Vasily Bazhenov

• 1. Introduction

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  Vasily Bazhenov once stood at the edge of the Moscow Kremlin and declared, "today we renew old Moscow." It was 1773, the groundbreaking ceremony for what would have been the largest neoclassical complex in Europe. Workers began shaving the southern slope of Kremlin Hill. Ancient towers came down. Then, two years later, Catherine II cancelled the entire project. Bazhenov had nothing to show for it but a debt and an extraordinary wooden model, seventeen meters long, built to a scale of 1 to 44.

  This was not an isolated disaster. It was a pattern. Every major commission of Bazhenov's life ended in demolition, dismissal, or bankruptcy. And yet historians regard him as the architect who gave neoclassical Moscow its defining character. How does a man shape a city without completing a building in it? How does one of the most decorated architects of his generation die in poverty, his birthplace unknown, his grave unmarked? And why does even the most recent academic research struggle to tell his story without relying on what critics now call the "Bazhenov myth"?

• 2. A Prodigy's Formation

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  In 1753, a teenager from a church clerk's family walked into the Kremlin-based architectural company of Dmitry Ukhtomsky and asked to join. Bazhenov was not formally hired; he simply volunteered, absorbing practical construction skills that formal classrooms in Moscow could not yet offer. Poverty drove the arrangement: paid work came before theory.

  Two years later he enrolled in the first class of the newly opened Moscow State University. Then, in early 1758, Ivan Shuvalov arranged for a group of sixteen students, including Bazhenov and Ivan Starov, to travel to Saint Petersburg and join the freshly established Imperial Academy of Arts. At the first exam, Bazhenov ranked first among the entire class. He was twenty years old and the oldest student; Starov, who ranked seventh, was fourteen. The youngest in the room, Stefan Karnovich, was only twelve.

  Bazhenov was assigned to the class of Savva Chevakinsky, chief architect of the Russian Admiralty. He worked on the construction of the Saint Nicholas church and became, by his own account, a personal mentor and blood brother to the younger Starov. Three years on, Bazhenov and painter Anton Losenko became the first Academy students awarded a scholarship abroad. He trained in Paris at the workshop of Charles De Wailly. His entries to the competitions of the French Academy of Architecture succeeded; he was elected to the Roman Academy of Saint Luke, the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, and the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna. He returned to Russia in May 1765 carrying, in one contemporary assessment, "unusual and impeccable credentials for a Russian of that day."

  The Academy's new management refused to hire him regardless. He was ordered through a rigorous formal examination and required to submit a new graduation project. Catherine II and her son Paul noticed him instead, commissioning a private mansion on Kamenny Island. By the end of 1766, Grigory Orlov, commander of imperial artillery and military engineers, took Bazhenov into his retinue with the rank of captain of artillery and commissioned the Arsenal in Saint Petersburg.

• 3. The Kremlin That Never Was

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  Catherine II's idea was to tear down the decrepit palaces of the Moscow Kremlin and replace them with a new government center befitting a reformed empire. Bazhenov responded with a scheme so vast it reads as utopian architecture. By summer 1768 he had finalized a design for a four-storey neoclassical palace stretching 2,100 feet, or 630 meters, along the entire southern wall of the Kremlin, from Konstantino-Yeleninskaya Tower in the east to Borovitskaya Tower in the west. The complex would have completely enclosed the Kremlin cathedrals, blocking their view across the Moskva River.

  Rather than placing the palace on the plateau at the top of Kremlin Hill, Bazhenov positioned it on the steep slope between the plateau and the Kremlin wall, using enormous stone buttresses to keep the structure from sliding into the river. The plan called for demolishing the wall itself in places and for cleaning and regulating the river channel with a log-flanked embankment. Historian Nikolay Karamzin wrote in 1817 that plans of this kind were "similar to Plato's Republic or More's Utopia: they should be admired in thought and never put into practice."

  Catherine approved it regardless. A government body called the Kremlin Construction Board was established to manage the project, and it became a working architectural school. Bazhenov's aide Matvey Kazakov joined in 1768 and eventually took over management of the Board in 1786. At the groundbreaking, the southern Kremlin wall was partially demolished; Taynitskaya Tower and the First Unnamed Tower came down. An earth pit was opened beside the Cathedral of the Archangel. Bazhenov and his engineers fought landslides for the next year.

