Russian temple building of the middle of XIX - early XX centuries in the assessment of pre-revolutionary and soviet historians of architecture: to the historiography of the question

In the article for the first time the historiography of temple building in the Russian Empire in the 1830s-1910s is considered. Te Russian style prevailing at that time was formed as a historical and cultural phenomenon on the basis of the state order and reflected the unity of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality”. Its initial positive evaluation as a symbol of spiritual and national revival by the 1860s. was replaced by criticism from the conditional “national-democratic camp,” and in the early XXth century - art association “World of Art”. Critics were united in their common secular perception of church architecture, subjectivity, politicized approach. Consideration of the historiography of the question makes it possible to understand the mentality of the Russian cultural elite of the pre- revolutionary period. Te ideologization of criticism was sharply aggravated afer the coup of 1917 and became an important justification for the mass destruction of temples built in the 1830s -1910s. Only in the early 1970s. the “rehabilitation” of the modernist architecture begins (E. A. Borisova, T. P. Kazhdan), and since the early 1980s. it concerns eclecticism (E. I. Kirichenko, V. G. Lisovsky, T. A. Slavina), although stereotypes of Soviet perception are also found in modern publications