saint basil's cathedral as a symbol of the otherness of russia

Saint Basil's Cathedral as a Symbol of the Otherness of RussiaAuthor(s): Irena Grudzinska GrossSource: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1991), pp. 178-188Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40246780 .

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Saint Basil's Cathedral as a Symbol of the Otherness of Russia

IRENA GRUDZINSKA GROSS

In travel literature, it is not the travelling - the movement itself - that is of interest but rather the encounter of consciousness with a new reality, and the ensuing effort of confronting, sorting, and describing. The travel memoir is a place, locus, in which we can observe these operations of making sense as they unfold. The genre has a double nature. The word "travel" in the name of the genre (travel memoir) denotes description, "memoir" the traveller's consciousness. The action of describing includes quoting - of history, of other traditional and authoritative works - while the action of witnessing should show us a mind at work. The double nature of the genre shows the functioning of cultural descriptions and the origin of biases and prejudices, or, more generally, the limitations of individual inquiry into a field as complex as culture.

If a nation's culture resides in its shared, non-hereditary memory,1 it is through tradition that culture is established, built up, transmitted, and modified. A nation's self-image, and the image it holds of the other nations, are part of that memory. The ideas of normalcy and abnormality, of what is the center and what is margin, of us and them, are at the basis of self-image. The travel memoir, showing us the traveller at work, opens to analysis the uses and abuses of these concepts. A travel account is an agreed-upon way of talking about "them" among "ourselves," and can reveal the weight of tradition one has necessarily to bring along on one's (written) journeys. To be a traveller in a foreign country, especially one

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 28, No. 2, 1991. Copyright © 1991. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.



SAINT BASIL'S CATHEDRAL 179

who is planning to write about the visit, is similar to being a diplomat: the individual is submerged in the group, and the group's characteristics -

being a Frenchman or an aristocrat - take precedence over the personal. A culture and its memory are not only a repository of texts, beliefs, and

codified behavior, but also a mechanism which produces further, similar texts and behavior.2 The travel memoir - a description of another culture - is one of the ways in which the West-European culture described itself. The non- individual, group character of the travel memoir is visible in two basic methods emmployed in the genre: comparison and

quotation. Comparison is the activity of an individual traveller, while

quotation - repetition of already-uttered words - refers to the communal, guidebook-like information necessarily included in the travel memoir. The traveller's identity is built on quotation, and most of the quoted material is based on analogy and comparison. It is more accurate to say that comparison and quotation are the mental activities that organize the

writing and reading of the travel memoir, and, perhaps, the travelling itself.

As the travellers journey and write about it, they re-state their cultural

identity, measuring it constantly against the new reality. Indeed, it is an effort of restatement, not of creating anew. Travel discoveries build on the already known, rarely radically changing the framework of the traveller's cultural identity. The meaning of "learning through travel" is cumula- tive and corrective rather than subversive: "as the traveller moves for- ward, either observing by himself or reading the accounts of others, he loses a prejudice, develops his spirit, purifies his taste, enlarges his mind. . . ."3 In travelling, which is here likened to reading, the outside view of another culture does not liberate or extricate the traveller from his own culture and tradition.

While writing about foreign countries, travellers convey their impressions by comparing what they describe with sights better known to their future public. They translate what they see into terms comprehensible to the reader. The new is therefore measured against the standard, the normal or, if abnormality is detected, against the standard, "home" abnor-

mality. Only rarely is a corresponding "normal" term found with which to

compare and elucidate the foreign object. If such a situation occurs, it is a result of the decision by the writer that the thing described is outside any norm.

For centuries many writers thought that Russia belonged to a radically



180 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

alien civilization. It was a country that was not European, but neither was it Asiatic. The writers attempted to compare various aspects of what they saw in Russia with corresponding phenomena in Europe or "the Orient," but they were unable to grasp once and for all the nature of this differ- ence. The difficulty - inherent in the enormous complexity of the terms

"Europe," "the Orient," and "Russia" - did not discourage them: travellers have to compare, they cannot refer to objects for which they do not have any linguistic representation. The parallelism, after all, is "the most common form of the principle of identity."4 Therefore, even things that are declared incomparable are described by comparison, albeit an unusual one. Such was the case with the descriptions of Moscow's Cathedral of Saint Basil.