  In 1775 Catherine shut it down. She cited damage to the Cathedral of the Archangel and poor geology. Historians point to other reasons: the staggering cost, her preference for investing in Saint Petersburg over a Moscow she distrusted, and the conclusion of a constitutional assembly that the palace was partly meant to celebrate. In 2001 the City of Moscow proposed a pavilion in Alexander Garden to display Bazhenov's original 17-meter model. The proposal was rejected.

• 4. Tsaritsyno and the Battle of the Palaces

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  During the 1775 celebrations of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji on the Khodynka Field, Bazhenov produced temporary decorations that attempted something nobody had tried before: a synthesis of medieval Russian, Eastern, and Western Gothic motifs with elements drawn from antiquity. Catherine was pleased enough to commission two imperial palaces in the Moscow suburbs. Kazakov received the smaller Petrovsky Castle on the road to Saint Petersburg. The larger commission, Tsaritsyno, went to Bazhenov.

  The design that emerged that summer followed Catherine's fondness for what she called a "peasant style": neo-Gothic lodges scattered through a carefully arranged landscape meant to appear natural. A second master plan, approved by Catherine in spring 1776, added a main palace designed as two identical buildings joined by a greenhouse. One wing was for Catherine, the other for her son Paul. Bazhenov planned to tile Tsaritsyno with traditional Russian colored tiles called izraztsyi; Catherine insisted instead on red brick walls, white ornamental stone, and yellow glazed roof tiles. The roof tiles did not survive Russian winters and were replaced with sheet iron.

  Bazhenov built the front row of gates, bridges, and small outbuildings first. Their white stone carvings were unusually fine; later buildings at the site show simpler ornament, either from a shortage of skilled craftsmen or a deliberate shift in Bazhenov's own approach. The main palace took eight years to build. Governor Jacob Bruce inspected the site in 1784 and, puzzled by the lack of a formal front courtyard, still sent Catherine an enthusiastic report praising the bridges and landscaping.

  Catherine made a surprise visit in June 1785 and left furious, describing the palace in letters to Paul and to Melchior Grimm as a "dark place with low vaults and narrow stairs, unfit for living." Her real concern was political: her relationship with Paul had deteriorated to the point where she was considering removing him from the line of succession, and a palace designed as twin royal residences no longer suited her intentions. She ordered the main palace demolished and rebuilt as a single palace for herself alone. Bazhenov submitted a new design at the end of 1785; it was rejected and he was dismissed, nominally to attend to his health and personal affairs. In February 1786 the commission passed to Kazakov. That summer, Bazhenov's eight-year palace was pulled down.

  Public gossip blamed Bazhenov's connection to the Freemasons or his Gothic styling. Neither explanation holds up. Kazakov retained both Gothic detailing and Masonic architectural references in his own rebuilt Tsaritsyno, and most of Bazhenov's smaller auxiliary buildings at the site still stand today.

• 5. Demidov, Debt, and Withdrawal

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  By December 1786 Bazhenov had left state service entirely and was surviving on private commissions. Dmitry Shvidkovsky, assessing Bazhenov's position at this point, noted that while Bazhenov had established the stylistic character of neoclassical Moscow, it was Kazakov and Kazakov's students who actually designed and built the city. Kazakov's buildings, Shvidkovsky observed, were "considerably more practical than Bazhenov's, more adapted to Moscow life."

  Bazhenov's attempt to stabilize his finances through the wealthy patron Prokofi Demidov turned into a decade-long trap. Demidov initially offered to refinance Bazhenov's debts in exchange for design and management work on a new building for Moscow University. Once Bazhenov was financially dependent on him, Demidov rejected the proposed downtown campus design and demanded an entirely new campus on the Sparrow Hills instead. Bazhenov's own writing describes the situation as a cat and mouse game. He spent years on a project that was never built, remained in debt, and had no leverage to walk away. Kazakov, again, picked up the contract and completed the downtown university core in 1793.

