This book by Simon Marsden and Duncan McLaren is a haunting evocation of the ruined country estates of the Russian aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries.  Revolution, civil war, invasion, anarchy and casual indifference have conspired against many of the grand buildings of Russia’s rich and complex past which have perhaps suffered more than in any other country.  While the architectural riches of the two great cities of Moscow and St Petersburg still exist for everyone to see, when photographer Simon Marsden and author Duncan McLaren entered the Russian countryside, away from the obvious tourist trails, they encountered a very different world. 

This book, the result of four trips undertaken by Marsden and McLaren to the Moscow and St Petersburg regions, illustrates a diverse mix of pre-revolutionary buildings and memorials, manor houses, palaces, churches, statuary and tombs, interspersed with more recent monuments from Soviet times.  Each picture tells its own tale.  In the newly-found freedom and optimism of the post-communist era, some of these estates are being restored by individuals and organisations whose immense dedication to rescuing their past is nothing short of inspiring.  Others will simply crumble to dust in the face of indifference from the majority of the population making Russia: A World Apart a beautiful and melancholy testament to the glories and grandeur of the past few centuries.

McLaren relates how “The further from Moscow and St Petersburg, the more desolate and derelict the landscape became.  Endless pot-holed roads pass through one dead or dying village after another and vandalised churches are now the refuge of owls and pigeons.  This is the plight of modern-day Russia where the countryside is dying and its population declining while the big cities are thriving.  Hidden away within all this desolation and chaos, many devastated country estates can be found.  The statuary and formal gardens are gone forever, replaced by an overgrown wilderness where stray dogs forage amongst the crumbling outhouses, garbage and rotting tyres.”  Some of the larger estates and palaces have been restored by the state, mainly as museums, and a few of the estate churches by the dedication of the local people, but there are so many that exist today in the words of the Russian playwright and satirist Arkady Averchenko (1881-1925) as merely “fragments of what has been smashed to smithereens”.  Others remain as schools, sanatoriums or asylums from the Soviet era, the rest are abandoned to the elements. 

The publication also serves as a tribute to Sir Simon Marsden, Bt. who died aged 63 in January 2012.  He was an admired photographer of subjects evocative of ghosts and the supernatural, an interest developed during his childhood spent in two haunted houses, Panton Hall and Thorpe Hall, in the remoteness of the Lincolnshire Wolds.  Here he played for days on his own in the vast parklands with only his imagination as a friend.  His father and elder brother were avid readers of ghost stories and he inherited the family’s collection of books on the genre.  He wrote that “in later years I was to discover the works of Edgar Allan Poe, whose dark tales of decaying mansions and moonlit abbeys seemed somehow to mirror my own obsession with the ghosts that haunted them”.

Marsden’s father gave Simon an old Leica camera on his twenty-first birthday and he instantly became hooked.  “What intrigued me most was the magic of time and light and the enigma of ‘reality’ that these elements conjured up.  Over the years I have tried to portray the unreality of the ‘real’ and the reality of the ‘unreal’...  The mystical quality of my photographs reflects this ancient order and they attempt to reveal what is eternal.”  Marsden’s distinctive style came from the infra-red film he used which gave his images their ethereal, haunting quality and he also excelled in the art of printing, an art that is disappearing in the age of digital photography.  His work has been widely exhibited and examples can be found in the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu and the Saatchi Collection.  Many books of his haunting photographs have been published and Russia: A World Apart is the third book of a trilogy Marsden published with Duncan McLaren which focuses on the destruction of the classical estate, the first being In Ruins – The Once Great Houses of Ireland (A. Knopf, 1980) and the second Beyond the Wall – The Lost World of East Germany (Little Brown, 1999).  Russia: A World Apart is a fitting memorial to Simon Marsden.  www.simonmarsden.co.uk       

Duncan McLaren, former director of the Sotheby’s International Board, is a highly regarded art dealer and advisor.  He first met Simon Marsden at one of his photography exhibitions in 1976 and said: “I knew that the book I wanted to write now had its photographer”.  This publication is the result of their third collaboration.  At the age of sixteen McLaren met, through family friends, Captain Ilia Tolstoy, the grandson of Leo Tolstoy.  Despite losing his father at a very early age, McLaren had never encountered a loss so total as that of the Captain.  Not to be able to go back to your own country or, if you did, to find your world so altered as to be incomprehensible, was inconceivable to him and the experience had a curious and lasting effect.  Later McLaren shared a flat with a Russian friend, which gave him more knowledge of the vast country he had yet to visit.  He also read books and watched films about Russia but it was not until 1980 that he began travelling this diverse and beautiful land.  Twenty-six years later, when he and Marsden decided on the book, McLaren turned to Tania Illingworth, née Tolstoy-Miloslavsky and great-great-great-niece of Ilia, to organise their trips and in so doing, completed a circle.

Compiled by Marie Benoit