14 DECEMBER 1991, Page 39

Palaces and monasteries of Old Russia

John Jolliffe

IMPERIAL SPLENDOUR by Prince George Galitzine, with photographs by Earl Beesley and Garry Gibbons Viking £35, pp. 187 To declare an interest, I was first dazzled by the buildings portrayed in this beautiful book on a visit to Russia in 1964, in company with the late and much lament- ed Mariga Guinness. Our task was to blaze a trail for a tour which the Irish Georgian Society were to make in the following year. Given a free hand — and her hand was usually pretty free — the enterprise and imagination of the one and only Mariga were prodigious. On this occasion she somehow managed to give the grim, unyielding Soviet authorities the impres- sion that her Society consisted of émigré Georgians plotting the downfall of the Soviet Union from a castle outside Dublin. But if she could create confusion, she could also dispel it. Her most worrying habit was to take photographs not only of elegant

bridges (which were in those days firmly classified as military installations) but also on one occasion of a rather forlorn detach- ment of cadets enjoying a rural tea-break. Either of these could have led to charges of spying, and even to long prison sentences if the authorities had been so minded. But, mercifully, all that happened was that she soon charmed some official into providing us with a huge black Zim limousine, complete with chauffeur, in which we visited many of the buildings pictured here.

And what pictures! The book is oddly shaped, about a foot square, but by means of something called a 'gatefold' some of them are spread across three whole pages, making a breathtaking panorama each time. Yet no interiors are represented at all, which is a sad waste. It would have been better to divide the book into two: secular buildings in one, eccelesiastical in the other, and interiors in both. There is no index, and at the very least a list of illustra- tions should have been included so that one could find what one is looking for. Even the captions are often inadequate, giving the name of the building but not say- ing where it is.

George Galitzine was born in Tiflis, but came to England at the age of three, later winning a history scholarship at Oxford. More recently, he has taken to leading classy sightseeing tours in Russia, and rapidly made such a reputation that in 1988-9 he led no less than 24. His text, though not stylish, has real authority, and it is difficult to imagine a more informative and captivating guide, especially to the masterpieces of the great Italian architects The Church of the Holy Virgin of Kazan at Kolomenskoe of St Petersburg — Trezzini, Rastrelli and Rinaldi, and their neoclassical successors Quarenghi and Rossi. The production is more like television than a book, but although the publishers could have put it together more intelligently, nothing can take away from the tremendous visual impact of the photographs: a perfect Christmas present for any lover of 18th- or 19th-century architecture, or indeed of Russia.