The Ruler in the Garden: Politics and Landscape Design in Imperial Russia. Russian Transformations: Literature, Thought, Culture, I by Andreas Sch�nle (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 557 between individual deviance on the one hand and social disorder and political conflict on the other. This collection is an important contribution to our understanding of the ways inwhich the shiftingdiscourse ofmadness offersa rich and varied lens throughwhich to explore Russia's troubled experience ofmodernity. RoyalHolloway Colkge Universityof London D. Beer Sch?nle, Andreas. The Ruler in theGarden: Politics and Landscape Design in ImperialRussia. Russian Transformations: Literature, Thought, Culture, i. Peter Lang, Bern, Oxford and New York, 2007. 395 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. 70.00: ?45.50: $90.95 (paper back). Imperial Russian gardens provide fertile soil forAndreas Sch?nle to dig in, and dig he does, unearthing layers of imperial and local aspirations, 'chore ographies' of power, ethical and aesthetic ideals, self-fashioning, leisure and theatricality. Gardens show the shifting borders between European and national allegiances, private and public, artifice and nature. These categories are fuzzy and the Russian estate embodies the creativity and ambiguity characteristic ofmythical constructs. Four chapters, following a cogent introduction, focus on individual land owners, apdy chosen tohighlight differentaspects of gardening. Sch?nle draws on archival and published accounts: landscaping manuals, memoirs, letters, visitors' accounts, newspapers, journals, as well as the inscriptions, signs, poems and directives physically present in gardens. Engravings, maps and paintings are nicely reproduced and analysed. The first chapter concerns Catherine IPs cultivation of empire. Her early projects at Oranienbaum and her English garden at Tsarskoe Selo are explored through her memoirs, correspondence, translation of and (more surprising) critical amendments to Thomas Whadey's gardening manual, which she intended to publish forRussian emulation. Her 'plantomania' is reflected in her 'legislomania' in Sch?nle's new reading of the JVakaz illustra tions, and the famous Minerva-Catherine celebrations gain depth when he foregrounds Minerva as goddess of gardening. Gardening choreographed Catherine's imperial aspirations as a benign alternative to 'male' war. The semiotics of Eden fusewith 'Moscow theThird Rome' doctrines, Catherine's 'Greek Project' and Potemkin's 'Amazon regiments' to define Russia's annexation of Crimea. In the second chapter gardening reflects noblemen's career ambitions. A. T. Bolotov designed wondrous garden conceits to surprise his guests. They were coordinated with his paintings, writings and oral performances of artistic credo and, though designed for display, they also concealed serfdom's cruel ties.While Bolotov faithfullymanaged some of Catherine's estates, A. B. Kurakin's estate served as an antidote to his disgrace at Catherine's court and 558 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 2010 expressed his oppositional politics. Like Catherine he was conversant with European gardening, and like Bolotov he obsessively inscribed his garden and documented it in engravings, maps and literary texts.His socio-political inclinations are particularly evident in the provisions he made for heirs and serfs,and their reactions. His reformist concerns surprisingly also confirm his sympathies for a social status quo. Bolotov's and Kurakin's affinities for Sentimentalism and the picturesque (e.g., Kurakin's perusal of Claude-Henri Watelet) might have been better integrated with the chapter on . M. Karamzin and picturesque aesthetics. Karamzin's travel discourse shows a picturesque intersection of painted and natural landscapes and is linked to self-fashioning and the progressive European Enlightenment values he envisioned for a new Russian culture, but also shows his ambivalent embrace ofmodernity. In his late fiction, set in Russia, the picturesque paradoxically allows him to reconcile progress and modernity with conservative politics. Might not the same logic hold for Kurakin and Bolotov? The Aksakovs reacted against picturesque aestheticization of nature and history and the concomitant solipsism. They rebelled against the conflation of European and Russian values, fashionable gardening contrivances and Western melancholy so enthusiastically evoked earlier. They preferred unme diated immersion innature (e.g. fishing and hunting) and a Russian spiritual ity,expressed in their benign neglect of landscaping. They nevertheless had to fudge their idealized Russianness when faced with the ethnic realities of the distant steppes they roamed or with their own economic needs for serf labour. Ethical ambiguities and moral self-fashioning culminate in L. N. Tolstoi's approach toRussian estates inWar andPeace and at Iasnaia Poliana. Sch?nle proves that Tolstoi was not the enthusiastic proponent of estate life generally presented...