Catherine the Great by Simon Dixon

Author:Simon Dixon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-08-13T04:00:00+00:00

In the end, the Menshikov Palace was used to house theatrical staff and Catherine chose to build a new stone residence on the site of the burnt-out palace on the other side of the Yauza River. Noting that it was ‘designed to be two or three English miles in circumference’, Wraxall observed that there was ‘a sort of savage and barbarous grandeur in this taste, which never appears in the edifices and productions of Athenian sculpture or architecture’.139 So ambitious was the project that the empress never occupied her Catherine Palace, which was completed only in 1796. Since the immediate need for a useable residence remained, Bazhenov’s assistant, Matvey Kazakov, returned from St Petersburg at the end of August 1774 with a more modest commission to connect three large houses belonging to the Golitsyns, the Dolgorukys and the Lopukhins. It was in this ramshackle Prechistensky Palace, dismantled shortly afterwards, that Catherine was to celebrate victory over the Turks in 1775. Before then, however, she had not only to defeat the enemy, but also to overcome the most serious internal challenges of her reign.

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