Evgenii Vasil'evich Mikhailovskii's

The Methods of Restoration of Architectural Monuments

Author(s): Igor Demchenko
Source: Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism, Vol.
8, No. 1 (Summer 2011), p. 83
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/futuante.8.1.0083
Accessed: 10-11-2015 07:14 UTC

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1. Portrait of Evgenii Vasilevich Mikhailovskii. Photo courtesy the Schusev State Museum of Architecture.

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Igor Demchenko

Future Anterior
Volume VIII, Number 1
Summer 2011

Evgenii Vasilevich Mikhailovskiis

The Methods of Restoration of
Architectural Monuments
The edited volume The Methods of Restoration of Architectural
Monuments was prepared by Evgenii Mikhailovskii as an official reference tool for Soviet restorers. It aimed at reflecting
the state-endorsed position regarding the goals of heritage
preservation activities in the Soviet Union.1

From the mid-1960s, Mikhailovskii, who was both a
practicing restorer of Old-Russian church architecture and a
scholar working for the Central Scientific Research Institute of
the History and Theory of Architecture in Moscow (the TsNIITIA,
currently the NIITIAG RAASN), established himself as a firm proponent of the Venice Charter, opposed by the patriotic wing of
the Soviet preservationist community. Mikhailovskii was concerned with the growing rift between the historicist approach
advocated by the UNESCO heritage preservation institutions
and the unruly aestheticism and cultural nationalism, which in
the 1940s justified the reconstruction and recreation of monuments destroyed by the Germans in the western regions of the
USSR and by the 1960s had spread to all the republics of the
Soviet Union.

In the introductory chapter to The Methods volume, which
is translated below, Mikhailovskii attempts to differentiate between the artistic value that the restorers of the patriotic wing
strived to recreate in monuments and the aesthetic value contingent in each historic period. Mikhailovskii inevitably aligns
himself with the official position of the Soviet Marxist-Leninist
aesthetics that postulates the objectivity of artistic value;
however, in consent with Alois Riegl he argues that the creative
modes of the past epochs, despite their objectivity, are inaccessible to contemporary restorers. Mikhailovskii insists that,
instead of trying to penetrate the creative consciousness of the
past epochs, Soviet restorers should clean, consolidate, and
reveal historic monuments in order to provoke aesthetic feelings in contemporary viewers who do not have special training
in the history of art. According to Mikhailovskii, this is the only
type of intervention that could be done to a monument without
relying on subjective and thus inappropriate stylistic con
jectures. Mikhailovskiis theories were the primary guiding
principles for the preservation work carried out by TsNIITIA
until the 1980s, when he left the research institute and a new
generation of late-Soviet theoreticians returned to the practice
of complete restoration.

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