destroyed in the war. Pretty cool.

If nothing else, one really admires the dedication it took to recreate basically everything in the palace. For example, when restoring the molding on one particular dome, over 40,000 pieces of recovered plaster had to salvaged and re-pieced together (a task which took 26 years).

The palace and grounds were interesting architecturally as you could see how the things continued to change stylistically under different rulers. I did not really like the blue baroque palace, even if I was less disappointed overall with the palace than I was with Peterhof. The gilding seemed to have more purpose and the organization of the rooms was more tasteful. Inside the palace I did appreciate the baroque style more and the elegance of the woodcarving on the walls and the interesting use of color contrasts (whether it was deep blue with gold or milky white with crimson red).

Cool Doorknob:

I also enjoyed the parks more than at Peterhof. Going with Professor Dorontchenkov was particularly interesting because he was able to open up a whole new way of experiencing gardens and parks by looking more closely at the imperial and aesthetic motivations behind them. It was strange to see different styles from different civilizations migrating into this northern landscape, such as Egyptian obelisks, or a roman villa, Italian gondolas, phony ruins, a Chinese temple, a Turkish bath that looked like a mosque, or even an Egyptian pyramid. I kind of felt like I was once again in a strange Epcot center for aristocrats. The sites were beautiful, like the admiralty over the English park and pond, even if they felt completely artificial.

French Garden:

Lake:

Rostral column:

Famous sculpture:

Italian Bridge:

It was fun to try to pick out the changes in style and how they fit in with the personal whims of whomever was in power or in response to social, political, or historical influences (such as Catherine’s neoclassical alterations in tune with the age of enlightenment). Professor Dorontchenkov explained how parks are tricky places to figure out and read properly. As you walk through a park or garden you have to watch how it unfolds before you and how the different elements combine. One has to be especially attentive to the meaning of a park or garden since at times they pretend to be nature, but aren’t natural, and nature in and of itself has no real meaning. So it was fascinating to observe how parks can be added to, altered, destroyed with the changing contexts and what each of those stages add to the overall effect.

The park can be designed for personal experience and contemplation, to evoke personal memory, lost love, (basically non imperial feelings), but it can still acquire a political meaning, such as with the placement of an obelisk that has military and political connotations.
Like this one:

Prior, I had pretty much ignored or been unaware of parks as holding a whole lot of meaning other than a place to walk around for a few hours, but this park was set up very interestingly and deliberately as almost its own universe, where you could walk the grounds as if they were a microcosm of the Russian empire. We walked to the literal “frontiers” of the park where we’d run into a Chinese village (the border of the Russian empire). Having this Chinese building here was also interesting in how it expressed European ideas of the orient, and the use of oriental visual language to express western cultural values (oh art history talk). The placement of China on the border of the park also expresses Russia’s prior colonial ambitions, not to mention a kind of reference to Russia’s own oriental heritage by including China in its imperial park.

On of the most bizarre elements in the park were the imitations of Roman ruins. Professor Evdokimova made an interesting statement in regard to this obsession Romantics had with ruins: that the goal to reach infinity was believed to be achieved through the fragment--by not believing in a state of completeness, and so a Roman ruin for example can sort of represent that idea of fragmentation. Thus by contemplating these ruins one could perhaps get a more cosmic and eternal sense of life and time, seeing as ruins are supposed to represent the passing of time, by literally showing the affects of time and nature (with man’s help in this case) on their surfaces. As a Romantic, one is supposed to be plunged into a thoughtful and melancholy mood, where one thinks about the unconquerable forces of time and nature on human civilization and life, and becomes aware of the beauty and tragedy and transience of life. So these ruins show the process of civilization becoming reintegrated with nature by means of destruction (time). Exciting, I know. Regardless, the column looked pretty ridiculous, not to mention ugly.

I did like the brick admiralty for their simplicity and symmetry and made me think of the more simple architecture Peter would have enjoyed.
You can see it across the lake, through the trees:

The Egyptian pyramid under which Catherine buried her favorite dog was pretty weird and added to the surreality of some of the parks. Although I guess plopping down a little pyramid wasn’t so odd back then, because Egyptian periods were supposed to represent eternity (another good thing to contemplate for a Romantic I guess.