The Cathedral was built between 1553-1560 (or 1555-1561, depend- ing on sources) to commemorate Ivan the Terrible's 1552 victory over the Tartars. It is composed of a central tower surrounded by eight small churches, each with a dome; all nine towers are raised on a podium. Each of the domes differs from the others, their exterior bright with a variety of colors. Originally, the structure was white, and the colors were added a century after the church had been completed. Although it had clear forerunners in the churches at Kolomenskoe and Diakovo, its architecture represents the most successful attempt at translating into masonry the Russian medieval wooden church structures. It is so different from the buildings traditionally used for Western Christian worship that no simple analogy can describe it. "This boldest departure from classic or Byzantine architecture violates the academic laws of symmetry and proportion as understood by the Western world, and the structure is uniquely medieval Russian in content, form, technique, decoration, and feeling."5

Western nineteenth- and twentieth-century travel writers attempted to convey the uniqueness of the building by comparing it to the most unusual objects. In 1847, August von Haxthausen, author of a treatise on Russia, wrote that Saint Basil "reflects all the colors of the rainbow, and from a certain distance or in foggy weather one might think it was a huge dragon ready to pounce on its prey."6 Italian writer and painter Carlo Levi compared it to "the back of a gigantic animal ... a bunch of flowers or strange vegetables ... a natural object, an elaborate plant."7 Nestor Considérant likened the church to "a gigantic plate loaded with flowers and fruit, on top of which a mass of rainbow-colored melons and pineap-




pies has been mounted."8 "I counted seventeen cupolas on the roof of Vassili-Blagennoi," wrote Jacques Angelot, "each is different by its form, color, proportions: one resembles a ball, another a pineapple."9 Colin

Simpson described the cupolas as "colossal cloves of garlic centrifuged into twirled shapes in various paintpots; and ... as colored onions that have been incised by pineapples."10 And Waldo Frank called it "an intri- cately petalled giant flower."11

There were writers who compared Saint Basil to human artifacts. The crosses atop the domes of the Cathedral reminded Walter Benjamin of

"gigantic earrings attached to the sky."12 Mario Praz called it "a massive

paperweight liberty avant la lettre,"13 while Jozef Lubomirski thought it was like "an eccentric piece of furniture - heavy, fantastic, bizarre -

forgotten in an empty drawing room on the day of moving."14 Usually, however, writers found comparable objects in the realm of nature. It was

by no means an obvious way of describing a church, and often frustration was expressed at the elusiveness and bizarre character of the object of

description. "This building is always holding something back," com-

plained Benjamin (25). Nestor Considérant feels unable to give "an ac-

ceptably precise idea of this architecture that departs from nowhere and arrives at nothing."15 Even the master painter of unusual sights -

Théophile Gautier - declared that he "will not seek comparisons in order to give an idea of a thing that has neither prototype nor similarity." He said this, though, after having already compared the building "to a gigantic madrepore, a colossal crystallization, a grotto of stalactites turned

upside down."16 All the descriptions found here share two elements: bewilderment,

expressed by the unusual second term of comparison, and a feeling of the

grandeur of the object they face. Whatever Saint Basil is compared to, be it "madrepore," "paperweight," or "a clove of garlic," it is always "gigantic," "massive," and "colossal." It had a "groznyi" - terrible - look, just like that of its founder - a look at the same time terrifying (in the reli-

gious meaning of the word), imposing, and intimidating. But the main element of these descriptions is frustration, inability to "ambush" the

building (Benjamin's expression), to describe it in a conventional way. Usually, buildings are compared to buildings, people to people, and land-

scapes to landscapes. The "incomparable" Saint Basil is compared to the

objects outside the pool of things buildings are normally likened to. Not




only does it not belong to architecture; it does not belong to the man- made realm of culture. Instead, it reminds writers of fruits, flowers, and

vegetables, and becomes a part of nature rather than civilization. The encounter with Saint Basil Cathedral was in fact shocking for the

writers. The building is placed at the end of the Red Square - a large, empty space, "entirely enclosed yet ... infinite and open,"17 not truly flat, but not raised either. It borders the square together with other unusual buildings; in description, it was traditionally juxtaposed to the

architecturally eclectic but more classical Kremlin. For the last several

decades, it has formed a pair of opposites with the Lenin Mausoleum - an

opposition in which Saint Basil consists predominantly of surface, while the mausoleum is "sinking into the ground like a root" (Frank 207). "It is not only unlike any other building anywhere, it isn't even shaped like a

