Architecture of Oblivion : : Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia / / Andreas Schönle.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Schönle, Andreas,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2021]; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (295 p.) :; 28 illustrations

Despite attempts to promote the aesthetics of ruins in Russia—from Catherine the Great's construction of fake ruins in imperial parks to Josef Brodsky's elegiac meditations—ruins have never achieved the status they enjoy in Western Europe. While the Soviet Union was notorious for leveling churches, post-Soviet Russia has only intensified the practice of massive destruction and reconstruction. Architecture of Oblivion examines the role of ruins in the development of Russia's historical consciousness from the eighteenth century to the present. Investigating the meaning and functions ruins have acquired in Russian culture, Schönle looks at ideological reasons for the current disregard for the value of ruins and historical buildings, in particular by political authorities, and reveals how ruins have often become a site of resistance to official ideology and an invitation to map out alternative visions of history and of statehood. An interdisciplinary study of Russia's response to ruins has never been attempted, although the topic of ruins has garnered considerable interest in Western Europe and in the U.S. This original work from a leading authority on the subject will appeal to historians of Russian culture and thought, literature and art scholars, and general readers interested in ruins.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Illustration List -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION -- 1-Ruins and Modernity in Russian Pre- Romanticism -- 2-Lessons of the Fire of Moscow in 1812 -- 3-Aesthetics and Politics in the Romantic Fashion for Ruins -- 4 -Between Erasure and Nurture-Ruins and the Modern City in the Depth of Times -- 5-Post-Revolutionary Urban Decay-From the Return of Random Beauty to the Dystopian Loss of Self -- 6-The Ruins of the Blockade of Leningrad and the Aesthetic Struggle for Survival -- 7-Ruin as Transition to Timelessness in Joseph Brodsky's Poetry -- 8-The Ruin as Alternative Reality-Paper Architects and the Vitality of Decay -- CONCLUSION -- Notes -- Index