St. Isaac's Cathedral

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Story and images are copyright Eugene Suharnikov (euge_s@e-mail.ru ) unless noted otherwise. Clicking an image will open it for a larger view in a new window.

St. Isaac’s Cathedral (Isaakievski Sobor, Isaakievsky Sobor)

In the year 1809 Emperor Alexander I announced an architectural competition for the design of a new cathedral in St. Petersburg, which after its completion (some 49 years later), served as the main cathedral of the Russian Empire from 1858 until its downfall in 1917.

A design by Auguste Montferrand (Henri Louis Auguste Ricard de Montferrand) won the contest. Auguste Montferrand was then a young architect who emigrated from Napoleonic France in 1807, just two years before the fateful competition, and who later became one of the official architects of the Russian court. Montferrand dedicated his entire life, some 50 years of it, to the construction of the Cathedral. The actual construction did not commence until 1818 (Napoleon’s invasion of Russia interrupted the initial construction plans) and it took 40 years to build the Cathedral which was completed in 1858, the year when its’ creator, Auguste de Montferrand, died.

Henri Louis Auguste Ricard de Montferrand was born on January 23, 1786 at Chaillot. Chaillot is now one of the most central areas of the French capital but used to be a suburb at the time of Montferrand’s birth. Chaillot is most famous for its magnificent Palais de Chaillot (well, at least in my opinion the building is magnificent. I am madly in love with 1930s public architecture from democratic countries, from France - such as Palais de Chaillot, and the United States, - the Empire State Building in Manhattan is perhaps the most grandiose monument to the epoch - but I also like countless city halls, fire stations and police departments across the US which were built in those turbulent years. The public architecture of Finland, Sweden, Switzerland of 1930s is equally beautiful). Chaillot is known for other famous landmarks such as the Cinema Museum and the Eiffel Tower nearby (which can be best observed in all its evening glory from the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot). Auguste de Montferrand worked in Paris after the defeat of Napoleon and Russian occupation that followed it - from 1814 to 1816 - but then again chose to return to St. Petersburg, where his architectural career began in earnest. According to other accounts, Auguste Montferrand served in Napoleon's army, in cavalry, during Italian campaigns and was even wounded. St. Isaac’s Cathedral is a monument to the Russian Empire; it is also a symbolic memorial, along with the colossal Cathedral of Christ the Savior (or Christ the Redeemer) in Moscow, to the sacrifices and privations of Napoleonic wars and it is, ultimately, a monument to Russia’s triumph over Napoleon and, indirectly to the victory of monarchists in France. However the Cathedral is also a personal shrine of Auguste de Montferrand. The building became the chef d’oeuvre of his life and it stands today as the testament to Montferrand’s creative genius. Montferrand designed St. Isaac’s and supervised its construction, day in and day out, for forty years. His wife, conveying the last wish of the architect, which Montferrand wrote in his own will some 20 years before his death, requested the permission for his body to be buried inside the Cathedral. This request was turned down. In the opinion of Alexander II, de Montferrand was just a hired hand, besides the first Cathedral of the Empire is not a cemetery. I cannot figure out why the permission was not granted. Perhaps in a feat of anger, the wife of Auguste de Montferrand left Russia for France and took the embalmed body of her husband with her. The body of the architect was buried in the Montmartre cemetery (le Cimetiere de Montmartre) where it was promptly forgotten and then the architect’s grave was lost to many generations. Luckily the grave of Auguste de Montferrand was recently found, he is buried next to his mother in the eastern part of the Cimetiere de Montmartre, and his modest monument, which he designed for himself in 1830 (almost 30 years before his death) bears no inscription of his name, but has Montferrand’s court of arms engraved on it with two letters A. M. standing for Auguste Montferrand.