building" (Simpson 222). Saint Basil stands out as an object that defies

description. Although their journeys were undertaken in search of something new,

the writers express surprise and shock at finding an object so unlike any- thing else. The comparisons they reach for seem capricious, outrageous, arbitrary. And yet the pineapple, the onion, the vegetable are repeated from book to book. Each surprise, each description is controlled by previ- ous surprises and descriptions, and by the general framework of culture in which the writer operates. The writer is facing an elaborate artwork, a

magnificent building. The building does not fulfill the expectations of the writer's canon of beauty. The writer goes back to his first impression - that of surprise and, most often, enchantment - and revises it. I thought it was

art, he says, but when I looked more closely I saw it was nature. It has

beauty, I agree, but it is the beauty of an artichoke: the unself-conscious

beauty of a natural object. It is not a product of civilization: it is, like

nature, a result of a caprice. Therefore, it does not need to disturb our ideas about culture.

This reasoning did not need to be made anew by each of the writers: it could be found in books that the writer must have read in order to understand what the Cathedral represented. In these books the Cathe- dral's very own history placed it outside civilization. The story has it that Ivan the Terrible had the builder of the Cathedral blinded so as to prevent him from creating a similar masterpiece. Most probably untrue, the story stuck to the building and it is a rare book that does not mention it. The insistence with which it is repeated, even when doubt is expressed as to its




truthfulness, is analogical to the flowering of strange comparisons. To the writer, the cathedral looks like a caprice and is a result of caprice, an accident of history, rather than a product of an orderly development of a civilization. The lack of order in its structure corresponds to lack of order in its origin and, instead of being an example of the uniquely Russian culture the writers were looking for, it becomes a strange growth, an accidental protuberance, or "a dream of a sick mind implemented by a

crazy architect."18 Saint Basil ceases to be part of culture; instead it

belongs to nature. To appreciate how the operation of exclusion works, I would like to

turn to what was perhaps the most representative nineteenth-century description of Russia - Astolphe de Custine's La Russie en 1839. Custine

approaches the subject of Moscow and Saint Basil only in his third volume, when the reader is already versed in Russian matters, and has been

given a tour of Saint Petersburg. Custine recounts his arrival in Moscow, and describes a magnificent, distant view of the city, hundreds of whose churches were still in existence. "This first view of the capital of the Slavonians, rising brightly in the cold solitudes of the Christian East, produces an impression that cannot easily be forgotten. Before the eye, spreads a landscape, wild and gloomy, but grand as the ocean; and to animate the dreary void, there rises a poetical city, whose architecture is without either a designating name or a known model."19 This wonderful

image of the city from the distance is soon juxtaposed to the prosaic character of its streets. This contrast between the splendid exterior and the dull interior - between superficial richness and interior poverty -

expresses the very nature of what Custine understands as the Orient. "On

entering Moscow we feel as if waking from a brilliant dream to a very dull and prosaic reality - a vast city without any real monuments of art, that is to say, without a single object worthy of a discriminative and thoughtful approbation." The same contrast functions on other levels of the description: the Saint Basil Cathedral's external beauty is opposed to its internal

ugliness, the Church's Oriental vivaciousness to the almost-classical re- straint of the Kremlin, its happy, life-affirming colorfulness to the terrible fate of its architect.

Although he declared a moment before that Moscow has not a single object of art worthy of approbation, the Church of Saint Basil is for Custine "the most singular, if not the most beautiful edifice of Russia." The description that follows displays brilliantly, in a crescendo, all the




vegetables and mythical animals of other comparisons quoted here. "It

appears an immense cluster of little turrets forming a bush, or rather giving the idea of some kind of tropical fruit all bristled over with excrescences," he says at the beginning, only to move from the realm of nature to that of

strange artifacts: "or a crystallization of a thousand rays, the enamelled skin of a serpent, the most highly polished enamel of China." Then the

comparison moves to the sphere of mythical animals: "It is like gilded scales of fish, the skins of serpents stretched on piles of misshapen stones, heads of dragons, shells of chameleons," and continues into a purely visual series of associations: "altar ornaments, priests' robes, and the whole is

topped by spires so painted that they resemble rich materials of reddish brown silk." The nouns "cluster," "brush," "bouquet," and "excrescences," indicate a chaotic, unorganized, organic character of the Church, so chaotic as to defy all orderly description. This "masterpiece of caprice" can

hardly be imagined as a place of worship and "the men who go to worship God in this box of glazed fruits are not Christians." Soon the splendid outside is sadly contrasted with the inside of the Church, which is "nar- row, mean, without character." The richness of colors and shapes slowly becomes incomprehensible; the traveller's attention wanes for lack of form. It is not art, because it is not harmonious. So, although the Church is beautiful, it is not worthy of "thoughtful approbation."

