The new book by Grigory Revzin, published by Strelka Press, is a collection of articles from the author's column of 2018 in Kommersant Weekend - a project known to many. The text, however, has been largely revised: according to the author, the anti-plagiarism system of the Higher School of Economics rated 49% of it as completely new; the preface says that the text has been rewritten "by about three quarters." The book received a rather rigid two-level structure of chapters, but retained the essayistic poetry of their content.
The story about the city is not conducted in a distant scientific language, although the book cannot be called a popular one. The author can mock his erudition as much as he likes, but it is significant and becomes the basis for a personal, and at the same time, very well-founded view of the phenomenon of the city as a cultural phenomenon, built through an appeal to ancient and deep themes. Suffice it to say that the city, or urban community in the book is divided into four "castes": power, priests, workers, merchants - they are devoted to the main sections that structure the narrative.
We publish the chapter "Monument of architecture" from the section "Priests" - in particular, it was not in the Weekend project. And here is Grigory Revzin's commentary on the book.
Buy a book you can visit the Strelka store:
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Architectural monument
Of the urban themes, the preservation of monuments is the only subject of general interest. As always in such cases, there is a sense of participation in this issue (and therefore it is difficult to reach agreement here). The monument more or less belongs to all those persons who are not indifferent to its value. The circle of these persons is not formally limited, one can enter it and one can fall out of it.
To be present in a circle, the following rules must be observed. The monument cannot be touched, and it is required to drive away all those who are trying. Also, you can not touch the ground next to it for any construction purposes. Any attempts to adapt a building to modernity - reconstruction, completion, renovation, restoration - are considered a crime. Only restoration is recognized as possible, but it is always under suspicion, and true connoisseurs often tell us with restrained sorrow that this or that building has been “restored” to death. However, it is possible to fight for the organization of a park around the monument. Do not overlap the views of it from places from where it can be seen in clear, good weather. Plants planted at the monument should also not overlap the views of it. But chop down those that
already blocked, it is also impossible. Some trees are equated in value with monuments. One can speak aloud near the monument, but some statements can be declared heretical.
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I would say that there is a taste of Tertullian's great formula "I believe because it is absurd." This is a cult, and this is a late cult. Pausanias tells us that in the temple of Hera at Olympia (in the 2nd century), some of the columns were marble and some were still wooden, and the wooden columns were gradually replaced with stone ones by donations. This is an important story in the school narrative about the origin of the classic order of wooden posts.
Such a replacement today should be seen as an example of blatant savagery: the wooden columns should have been preserved, instead the monument was falsified to satisfy the vanity of individuals or communities. Under our conditions, the order would never have occurred. Until the end of the 19th century, the idea of rebuilding, reconstructing, restoring the lost building did not raise any special objections: Eugene
Viollet-le-Duc completed the construction of Carcassonne, Notre Dame Cathedral, and Amiens to general European applause (John Ruskin, who condemned this, was a rare exception). However, since the 1920s, the situation has changed, and it seems to me that the matter is not only in the results of the First World War, which destroyed a lot of monuments.
The fact that monuments of architecture and culture, and just old houses, the memory of the authors and inhabitants of which has worn out, are of absolute value, is so self-evident that we do not realize how unique this assessment system is. But this is mysterious.
A hundred-year-old piano, old clothes, old phone, old idea, old scientific work, etc. are definitely less valuable than new ones. There are, of course, antiques markets, but they are essentially insignificant in comparison with the markets of modern consumption. Compare antiques at least only with the visual culture markets in general (and this is a tiny part of consumption) - the cost of a Category B action movie is fundamentally higher than the cost of Malevich's paintings, and this does not surprise anyone, this is in the order of things.
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It seems to me that in order to understand the current status of an architectural monument, one should turn to the cult of relics. The relics function partly like icons. The saint can act through his remains - heal, protect, grant victory, through the relics one can enter into communication with the upper world. Physical remains are a portal to metaphysical space, just like icons. But the relics have differences. They are quantitatively limited and they are associated with death.
An icon is not an image of a saint, but his appearance on the border of reality and superreality (this is the classical theology of an icon), but there can be as many such phenomena. Saint Nicholas is a believer in every consecrated icon of Saint Nicholas. It is different with the relics - their number is finite.
The question of which set of relics of St. Nicholas is real - in Bari (where they were transported in 1087 by the Bari merchants, which is recognized by the Russian Orthodox Church), in the Myra of Lycia (where the real remains of St. Nicholas lie, while the Barians stole by mistake by an outsider the skeleton, which the Greek Orthodox Church claims) or in Venice (where after 1096 some remains from the same church in Myra, which is recognized by both Catholics and Orthodox), were significant. Some of the bones may not be real. While verification is not possible, it is important that the relics imply a value for authenticity.
The value of architectural monuments is arranged according to this model. This is a complex phenomenon, the earlier Renaissance understanding of the monument as a work of antiquity, which is an aesthetic model, is mixed here with the cult of the authenticity of the past. However, today it is considered unacceptable to discuss the quality of a monument based on its aesthetic merits. What matters is not how beautiful it is, but that it is genuine. Moreover, its some imperfection, and especially its destruction, ruinousness, is precisely its value - if the monuments are not too much
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com ruined, they are stripped of plaster to create a greater effect.