But let’s go back to the Cathedral. Peter I, also known as Peter the Great, was born on the day of St. Isaac of Dalmatia, an obscure Byzantine monk who also happened to be saint but who was not very popular in Peter’s Muscovy or in Russia: Saint Isaac has remained an obscure saint of obscure origin to the majority of populace, the fact of his being the patron saint of the Empire’s founder notwithstanding. Nonetheless, in the year 1710 Czar Peter ordered the construction of a wooden chapel in the honor of his heavenly patron. The contemporaries described it as a barn with a rickety timber bell tower. In 1716 the wooden chapel (or the barn) either burned down or was destroyed by some other calamity, and a new, this time a stone baroque church was constructed under supervision of Georg Johannes Mattarnovi, a well-known architect. There is a chance that the architect has miscalculated the weight of the building or the church’s foundation was poorly designed, - after all St. Petersburg was built on a swamp, - but as the ground settled, the church of St. Isaac began to collapse. It was speedily disassembled to avoid further embarrassment. In 1768 Empress Catherine II, also known as Catherine the Great, hired Antonio Rinaldi, another baroque architect, to erect a cathedral on the spot where Peter’s chapel of St. Isaac used to stand. This should have become a monument to the reign of Catherine and a memorial to Peter, a granite and marble shrine to the monarchy, which however, as work dragged on, was not completed until Catherine’s death in 1796. Paul I who ascended the throne the same year was stingy with money (I don’t think Paul was a miser, he was just prudent with the country’s finances and that was one of the main causes of his phenomenal unpopularity among parasitic nobility). The project was continued under his reign but the cathedral was finished in brick instead of granite, and that led to emergence of a multitude of jokes. The building should have really looked odd with one half of it built in granite and marble on a granite foundation with the top made of brick.

After the murder of Emperor Paul I, Alexander I, future vanquisher of Napoleon, ordered the building to be demolished. An anonymous epigram survives from those days ( Сей храм трех царств изображенье: гранит, кирпич и разрушенье)

The temple is of three reigns’ manifestation:
Of granite, brick and devastation.

And that is my translation (and yet another rhyme!). I am reading memoirs of Sergei Makovski (Makowski, Makovski, Makovskij), a son of the famous artist and the publisher of the Apollon (Apollo) art magazine that was popular at the turn of the century. Russians sometimes refer to these brilliant twenty five years (from late 1880s until 1914) as the Silver Age or their Silver Age - the book of memoirs was originally published in Paris in the early 1950s - and is quite romantically titled “Na Parnase serebrjannogo veka” - which you can roughly translate as “On Parnassus of the Silver Age.”

The book I own is a reprint of the original and is published by some Nash Dom (L’Age d’Homme!) from Ekaterinburg. In the chapter dedicated to Mstislav Dobuzhinski (Dobuzhinsky, Dobuzinski), an outstanding illustrator from the turn of the century, who captured the spirit of St. Petersburg as no one else did before or after him, Makovski muses over melancholic images of the city which inspired Dobuzhinski and he brings up a melancholic vision of St. Isaac’s cathedral followed by the same verse -

( Сей храм трех царств изображенье: гранит, кирпич и разрушенье)

The temple is of three reigns’ manifestation:
Of granite, brick and devastation.

Makovski thinks this opus is a real piece of serious poetry. He writes (on the page 294 of the reprint) “..the colonade of St. Isaac’s is even more somber, a poet (but I don’t remember who) once said..” - and then he quotes the granite, brick and devastation thing. Makovsky made the error most of us make, he attempts to assign some special meaning to a piece of “art” where there is none. As a modernist, who published many symbolist poets, he seeks symbols and searches for metaphors (and even finds them) while it is unlikely that the historic epigram he is so charmed with contains any.

Most likely the epigram conceals no metaphor. The word “carstvo” (tsarstvo) has two separate meanings in Russian - that of a reign and that of a kingdom. Makovski misunderstood the word in the sense of kingdom (the symbolic kingdoms of granite, of brick and of devastation. Well if you see it that way then the combination does indeed sound sufficiently melancholic and quite scary). The author of the epigram meant “reign” and the translation of the verse is quite straightforward. The temple is a testament to three separate reigns, those of Catherine II who ordered the structure to be built in granite; of Paul I who decreed to continue the construction in humble brick; and of Alexander I who ordered the entire thing to be demolished.

