After taking in the Kremlin’s immense, impersonal government buildings, arriving at Assumption Cathedral, which is tucked deeper inside, is like falling back in time. Its exterior is a battered, undressed stone that evokes a pre-Christian desert landscape. And its interior – every square inch – is covered in jewel-hued frescoes that tell the story of the church. These aren’t like the frescoes in Renaissance churches, that open windows into fictive space. These are paintings stacked one upon the other, wrapping the walls and crawling up onto the ceiling vaults. Populated with flattened figures in airless gold backgrounds, they’re like very sacred cartoons, rich with knowledge from another age.

The way the embellishment overwhelms the architecture made me think, as I had many, many times during my trip, that Russia not part of Europe but part of Asia. In many ways the country reminds me of India. It’s huge, deeply diverse in culture, and moving boldly into the new century while also remaining stubbornly the same. In Moscow there’s a barely-concealed sense of chaos coursing below the streets that once senses could, at any moment, simply erupt. This latent (and sometimes not) disorder seems like an essential part of the culture.

July 29, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I went to Florence and didn’t see the Uffizi, I went to Brugge and didn’t see the Leonardo Madonna, and I went to Moscow and didn’t see Lenin’s Tomb, though it was no fault of my own – that part of Red Square was closed off to prepare for a national holiday. But I felt more torn up about not seeing the house of modern architect Konstantin Melnikov, which had been preserved as a museum like the John Soane house in London. Melnikov’s house, just off Arbaty, Moscow’s main shopping street, was closed. Nonetheless I lingered around the sidewalk in front and took some unremarkable through-the-fence-and-foliage photos of it.

A gentleman passing by explained that Melnikov’s family owned the house and were currently raising funds to have it refurbished. It looked terribly run down, with peeling paint and boarded windows, and spookily overgrown trees and bushes. The house consists of two cylinders stacked like the figure 8 in plan. They’re built entirely of brick, and adorned with rows of small, space-age hexagonal windows. Only the back of the house, which faces a yard, is opened with a large picture window. From archival photos what’s most fascinating is the way the acoutrements of everyday life (curtains, tables, lamps) rest so uneasily inside the structure. At Soane’s house there’s no distinction between architecture and furnishing, between building and life; the place is one thick, voluptuous substance. The Melnikov House seems inviolable, as if it wouldn’t lend itself so easily to occupation.

July 26, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I had a high school history teacher who told us that history was a story, and another who told us that history was people. I would like to believe the latter. Visiting the Armoury Chamber, the Kremlin’s national history museum, I was mesmerized by those objects (robes, slippers, mirrors, thrones, carriages, … ) that had been belonged to the tsars and tsarinas. There’s a pair of black leather over-the-knees boots worn by Peter the Great when he was supervising the construction of St. Petersburg, whose size (they nearly reached my hips) gives a sense of how Great he really was. They’re punkish, with chunky heels and a soft patina, covered with a film of St. Petersburg muck. And they’re both identical, because, apparently, while the Russians had the ability to dredge the canals of St. Petersburg, they didn’t have the ability to design left and right shoes.

Most enchanting were the objects of the young tsars. There’s a sleigh carriage used by Peter’s son Alexey, whose small size (it is also hip-high) gives it a toy-like grace. It’s windows are sealed with micah rather than glass, which must have given the boy a strange, softened view of the world outside. Because of uncertainties in succession the Russians sometimes crowned boys tsars and, at least once, in 1682, two at the same time. That was when Peter (he was ten) was crowned alongside his less robust brother Ivan (he was fifteen). Inside the museum there’s the lovely twin throne they shared at the coronation. And there are the crowns they wore: the traditional Crown of Monomakh (above) for Ivan and, for Peter, a smaller, fancier replica. They’re dreamy. To see them is to feel, whatever one’s political inclinations, like a royalist.

July 24, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Though St. Petersburg is extravagantly picturesque, offering the pedestrian winding canals, candy-colored buildings, and fancy-capped churches each way she turns, I’ll remember the city for the decoration of its interiors, particularly the stonework in its churches.

Inside Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral on the island fortress, there are monolithic tombs for Alexander II and Empress Maria carved from deep green jasper and mottled pink rhodonite whose otherworldly hues and markings befit a tsar and his wife. The chunks of stone are very literally magnetic, drawing one forward. The inside of the Cathedral of Our Lady of St. Kazan is crowded with religious paintings, gilded trim, brass chandeliers, wreaths of lit candles, bearded priests, and praying babushkas. And the walls and floors are lined with stones the likes of which I have never seen before. The floor is a mosaic of different dark, tumultuously-patterned varieties, the tiles of each worn to different depth because of its unique hardnesses. There are pilasters flanking the altar carved from lapis lazuli and malachite, their blue and green the strongest, purist colors I’ve ever seen. It’s suddenly obvious why the stones are precious, and why they’re employed here in the service of the divine. There’s something in the way strongly colored and patterned stones are used so liberally in (many are mined in the Urals) that’s particularly revealing. The stone isn’t subservient to the architecture or ornament; it remains a substance with marvelous properties.

July 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses