Glazovo estate and other estates of the Bazhenovs near the town of Kashira in the first third of the 19th century.

Abstract

The Glazovo estate in Kashirsky uyezd, Tula province (now the village of Staroye Glazovo, Venyevsky district, Tula Oblast) holds a special place in the biography of the great Russian architect and painter Vasily Ivanovich Bazhenov (1738-1799). It was here that the architect regularly lived during his disgrace after his removal from the construction of the Tsaritsyno estate in the second half of the 1780s and in the early 1790s, and it was in the village of Glazovo that Vasily Ivanovich was reburied from the Smolensky cemetery in St. Petersburg in 1799 according to his will. In the present article the author continues the study of the estate's history and aims to highlight the history of the Bazhenov's estates near the town of Kashira in the first third of the 19th century until their complete sale in 1837, finally clarifying a number of important issues of the Glazovo estate's history. The novelty of the study lies in the publication of many previously unknown facts and documents, which the author discovered during his work in the archives of Tula, Nizhny Novgorod and St. Petersburg. For example, for the first time an inventory of the Glazovo estate's buildings (1823) is given, the fact of V. I. Bazhenov's burial in the Glazovo cemetery is finally confirmed and the fate of the estate stone St. Nicholas Church, which the architect founded in 1784 and could not complete, is also clarified. Clarification of these issues is important both for the study of Bazhenov's life and work and for the history of Russian art and architecture.