Custine complained bitterly about the unoriginality of architecture in Saint Petersburg. His initial reaction to Moscow and Saint Basil is one of relief - finally something real and original! But the closer look revealed a

truly different city and a truly different church; his enthusiasm weakened. Another closer look and he had nothing more than waning patience for this "box of glazed fruits"; the patience disappeared when he remembered the fate of the architect. He recalls the Church's history: "this enervating work caused the misfortune of the man who accomplished it." Hence a

description that started with the highest praise (the most beautiful building in Russia) deteriorated into a hostile rejection: the Church is judged and condemned.

It is, in fact, the history of Saint Basil Cathedral that allows the writer to move one step away from the breathtaking image of the church into the security of cultural certitudes. From the cultural perspective the building can be handled as just one in a series of artifacts, reflecting the nature of Russia. The comments on the story about the architect, then, reflect an overall attitude of the writer towards Russia. Doubtful as to the truthful-




ness of the anecdote, Custine nevertheless insists on it because he finds it characteristic of the "Oriental" nature of Russian society. Lucky artist, he says; since the work was so successful he was not impaled but only blinded. His irony points to the reversal of the ways in which the success of an artist is treated in the "Oriental" society and serves as the "final word" on the Cathedral's beauty.

Other writers dealt with this story according to their needs. "A master with rather strange and unpleasant moods!" writes strongly pro- tsarist Haxthausen about Ivan the Terrible blinding the artist; but soon he rushes to redeem the tsar anyhow: "Curiously enough, in the memory and opinion of the Russian people and in extant popular legends he was a pious and good-natured man who could easily be duped and who was occasionally inclined to play practical jokes. . . . Legend always tells a version different from the one history tells and yet is just as true. What we call history presents the truth from one point of view only" (20). In that

way Haxthasusen is not confronted with the story as an illustration of Russian history but approaches it from the methodological point of view: without denying its truthfulness, he decides it is only half-true.

The third case is that of the already quoted Théophile Gautier. He visited Russia twenty years after Custine. Many changes, most of all the reforms of the new tsar Alexander II, improved the Russian situation. Also, in the years 1839-1845, Saint Basil's interior was partially frescoed

(Voyce 115). When Custine saw it, its walls were simply white, which

explains the shock of the confrontation between the Church's interior and exterior. Gautier went to Russia to write a book about Russian art, and the

project depended heavily on the Russian government's financial backing. Gautier, although not known to be afraid or opportunistic, wrote his

description of Russia in a "pittoresque," a-political vein similar to the style of his celebrated description of Spain. He very much liked - and described with gusto - both the exterior and the interior of the Church. "It would be difficult to imagine," runs his comment on the story of the blinding of its architect, "a cruelty more flattering in its jealousy, and this Ivan the Terrible must have been at bottom a true artist, an impassioned dilettante. This ferocity in matters of art displeases us less than indifference" (1: 379). It is, of course, Gautier's own indifference that makes him describe the barbaric tyrant as a jealous art-lover - indifference to the sufferings of this

far-away tribe. Custine was not indifferent. But both he, an anti-Russian writer if there




ever was one, and the pro-Russian Haxthausen compare Saint Basil to a dragon. Why was it so? Was the building really similar to a dragon? One answer is that Haxthausen took the comparison from Custine, whom he read and commented upon. Moreover, Gautier read and plagiarized Cus- tine. It is, therefore, a quoted comparison - and the repetition of comparisons is one of the ways in which tradition controls description. But what we see here as well is the binary mind at work. The unexpectedness of the way Saint Basil looks is expressed by the unexpectedness of comparison and is then controlled by the ideological and conceptual dimensions of a writer's culture. Saint Basil is fitted into a proliferation of binary oppositions: removed from culture, it is placed in nature; included in the Orient, it is excluded from the West; seen as a caprice, it is denied a status of a sus- tained work of art; acknowledged as a work of art, it is rejected as a building. The Kremlin, although the work of Italian architects, is seen as Russian, and therefore contrasted with the French Louvre; inside the Red

Square, however, the Kremlin is Western and becomes "a Louvre" opposed to Saint Basil's nativeness. There are here two systems, two "languages"; the reader knows only one of them, the traveller both. Comparison, or more generally, parallelism, is both a translation and an interpretation -

an effort to find synonyms, correspondences, similar meanings. That effort is performed before our eyes by the narrator-traveller. He is attracted by the unusual, which he is unable to render without using known and accepted notions, the "déjà vu." The dragon of Haxthausen's description, and the bouquets and crystallizations of Gautier's, are related to Custine's description which, in turn, is indebted to many prior descriptions. Hence the comparisons, as original as they seem, are an outgrowth of a collaborative effort modified by the talent each writer brings to the task.

