(St. Basil the Blessed)

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

We soon reached the Kitai-Gorod, which is the business quarter, upon the Krasnaia, the Red Square, or rather the beautiful square, for in Russia the words red and beautiful are synonymous. Upon one side of this square is the long faÇade of the Gostinnoi-Dvor, an immense bazaar with streets enclosed by glass-like passages, and which contains no less than 6,000 shops. The outside wall of the Kremlin rears itself on another side, with gates piercing the towers of sharply peaked roofs, permitting you to see above it the turrets, the domes, the belfries and the spires of the churches and convents it encloses. On another side, strange as the architecture of dreamland, stands the chimerical and impossible church of Vassili-Blagennoi, which makes your reason doubt the testimony of your eyes. Although it appears real enough, you ask yourself if it is not a fantastic mirage, a building made of clouds curiously coloured by the sunlight, and which the quivering air will change or cause to dissolve. Without any doubt, it is the most original building in the world; it recalls nothing that you have ever seen and it belongs to no style whatever: you might call it a gigantic madrepore, a colossal formation of crystals, or a grotto of stalactites inverted.

But let us not search for comparisons to give an idea of something that has no prototype. Let us try rather to describe Vassili-Blagennoi, if indeed there exists a vocabulary to speak of what had never been imagined previously.

There is a legend about Vassili-Blagennoi, which is probably not true, but which nevertheless expresses with strength and poetry the sense of wondering stupefaction felt at the semi-barbarous period when that singular edifice, so remote from all architectural traditions, was erected. Ivan the Terrible had this cathedral built as a thank-offering for the conquest of Kasan, and when it was finished, he found it so beautiful, wonderful and astounding, that he ordered the architect's eyes to be put out—they say he was an Italian—so that he could never erect anything similar. According to another version of the same legend, the Tsar asked the originator of this church if he could not erect a still more beautiful one, and upon his reply in the affirmative, he cut off his head, so that Vassili-Blagennoi might remain unrivalled forever. A more flattering exhibition of jealous cruelty cannot be imagined, but this Ivan the Terrible was at bottom a true artist and a passionate dilettante. Such ferocity in matters of art is more pleasing to me than indifference.

Imagine on a kind of platform which lifts the base from the ground, the most peculiar, the most incomprehensible, the most prodigious heaping up of large and little cabins, outside stairways, galleries with arcades and unexpected hiding-places and projections, unsymmetrical porches, chapels in juxtaposition, windows pierced in the walls at haphazard, indescribable forms and a rounding out of the interior arrangement, as if the architect, seated in the centre of his work had produced a building by thrusting it out from him. From the roof of this church which might be taken for a Hindu, Chinese, or Thibetan pagoda, there springs a forest of belfries of the strangest taste, fantastic beyond anything else in the world. The one in the centre, the tallest and most massive, shows three or four stories from base to spire. First come little columns, and toothed string-courses, then come some pilasters framing long mullioned windows, then a series of blank arches like scales, overlapping one another, and on the sides of the spire wart-like ornaments outlining each spire, the whole terminated by a lantern surmounted by an inverted golden bulb bearing on its tip the Russian cross. The others, which are slenderer and shorter, affect the form of the minaret, and their fantastically ornamented towers end in cupolas that swell strangely into the form of onions. Some are tortured into facets, others ribbed, some cut into diamond-shaped points like pineapples, some striped with fillets in spirals, others again decorated with lozenge-shaped and overlapping scales, or honeycombed like a bee-hive, and all adorned at their summit with the golden ball surmounted by the cross.

What adds still more to the fantastic effect of Vassili-Blagennoi, is that it is coloured with the most incongruous tones which nevertheless produce a harmonious effect that charms the eye. Red, blue, apple-green and yellow meet here in all portions of the building. Columns, capitals, arches and ornaments are painted with startling shades which give a strong relief. On the plain spaces of rare occurrence, they have simulated divisions or panels framing pots of flowers, rose-windows, wreathing vines, and chimÆras. The domes of the bell-towers are decorated with coloured designs that recall the patterns of India shawls; and, displayed thus on the roofs of the church, they recall the kiosks of the Sultans.

The same fantastic genius presided over the plan and ornamentation of the interior. The first chapel, which is very low and in which a few lamps glimmer, resembles a golden cavern; unexpected stars throw their rays across the dusky shadows and make the stiff images of the Greek saints stand out like phantoms. The mosaics of St. Mark's in Venice alone can give an approximate idea of the effect of this astonishing richness. At the back, the iconostas looms up in the twilight shot through with rays like a golden and jewelled wall between the faithful and the priests of the sanctuary.

Vassili-Blagennoi does not present, like other churches, a simple interior composed of several naves communicating and cut at certain points of intersection after the laws of the rites followed in the temple. It is formed of a collection of churches, or chapels, in juxtaposition and independent of each other. Each bell-tower contains a chapel, which arranges itself as it pleases in this mass. The dome is the terminal of the spire or the bulb of the cupola. You might believe yourself under the enormous casque of some Circassian or Tartar giant. These calottes are, moreover, marvellously painted and decorated in the interior. It is the same with the walls covered with those barbaric and hieratic figures, the traditional designs for which the Greek monks of Mount Athos have preserved from century to century, and which, in Russia, often deceive the careless observer regarding the age of a building. It is a peculiar sensation to find yourself in these mysterious sanctuaries, where personages familiar to the Roman Catholic cult, mingle with the saints peculiar to the Greek Calendar, and seem in their archaic Byzantine and constrained appearance to have been translated awkwardly into gold by the childish devotion of a primitive race. These images that you view across the carved and silver-gilt work of the iconostas, where they are ranged symmetrically upon the golden screen opening their large fixed eyes and raising their brown hand with the fingers turned in a symbolic fashion, produce, by means of their somewhat savage, superhuman and immutable traditional aspect, a religious impression not to be found in more advanced works of art. These figures, seen amid the golden reflections and twinkling light of the lamps, easily assume a phantasmagorical life, capable of impressing sensitive imaginations and of creating, especially at the twilight hour, a peculiar kind of sacred awe.

Narrow corridors, low arched passages, so narrow that your elbows brush the walls and so low that you have to bend your head, circle about these chapels and lead from one to the other. Nothing could be more fantastic than these passages; the architect seems to have taken pleasure in tangling up their threading ways. You ascend, you descend, you seem to go out of the building, you seem to return, twisting about a cornice to follow the curves of a bell-tower, and walking through thick walls in tortuous passages that might be compared to the capillary tubes of madrepores, or to the roads made by insects in the barks of trees. After so many turnings and windings, your head swims, a vertigo seizes you, and you wonder if you are not a mollusk in an immense shell. I do not speak of the mysterious corners, of inexplicable coecums, low doors opening no one knows whither, dark stairways descending into profound depths; for I could never finish talking of this architecture, which you seem to walk through as if in a dream.