CHRONOLOGY.
| DATES. | |
| Rurik the Varangian at Novogorod | A.D. 850 |
| Olga baptized at Constantinople | 955 |
| St. Vladimir the Great | 981-1015 |
| Yaroslaf died | 1054 |
| Sack of Kief | 1168 |
| Tartar invasion under Gengis Khan | 1224 |
| Tartar wars and domination till | 1480 |
| Ivan III. | 1462-1505 |
| Basil III. | 1505-1533 |
| Ivan IV., or the Terrible | 1533-1584 |
| Boris | 1598-1605 |
| Peter the Great | 1689-1725 |
The long series of the architectural styles of the Christian world which has been described in the preceding pages terminates most appropriately with the description of the art of a people who had less knowledge of architecture and less appreciation of its beauties than any other with which we are acquainted. During the Middle Ages the Russians did not erect one single building which is worthy of admiration, either from its dimensions, its design, or the elegance of its details; nor did they invent one single architectural feature which can be called their own. It is true the Tartars brought with them their bulbous form of dome, and the Russians adopted it, and adhere to it to the present day, unconscious that it is the symbol of their subjection to a race they affect to despise; but excepting as regards this one feature, their architecture is only a bad and debased copy of the style of the Byzantine Empire. There is nothing, in fact, in the architecture of the country to lead us to doubt that the mass of the population of Russia was always of purely Aryan stock, speaking a language more nearly allied to the Sanskrit than any of the other Mediæval tongues of Europe, and that whatever amount of Tartar blood may have been imported, it was not sufficient to cure the inartistic tendencies of the race. So much is this felt to be the case, that the Russians themselves hardly lay claim to the design of a single building in their country from the earliest times to the present day. They admit that all the churches at Kief, their earliest capital, were erected by Greek architects; those of Moscow by Italians or Germans; while those of St. Petersburg, we know, were, with hardly a single exception, erected by Italian, German, or French architects. These last have perpetrated caricatures of revived Roman architecture worse than are to be found anywhere else. Bad as are some of the imitations of Roman art found in western Europe, they are all the work of native artists; are, partially at least, adapted to the climate, and common-sense peeps through their worst absurdities; but in Russia only second-class foreigners have been employed, and the result is a style that out-herods Herod in absurdity and bad taste. Architecture has languished not only in Russia, but wherever the Sclavonic race predominates. In Poland, Hungary, Moldavia, Wallachia, &c., although some of these countries have at times been rich and prosperous, there is not a single original structure worthy to be placed in comparison with even the second-class contemporary buildings of the Celtic or Teutonic races.
Besides the ethnographic inaptitude of the nation, however, there are other causes which would lead us to anticipate, à priori, that nothing either great or beautiful was likely to exist in the Mediæval architecture of Russia. In the first place, from the conversion of Olga (964) to the accession of Peter the Great (1689), with whom the national style expired, the country hardly emerged from barbarism. Torn by internal troubles, or devastated by incursions of the Tartars, the Russians never enjoyed the repose necessary for the development of art, and the country was too thinly peopled to admit of that concentration of men necessary for the carrying out of any great architectural undertaking.
Another cause of bad architecture is found in the material used, which is almost universally brick covered with plaster; and it is well known that the tendency of plaster architecture is constantly to extravagance in detail and bad taste in every form. It is also extremely perishable,—a fact which opens the way to repairs and alterations in defiance of congruity and taste, and to the utter annihilation of everything like archæological value in the building.
When the material was not brick it was wood, like most of the houses in Russia of the present day; and the destroying hand of time, aided no doubt by fire and the Tartar invasions, have swept away many buildings which would serve to fill up gaps, now, it is feared, irremediable in the history of the art.
Notwithstanding all this, the history of architecture in Russia need not be considered as entirely a blank, or as wholly devoid of interest. Locally we can follow the history of the style from the south to the north. Springing originally from two roots—one at Constantinople, the other in Armenia—it gradually extended itself northward. It first established itself at Cherson, then at Kief, and after these at Vladimir and Moscow, whence it spread to the great commercial city of Novogorod. At all these places it maintained itself till supplanted by the rise of St. Petersburg.