St. Isaac’s Cathedral is a huge structure, some may call it monstrous - indeed up close the building appears overweight for its proportions and it may seem too ornately decorated even by mid-19th century’s standards. Its’ somewhat derogatory nickname stemming from that period is the Inkwell (cherniljnica, chernilnitsa). It does look like a heavy bronze and marble inkwell from the (French) Empire era. Montferrand’s St.Isaac is 101.5 meters high (which is the equivalent of a 40 story modern office building), it is 111.28 meters in length and 98 meters in width - so you can visualize a cube or a giant inkwell. It would accommodate 14,000 people for a mass. Columns on four sides of the St. Isaac’s facade are 114 ton heavy monolith pieces of granite - and that sounds already incredible if you think well about it. But when you consider that practically no machinery was used in those days and the giant monolith columns, each made of a single piece of granite, turned to a perfect shape and polished on the spot, were mounted in the middle of a busy city by raw muscle power of humans and animals, the feat of building St.Isaac’s acquires a surreal, almost Egyptian dimension. Some of the St. Isaac’s columns have scars left by fragments of German heavy shells and bombs. During the war St. Isaac’s Cathedral was used to store art treasures (it was a veritable treasure chest). According to a popular legend, some old officer told Leningrad authorities that Germans would not target St. Isaac’s because its dome is such a good reference point for their artillery. Whether that was true or not, St. Isaac’s had not sustained any direct hits during German bombardments of the city. Most likely Germans did not want to cause any damage to the Cathedral - you cannot miss this thing even if you wished to.

The interior of the Cathedral is a treasure. It is made of marble, jasper, porphyry, malachite and lazurite. Floors are constructed of marble of different colors, shades and patterns; marble slabs were brought from Finland, Karelia, Urals, Italy and South of France. Sculpture of the cathedral - the building is decorated with 54 bas-reliefs, 73 statues and 84 busts - were created by Peter Klodt (Clodt), Ivan Vitali, Nikolai Pimenov and Alexander Loganovski (Loganowski, Loganovsky, Loganovskij). In the Soviet times a Faucault pendulum swung back and forth - hung from the center of the dome, now the pendulum is gone, and a restored bronze dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit is in its place at the height of 80 meters right below the ornate dome. Paintings and the wall panels (“panneaux”) were done by Karl Brullow (Bruellow, Brjullov, Briullov), Vasili (Basil, Vassily, Wassili, Wassilij) Shebuev, Peter (Piotr) Basin, Timofei (Timothei, Timothy) Neff and Fedor (Theodore) Bruni.

The expense of building the Cathedral for almost 50 years, importing best materials and commissioning most popular artists and sculptors for the decoration work, was so great that one Imperial official later remarked the project would have been less expensive had they simply cast the entire “thing” in silver.

The Cathedral is open to visitors but is a somewhat of a tourist trap. It is run in a typically Soviet fashion - pushy, brazen but incompetent: look at their English sign pointing to the ticket kiosk. Soak the foreigners - they pay like 10 times more than the natives for the same entrance ticket. I cannot see the French charging an admission fee to the Notre Dame or to the Rheims Cathedral, I cannot see them selling tickets to the Madeleine either. The idea of Germans trying to charge innocent visitors the cost of two grilled bratwursts and a beer for the opportunity to the see the interior of the Mainz

Cathedral or the “Dom” of Cologne would strike anyone as preposterous. There is no moral dilemma about that in post-Soviet Russia (surprisingly it has preciously few moral dilemmas) - the part of the nation’s heritage and a church is made into a cash cow for the few, a successful business property in the country that is notoriously inept at doing any business or launching any new business save for exploiting usurped or stolen bits and pieces of old heritage or selling plundered natural resources. Right now St. Isaac’s is a museum, let’s hope one day it would become what it used to be and what it was built for - a church.

Another note about St. Isaac’s. When I was of pre-school age and when I went to school. St. Isaac’s cathedral was almost black. I always thought that the color of its marble was blackish. I believed that the building had very special, romantic, dark and somber charm because of its unusually mournful color. Well, that was air pollution, not the natural color of the marble. They cleaned it up a bit recently, sandblasted the walls (and the cleaning and restoration work continues) and voila - it turns out that St. Isaac’s Cathedral is almost white. So St. Isaac’s of my memories and the real Cathedral I see today are two different buildings.

Pictures on this page were taken by me, Eugene Suharnikov, and the color ones were taken by my brother Mihail (Michael) Suharnikov who used a small plastic compact camera. Black and white images are mine and you can use them freely but I would appreciate a link or referencee to the author. I will replace these pictures of St. Isaac’s Cathedral with new images sometime in the future.

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