Broken History and Crumbling Stones: The Romantic Conception of Architectural Preservation

Abstract

In this article Andreas Schönle explores the treatment of ruins in the Romantic period, in particular the propensity toward holistic reconstruction, rather than preservation of architectural heritage. He argues that the Romantic disregard of extant heritage harks back to the Sentimentalist infatuation with the fleetingness of life and dramatization of loss, that this melancholy feeling stoked a sense of national victimization, and that it legitimated an imaginary reinvention of the past and the constructedness of collective memory. The Church of the Tithe in Kiev serves as a case study illustrating that the Romantic commitment to totality has resulted in the significant destruction of architecture. Depictions of its ruins in travel accounts and in the writings of Vadim Passek and Andrei Murav'ev evidence a marked desire to exacerbate the sense of loss rather than to describe and valorize the remains. This disregard of heritage reprises the Sentimentalist infatuation with melancholy prominently deployed by Nikolai Karamzin. A comparison with Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in France and Augustus Pugin in England indicates that in Russia the invention of a national style of architecture required a much more radical imposition upon the historical landscape.