I’m back in Wooster, having spent ten days in Moscow and another three in St. Petersburg, but I still have some images to post, including these:
Leaving Moscow
View of Podolsk from Dubrovitsa
Nikita and I were accompanied by Douglas Smith, an American historian of Russia who is currently working on a study of the Russian nobility in the years immediately following the Revolution of 1917. The nobility, dvorianstvo in Russian, was a small but very diverse group. Some of its members were extremely rich (the aristocracy) and others not much better off than the serfs. Most were somewhere in the middle, leading comfortable if modest lives in the country. The wealthiest of the middle gentry had small houses in the city (like those pictured in a previous post) and respectable positions at court or in the civil service.
The first estate that we visited, Ostafyevo, belonged to a noble family in this particular layer of Russian society. Built by Prince Andrei Ivanovich Vyazemsky in the first years of the nineteenth century, it is famous as the home of his son, Pyotr Andreevich Vyazemsky (1792-1878), a Romantic poet and statesman, who is best known to Russians as a close friend of Alexander Pushkin (Russia’s greatest poet) and of many of the Decembrists, the army officers who staged an uprising against the Tsar in December of 1825. At Ostafievo, the manor house is in the midst of extensive renovation. The park, however, is in such good condition that it is still possible to imagine Prince Andrei strolling its tree lined allies and gazing at its attractions (bridges, streams, sculptures, artificial hills and ruins) with his poet friends.
The Manor House At Ostafievo
Peter and Nikita On a Tree-Lined Path at Ostafievo
Doug Smith and Alexander Pushkin In The Park At Ostafievo
The next estate that we saw was Dubrovitsa, constructed in the early 19th century by a member of the hugely wealthy Golitsyn family. The Golitsyns, who occupied an important place at the Imperial Court for centuries, were part of the aristocracy. They owned grand palaces in Russia’s major cities and country estates throughout the Russian Empire. Their wealth was based on the labor of thousands and thousands of serfs.
Dubrovitsa’s manor house, built in neo-classical style, now serves as the home of an institute for animal husbandry. The original church, a kind of Russian adaptation of the Italian Baroque, still stands but the park, for the most part, no longer exists. However, Nikita, Doug and I were particularly taken with the manner in which one of the park’s few surviving attractions, a large man-made hill crowned by a fenced in peak with views of the countryside, has been adapted to a contemporary rather pagan purpose. Lovers have placed initialed locks all along the fence, apparently a symbol of the expectation that their hearts will remained locked (forever), kind of like a tattoo or initials carved into a tree or spray-painted on an overpass.
The Golitsyn Estate At Dubrovitsa
The Church of the Sign of the Holy Virgin At Dubrovitsa
Contemporary Use of An Attraction In the Park At Dubrovitsa
Natasha + Dima
Sveta + Roma
The third and final Podolsk usad’ba that we visited, Shapova, was much more modest than the first two. It was also interesting to us because it has never been restored or turned into a tourist attraction. Rather it has been left in a state of disrepair. Unfortunately, hundreds of Russian country estates remain in this condition.
Facade Of The Manor House At Shapova
Doug At The Entrance To The Manor House At Shapova
Neighborhood Girls Smoke And Listen To Music On The Porch Of The Manor House
As anyone who has taken Professor Schilling’s course on the English country house knows, these buildings along with architectural plans and written accounts of life in the countryside are excellent sources for historians which shed light on ways of life as well as elite views of society and the world.
Returning To Moscow