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This monograph examines the contributions of landscape design to authority and to organization of public life in imperial Russia. Analyzing how tsars and nobles inscribed their political aspirations in the gardens they designed or inhabited, this study maps out a distinct trajectory in the meaning of landscape design. Based partly on archival documents, it explores the reasons for Catherine the Great's keen interest in landscape design. It reconstructs Grigorii Potemkin's attempts to transform the Crimea physically and symbolically into the garden of the empire. And it reveals the centrality of the garden for noblemen such as Andrei Bolotov and Alexander Kurakin, who expressed their political philosophy and their anxieties about unstable social relations through landscaping. The book follows the destiny of western aesthetic categories, notably of the picturesque, as they are first adopted, then transformed, and ultimately rejected. It analyzes the historical role and mythological representations of the country estate, along with Leo Tolstoy's fraught commitment to Yasnaya Polyana and his critique of estate mythology in War and Peace. Finally, this study exposes how the current fashion for gardening in Russia, in particular among New Russians, alludes to imperial landscaping culture in order to justify a retreat from the public sphere.
List of contents
Contents: Imperial Self-Cultivation: The View from Tsarskoe Selo - Garden of the Empire: Catherine II's Appropriation of the Crimea - Horticultural Theodicy: The Pragmatics of Wonder (A.T. Bolotov) - Oppositional Theme Park: The Inscription of Courtly Politics (A.B. Kurakin) - The Early Reception of the Picturesque and Karamzin's Invention of a National Landscape - The Landscape of the Russian Soul: The Embrace of Unpicturesque Uniformity - Laying Bare the Estate: Tolstoy's Moral Experiment - Blissful Living in a Garden and its Politics - Contemporary Gardening and the Rejection of the Public Sphere.
Report
«Schönle has written a well-informed and highly discerning work which both complements and extends the previous scholarship on the characteristics of landscape design in Russia.» (Barry P. Scherr, Slavic and East European Journal)
«... invaluable for those who are looking for a deeper understanding of the meaning of design practice, or for an application of modern methodological approaches to the history of landscape architecture, or for a vision of landscape architecture as a part of social and political life of a country.» (Alla Vronskaya, Historic Gardens Review)
«This fascinating and magisterial monograph is rich in material and provides us with an up-to-date account of the meaning of Russian gardens and the Russian landscape from the imperial period to the contemporary era.» (Dmitry Shvidkovsky, The Russian Review)
«This book is a gem - and a felicitous choice for launching Andrew Kahn's new series.» (Gitta Hammarberg, Slavonic and East European Review)
