Ghostly images of a lost Russia

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Patricia Andrew visits ‘a lost world’ captured by Simon Marsden’s haunting photographs and Duncan McClaren’s evocative prose

Russia: A World Apart by Simon Marsden and Duncan McLaren

Russia: A World Apart comprises a series of haunting, sometimes eerie, photographs of the ruined country estates of the Russian aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a lost world, and speaks of death and decay. The text is by Duncan McLaren, and the photographs by Simon Marsden, who died in 2012. The elegiac qualities of the book are thus enhanced by circumstance, for Marsden specialized in this type of evocative, atmospheric black-and-white image, fascinated by images of haunted houses, ruins and churchyards, decay and death.

The book also completes a trilogy of publications by Marsden and McLaren, describing and capturing the atmosphere of the remnants of estates with Classical country houses ruined through civil war, occupation, revolution, neglect and the passing of time (the previous two books examined Ireland and East Germany).

Making this particular book was quite an adventurous undertaking, necessitating four trips, and what it shows is a Russia that the tourist won’t easily find. The palaces and grand houses in Moscow and St Petersburg may still be there for us all to see, often alive again as museums. But deeper into the Russian countryside, away from tourist trails, there is a very different world: ‘The further you drive out of Moscow and St Petersburg, the more desolate and derelict the landscape becomes’.  Villages are dead or dying, as residents move to the cities. Roads are pot-holed, churches vandalized, and people stare at the unusual sight of travellers. Many of the estate buildings – the grand houses, the garden follies and statuary – are obscured behind decades of undergrowth.

The photographs, shot mainly in Marsden’s characteristic ‘sfumato’contrasting black-and-white style, show ghostly images of decay (though one set of buildings, constructed deliberately as fantasy, is shown in a very prosaic colour image, as a contrast). The buildings are generally empty shells, long stripped of furniture and quarried for their building material. Most were constructed before the revolution, and they range from palaces and manor houses to churches and memorials; there are also some more recent monuments from the Soviet era.

It is often the garden statuary that is most intact, for its lack of practical use, and its politically dangerous social associations, have left it untouched by anything except nature. Naiads and Venuses hide in the glades, and obelisks still stand as ‘sentinels to the days of cut grass and pathways’.

Some of the estates weren’t finally abandoned until quite recently, for after the revolution they were converted into schools, hospitals and other institutions. But as the Soviet era ended, these too have been left to vandalism and nature. A small number are now being restored, by individuals or by organizations, but many in remoter areas will simply continue to decay. Russia’s government and general public have other priorities, and there is nobody to lament their passing – unless something might have a modern political significance.  Thus, a re-built church in Moscow can be featured here, a re-creation of an ancient structure pulled down by Catherine the Great. And someone – presumably a private individual fearful of revealing an identity – has placed a statue of Tsar Nicholas II behind Feodorovsky Cathedral, the Imperial family’s parish church.  

The ownership of estates and buildings is often vague. On one estate, Marsden and McLaren found some relatively well-preserved old buildings, surrounded by more modern structures. But workmen who had been employed there for four years still had no idea who was paying their wages, or whether anyone actually owned the place. 

Will Duncan McLaren, an international art dealer, continue to pursue the theme of the ruined estate, or the hidden world of Russia, now there are no Marsden photographs to accompany his future text?  I do hope so.

Russia: A World Apart by Simon Marsden and Duncan McLaren is published by Mudds & Stoke 2012. 144 pp. over 80 illus, mostly mono. ISBN:978-0957379503