  In 1792 Bazhenov relocated to Saint Petersburg and took a modest but steady position as architect of the Kronstadt admiralty. In his spare time he translated the complete works of Vitruvius. That April he was drawn into the affair surrounding publisher Nikolay Novikov; police found a letter from Bazhenov to Novikov about delivering Masonic books to Paul. Novikov was imprisoned in Schlisselburg fortress for four years. Bazhenov was not charged. Paul, who knew of Bazhenov's real or alleged role as a Masonic intermediary to the heir's circle, had already stepped back from freemasonry by 1792 and personally warned Bazhenov not to press further. The episode gave rise to later theories that Bazhenov had functioned as a long-term agent of the Martinist movement, earning him the informal title "the Russian Christopher Wren."

• 6. Late Recognition and an Unfinished Legacy

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  Paul I ascended the throne in 1796 and moved quickly to reward those he saw as casualties of his mother's reign. Bazhenov was summoned to Saint Petersburg and appointed vice-president of the Imperial Academy of Arts. He used the position to argue for a fundamental reform of how the Academy trained artists. The existing system, shaped by the ideas of the Academy's second President Ivan Betskoy, enrolled boys between six and nine years old and ran them through nine years of general education before beginning at least six more years of professional training. Bazhenov believed the Academy should abandon elementary schooling altogether, admit literate teenagers who could demonstrate talent in an open contest, and concentrate entirely on the arts. He did not live to see it implemented; elements of his program were eventually introduced by Alexander Stroganov in 1802 and Alexey Olenin in 1830.

  Paul's own major construction project, Saint Michael's Castle, went to the Italian architect Vincenzo Brenna, with Bazhenov assigned to supervise. Historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries could not cleanly separate their contributions. Nikolay Lanceray, writing in the 1930s, gave full credit to Brenna. Shvidkovsky's later reading holds that Bazhenov produced an earlier design for the castle and that Brenna was asked to adapt it, but ultimately created an independent work. Bazhenov died while the castle was still under construction, leaving Brenna in sole charge. The finished building is described as "a rare example of an imperial palace genuinely redolent of the Romantic era" rather than a neoclassical one.

  Paul also commissioned a hospital near Danilov Monastery. Bazhenov responded again with an ambitious plan that advanced no further than a wooden frame. Kazakov replaced him and completed what became Pavlovskaya Hospital in 1802-1807. Shortly before his death, Bazhenov had begun assembling an album documenting Russian architecture, gathering drawings of "all large buildings in two capitals." That project, too, was left incomplete.

• 7. The Myth and the Attribution Problem

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  Pashkov House, which stands near the Kremlin and is described as "one of Moscow's most graceful and handsome residential ensembles," is attributed to Bazhenov primarily through 19th-century tradition supported by most 20th-century researchers. Unusually for 18th-century Moscow, it retains its original external appearance and layout as conceived around 1784 and completed in 1787. When the Fire of 1812 severely damaged it, the city rebuilt it exactly from the original drawings, the first time Moscow had made that choice for any building, in recognition of its landmark status.

  Beyond Pashkov House, the record becomes murky. Yushkov House on Myasnitskaya Street, likely from the late 1780s to early 1790s, is described simply as "attributed" to Bazhenov. Razumovsky House on Vozdvizhenka Street, another corner rotunda design completed in 1799, is attributed to him by one scholar but Russian sources broadly admit the architect's identity cannot be confirmed. The Dolgov House on Bolshaya Ordynka Street was once attributed to Bazhenov on the grounds that his wife was related to the building's owner; that attribution has since been discarded entirely. Country estates and churches present even greater difficulty. A church in Bykovo, a church in Starki built between 1759 and 1763, the Church of Annunciation in Polivanovo, and the triangular-plan Church of Theotokos of Vladimir in Dolgoprudny, built between 1772 and 1777, all carry uncertain or contested attributions.

  Igor Grabar, working in the first half of the 20th century, built the foundational biography of Bazhenov and credited him with numerous high-profile private buildings. Soviet historians expanded and popularized that account. Modern critics now call the result the "Bazhenov myth": a life story that is largely a scholarly construction rather than a documented record. Even Bazhenov's year of birth is uncertain, recorded as either 1737 or 1738. His place of birth is unknown. The location of his grave is unknown. Before he died, Bazhenov told his children to stay away from the treacherous construction business. It is, under the circumstances, advice that reads less like bitterness than like hard-won knowledge.