Throughout Russian history, local craftsmen have shown remarkable skill in fashioning wood into items of daily use, from bridges and street paving to carts and boats to household utensils and combs. Russia has the largest forested zone on the planet, so its architecture was also traditionally made from timber. From homes to churches to forts, Russian buildings are almost all, underneath, constructed with logs, often covered by plank siding or by lathing and plaster. In From Forest to Steppe, renowned scholar and photographer William Craft Brumfield offers a panoramic survey of Russia's centuries-long heritage of wooden architecture. Lavishly illustrated with more than 400 color photographs, the volume links log-built barns, windmills, houses, and churches in the Far North; Buddhist shrines in the Transbaikal region; and eighteenth-century palaces on the outskirts of Moscow. Brumfield also takes readers to the estate houses of many Russian literary giants, from Chekhov and Tolstoy to Dostoevsky and Pushkin. Spanning thousands of photographed sites, five decades of field work, and seven time zones, Brumfield's photographs offer compelling evidence of the adaptability of log construction and its ability to transcend class, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries. In the decades since Brumfield began photographing Russian architecture, many of the buildings he has documented have been demolished or abandoned and left to rot at alarming rates. Brumfield observes a contradiction in contemporary Russia: It acknowledges the cultural importance of wooden buildings yet struggles to find and dedicate the resources and solutions needed to save them. A hymn and elegy to the long Russian practice of building with wood, From Forest to Steppe is an unparalleled look into one of the world's most singular architectural traditions.
William Craft Brumfield is Professor of Slavic Studies at Tulane University. Brumfield began photographing Russia in 1970 and is the foremost authority in the West on Russian architecture. He is the author, editor, and photographer of numerous books, including Journeys Through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, Architecture at the End of the Earth: Photographing the Russian North, and Lost Russia: Photographing the Ruins of Russian Architecture, all published by Duke University Press. Brumfield is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2002 he was elected to the state Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences and in 2006 to the Russian Academy of Fine Arts. He is also the 2014 recipient of the D. S. Likhachev Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of Russia. In 2019 he was awarded the Russian state's Order of Friendship medal-the highest decoration of the Russian Federation given to foreign nationals-for his study and promotion of Russia's cultural legacy. Brumfield's photographs of Russian architecture have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums and are part of the Image Collections at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Acknowledgments ix Author's Note xi Exordium xiii Introduction. Getting There 1 Part I. Wooden Architecture as Cultural Environment 1. From Palace to Dacha: High Art Revisits Folk Traditions 25 2. The Wooden Ambience of Russian Literature 73 Part II. Where the Folk Live: From Forest to Steppe 3. The Russian North: Toward the White Sea 117 4. The Heartland 241 5. Crossing the Urals 303 6. Into Siberia 325 7. The Far East 381 Conclusion. What Will Remain? 407 General Bibliograhy 411 Index
"From Forest to Steppe is a tribute to the generations of anonymous Russian woodworkers whose skill and ingenuity took a simple basic module-the log cabin-and adapted its structure to dwellings large and small, from stout defensive walls and fortifications to prefab rooms for sale at medieval markets. It is also a tribute to the dedication and persistence of William Craft Brumfield, who found ways of reaching remote sites to photograph buildings that were often in a state of disrepair or that have since disappeared. Providing an expansive overview of a fundamental building block of Russian culture, this book helps us appreciate the importance of preserving architectural monuments as a window into the life of the boreal forest's past and present inhabitants." - Ann Kleimola, coeditor of (Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359-1584)
