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Enthusiasm for the Classical style (Ampir)
did not last long. The cooling off period began in the eighteen forties, which
quickly turned into displeasure, and by the end of the decade there was hardly
an architect in Saint Petersburg who would design new buildings in the style of
"False classicism," a derogatory name of that time for the Ampir
style. Even Rossi, the man who represented the best of the Classical style in
Russia, showed deviation from it at the end of his career. Suddenly, many found
it dull, and Turgeniev, in writing about it and about Saint Petersburg, made
stinging remarks. Perhaps as everywhere else in the 19th century, talents in
Russia had exhausted themselves; or maybe there was no desire for the
development of something new or original in architecture. In the absence of a
creative surge, some architects attempted to reintroduce the baroque, while
others wanted to find the answer to the problem by going back to the sources of
ancient Russian style, and if necessary to the Byzantine. The result was an
exaggerated eagerness to copy foreigners or to decorate new buildings with all
sorts of ornaments. It ended in a combination of professional mediocrity and
loss of aesthetic quality. Plentiful and often cheap decorations reappeared, as
if nothing valuable existed in architecture but expensive facades. Not all the
fault rested with the architects. This was a time when a new class of
successful self-made merchants and businessmen, often with little or no
education, was increasingly replacing as patrons the aesthetically more
sensitive but financially exhausted noblemen. Unsophisticated taste and freedom
to imitate at will foreign styles provoked considerable reaction among those
who still considered traditional Russian architectural forms as must convenient
for their practical needs and as best corresponding to their aesthetic
feelings. Moscow, the ancient capital of the old Russ was the leader of the
latter trend, while construction in Saint Petersburg continued to be by foreign
and domestic architects, each one adding his own preferences and reintroducing
all sorts of haphazard styles borrowed from the West. Soviet critics often
blame the last four Russian emperors for bad taste and architectural decadence,
but they, in all probability, are no more responsible than the fathers and
grandfathers of the Marx and the Lenins.
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