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Ruins and History: Observations on Russian Approaches to Destruction and Decay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Andreas Schönle
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Abstract

This article surveys theories of ruins and discusses their applicability to Russian history and culture. It identifies four major approaches to ruins: the ruin as a site of freedom from social norms and practices (Denis Diderot, Peter Fritzsche, Tim Edensor), the ruin as a reconciliation with nature (Georg Simmel), the ruin as the affirmation of modernity at the expense of the past (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno), and the ruin as the emblem of on-going historical decay (Walter Benjamin). In contrast to western approaches to ruins, Schönle identifies a reluctance to aestheticize ruins in Russian culture. Yet ruins acquire a distinctive meaning in Russian culture, be it that they occur and disappear as a result of political will, that they serve as exemplars of imperial legitimacy and might, that they reveal the vulnerability of Russia's identity between east and west, or that they betoken the crushing of Utopian projects and the magnitude of historical devastation.

Type
Forum
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , Winter 2006 , pp. 649 - 669
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2006

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References

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39. In a fortuitous parallel, the angel seemingly flying off the column and surveying the destruction recalls Benjamin's angel of history, modeled after Paul Klee's Angelus Novum. With his face “turned toward the past,” the angel “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” See Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Arendt, Hannah, ed., Illuminations (1968; reprint, New York, 1986), 257.Google Scholar

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49. Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin, 252.

50. Paperny interestingly claims that Stalinist ideology could not aestheticize destruction either, contrary to the Nazi celebration of war as a sublime spectacle, because it could not liberate itself from the identification of the signifier with the signified. Ibid., 254-56.

51. Grigorii Revzin, “Modern dolzhen byt’ razrushen,” Kovimersant-vlast', 14 June 2004.

52. Ibid.

53. Fritzsche, “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” 81.

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56. Yampolsky, “In the Shadow of Monuments,” 110.

57. For a rich discussion of the evolution of mass nostalgia in postcommunist Russia, see Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 57-71.