Hans Sedlmayr, whom I mentioned in connection with Gothic architecture, became famous not so much for his fundamental book The Emergence of the Cathedral, but for another one called The Loss of the Middle. By "middle" is meant God or, more precisely, the relationship between man and God. Accordingly, we are talking about civilization after or against the background of the death of God. I have already mentioned this in connection with the emergence of architectural chiliasm and the revival of the concept of a city-temple in modern European urban planning.
Zedlmair's book is based on the idea of temple substitutes (he calls them Gesamtkunstwerks, using Richard Wagner's term), which were intended to replace him when God died. The task itself is not devoid of paradox. If there is no God in heaven, then what can replace the temple at all? It is necessary to find sacredness in something else, not only not connected with God, but connected with him in such an unobvious way that the news of his death would not undermine it (or at least not immediately undermine it). In the history of European civilization in the 18th and 20th centuries, Hans Sedlmayr identified seven substitutes for a temple: a landscape park, an architectonic monument, a museum, a bourgeois dwelling, a theater, a world exhibition, and a factory (house for a car). I will note that the priests sometimes engage in the sublimation of the values of other castes to a metaphysical status: of these seven, the “house for the car” is the sublimation of the values of the workers, the world exhibition is for the merchants, and, finally, the bourgeois dwelling is not the value of any caste, but simply inhabitants which the castes have left with their worries. But one way or another, these are all new cults, and the first of them is a landscape park.
We have a great book by the Russian scientist and educator Dmitry Likhachev "The Poetry of Gardens". The park is an image of paradise. The temple is also an image of paradise (and in this sense Zedlmayr's indication that the park is a substitute for the temple is deeply true). The difference is that in the European park, as Likhachev justly and in detail wrote about, paradise is understood more
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like Arcadia than like Eden. The park makes an active use of ancient mythology. However, the use of antique reminiscences is more than typical for the Christian temple iconography of the New Age (and the Middle Ages, albeit in a completely different way). I would like to draw your attention to another feature of the park-temple.
Over the course of about a century, it has evolved from regular French to pictorial English. The French park is the harmony of perfection revealed to us, the kingdom of Plato's geometry. In a sense, this is a "temple of the earth", which is understandable if we keep in mind that in Versailles, the model of all the regular parks of European monarchies, there is a living God - the "sun king". There are many elegant proofs that a landscape English park is an image of the harmony of the world, only this is a different harmony. However, I am inclined to think that this is an image of a harmony that has been lost or, rather, is being lost before our eyes. The proof of this, in my opinion, is that a cult of architectural ruins is emerging in landscape parks.
The ruins, of course, appeared before the landscape parks. Europe was filled with Roman ruins until the 19th century, and the Asian Mediterranean is still filled with them. Ruin in Baroque and Classicism is a classic attribute of the genre “memento mori”, “remember death”, edifying Christian images-sermons, urging the viewer to think about the futility of everything. A ruin is a common type of modern European tombstone. However, in landscape parks, ruins begin to rise.
to be found anew, artificially. This is an indication that the place has a history and looked very different in the past.
I would say an indication that paradise is lost. The ruin is the same Christian symbol, a magic wand broken into pieces. In this sense, we can say that over a century of its active development, the park has evolved from an earthly temple to a heavenly temple, repeating the thousand-year evolution of the temple, and the very haste of this evolution.
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tion proves the validity of Zedlmayr's idea of the park as a substitute for a temple - substitutes do not have a long life.
An architectural ruin is an intermediate link between relics and architectural monuments. It still retains the theme of death. At the same time, the ruin creates a format for the value of an architectural monument, the beauty of plastic imperfection, the randomness of form, and the superiority of ethics over form. In relation to the park ruin, the task of repairing, completing, restoring, adapting for new use is not just absurd, but blasphemous - it is an image of a lost paradise, and not real estate requiring repair.
This whole complex of meanings is inherited by the monuments. At the same time, a ruin in a city is a trigger for the architectural imagination, it triggers a mental reconstruction. Looking at what is left, we imagine the whole. A city with ruins contains a layer of its imaginary reconstructions, sometimes, as, say, in the case of the Roman forums, documented by thousands of drawings, sometimes remaining only in the imagination of people. In a sense, Piranesi's Rome does not exist and never existed in reality, in another - the reality of Rome constantly contains a layer of Piranesi's fantasies. Ruins are an elementary indication of the existence of another world.
Let's put it together. The monuments have absorbed the axiology of ruins, primarily those that were the most important element of the language of the landscape park. The park itself was a substitute for the temple, a kind of answer to the death of God.
In Nietzsche's formula "God is dead" there is a certain not quite obvious meaning. He is somehow overshadowed by the rejection of this death, the belief in his immortality, in the fact that God is outside of time and exists forever. But "God is dead" is not equal to "There is no God." It contains not only a message about this catastrophic loss, but also another - an indication that he used to live. And if he lived and died only now, then the past is a kind of Tabernacle. The power of God was present in him.
And now he's dead. Hence, any remains that have come down to us from the past turn out to be the sought-after half of a broken magic wand. Grasping at it, we can reconstruct the picture of the whole, just as we reconstruct the building that left it from the ruin. And thus find yourself in the world where God is. If we consider that progress has killed God, then we can say that progress has unusually expanded the scope of the sacred in the past. Everywhere, everywhere, in every place, in every carriage shed, just recently, just recently, God was. There is now simply no point where it is not. The entire past has turned into a huge space of hierophany.
