Recollections of the Future in the Italian Text of Andrei Beloborodov

Abstract

This article explores the work of Andrei Yakovlevich Beloborodov (1886–1965), an architect, graphic artist, and memoirist. An outstanding representative of Russian emigration, he has long been ranked among the names of the highest order abroad. Beloborodov gained great fame in Italy, where he settled down in 1934 and where his gift as an architect and graphic artist flourished. Beloborodov was an author of the iconic architectural and publishing projects of the early twentieth century; however, his name has been forgotten in his homeland. The article tracks the biographical background of the artist’s work and the pre-revolutionary period of their formation, later described by Beloborodov in his Memoirs. The author examines the place of the Palladian architect in the architectural tradition of the early twentieth century, which revived great Italian classicism in St Petersburg. Beloborodov’s work is explored comprehensively: his memoir heritage is interpreted as part of a single discourse of a retrospective architect, while his outstanding long-term graphic cycle The Great Island (Grande Isola, 1939–1953) is considered part of the general mnemonic tradition of Russian abroad, which was especially clearly manifested in the literature of the first wave of Russian emigration. Special attention is paid to the image of the city as a model of the world in the artist’s graphic design. Beloborodov’s philosophy of the city and fantasy urban cycles are considered as part of the émigré “post-Petersburg” text. At the same time, the island symbolism and metaphorical architectural images in the cycle Great Island are compared with the “architectural” code of the later projects of the Russian abroad in the interwar years (Chisla and Novy Grad magazines). The article’s author employs historical, hermeneutic, and comparative research methods. The purpose of the work is to actualise Beloborodov’s artistic heritage. One of the main results of the study is to provide a multidimensional reception of this outstanding architect/idiosyncratic memoirist and help study his urban metaphysics as a close interweaving of Italian and Russian architectural traditions, a vivid illustration of the relevant sociopolitical and cultural dialogue of the 1930s around the international place of the Russian abroad.