But the uses to which the image is put vary a great deal. All three examples, taken as they are from representative nineteenth-century de-

scriptions of Russia, show the ideological use of the image of Saint Basil, or, to phrase it differently, the role of the image in the integrated vsion of Russia. An unusual building, it is treated by Custine as typical, capricious- ness being the characteristic of Russian culture; by Haxthausen as not so unusual, after all; and by Gautier as one work of art in the long series of other works of art he has described, thus removing it from the general realm of culture into an aesthetic one and turning it into a matter of taste only. In all cases, however, it is strange and unusual, therefore typical of Russia.




By placing Saint Basil's Cathedral in the realm of nature, by deciding it was "strange" rather than "complicated" or "intricate," the travellers de- prived Russia of its art, i.e. , civilization. This was only one decision in the debate - Was Russia part of Europe or of Asia? The continual reemer- gence of this question lay at the basis of the West's attitude towards Russia. Geography was a way of defining identity, and art-less Russia belonged to Asia. But the placing of Russia in Asia was never final, and the effort of definition had to be repeated with every description. Russia was never simply "Europe" or "Asia," but was always defined in terms of both. And Saint Basil's Cathedral, although similar to a dragon, was nevertheless a building, even if so special as to serve today as a visual

symbol of Russia.

Emory University

NOTES

1. See Iurii Lotman, Lidiia Ginsburg, and Boris Uspenskii, The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 30.

2. Lotman, The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History 65. 3. Larousse du Dixneuvième Siècle (1876) 17: 1206. 4. Tzvetan Todorov, Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1973) 128.

Ail translations are my own, unless indicated otherwise. 5. Arthur Voyce, Moscow and the Roots of Russian Culture (Norman: U of Oklahoma P,

1964) 111. 6. He thought Saint Basil "one of the most unusual and magnificent buildings. See his

Studies on the Interior of Russia (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972) 20.

7. "La schiena di un immenso animale ... un mazzo di fiori o di strani ortaggi ... un

oggetto naturale, un végétale elaborato." In 11 futuro ha un cuore antico (Turin: Einaudi,

1956) 54. 8. "Un immense plat chargé de fleurs et de fruits, et au sommet duquel on a empilé des

melons et des ananas de touts les nuances de Tarc-en-ciel." See Nestor Considérant, La Russie en 1856: Souvenirs de voyage, 2 vols (Bruxelles and Leipzig: Auguste Schnée, 1857) 1: 112-13.

9. Jacques Angeolot, Six mois en Russie (Bruxelles: Wahlen, 1827) 249-50. 10. Colin Simpson, This is Russia (Sydney, Australia: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965)

222. 11. Waldo Frank, Dawn in Russia: The Record of a Journey (New York: Charles Scribner

and Sons. 1932) 201. 12. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986) 22.




13. "Un massiccio posacarte liberty avanti lettera." Mario Praz, // mondo che ho visto (Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 1982) 442.

14- "Un meuble excentrique (lourd, fantastique, bizarre) oublié dans un salon vide le jour d'un déménagement." Jozef Lubomirski, Scènes de la vie militaire en Russie. Le Prince Soldat. Superstitions russes. Impressions de voyage (Paris: Didier, 1873) 296.

15. "Une idée passablement précise de cette architecture qui ne dérive de nulle part et qui n'aboutit à rien." Considérant 112.

16. Théophile Gautier, Russia, trans. Florence Maclntyre Tyson, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: The John Winston Co, 1905) 1: 379.

17. Frank 201. 18. As Alexandre Dumas Père said in his Voyage en Russie (Paris: Hermann, 1960) 482. 19. Astolphe de Custine, The Empire of the Czar (New York: Doubleday, 1989) 393-94

(vol 3: 132 of the original 1845 four'volume French edition by Lavocat in Paris). Other Custine quotations come from pages 393-97 of The Empire of the Czar; additional passages, cut out in the American edition, have been translated for this article from vol. 3: 251-53 of the original.



saint basil's cathedral as a symbol of the otherness of russia

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