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[THE EARLIEST SOVIET ANALYSIS OF CHINESE ARCHITECTURE] Kitayskaya arkhitektura i yeye otrazheniye v Zapadnoy Yevrope [i.e. Chinese Architecture and its Reflection in Western Europe]

Zgura, V.

Item #2762

Moscow: RANION, 1929. 48 pp., 4 plates. 20,3x14 cm. In original publisher’s printed wrappers. Wrapper detached, tears, the text block split in half, but otherwise a good copy. Previous owner’s ink inscription on the inner side of the half-title “A. Leybfreyd, 5/VIII/1930.” Alexander Leybfreyd (1910-2003) was a Soviet architect, who wrote several works on Kharkiv architecture.

Scarce. First edition. 1 of 1,000 copies. Text in Russian. With a brief foreword by the Soviet art historian Boris Denike (1885-1941). With a bibliography and a summary in German. The book was issued by the Russian Association of Research Institutes of Social Sciences (RANION) a year before the institution was dissolved by the Soviet state, as ideological controls tightened and “bourgeois” formalist approaches to art history came under increasing political attack.
The first comprehensive Soviet study of Chinese architecture and its influence on European art authored by the short-lived Soviet art historian Vladimir Zgura (1903-1927). The book originated as an extensive report on Eastern art delivered by Zgura in 1926 at the Institute of Archaeology and Art History (part of the RANION network). It was first published in book form in 1929, three years after the author’s tragic drowning in the Black Sea.
In the book, Zgura analyses Chinese architecture through a formalist lens and discusses the 18th-century European fascination with Chinese aesthetics, known as “Chinoiserie.” He argues that key Eastern features (layered roofs, fragmented wall systems, etc.) were consistently misinterpreted by European observers, whose classical focus on symmetry could not accommodate Chinese tectonic principles. The author further examines European examples of Chinoiserie, including Sir William Chambers’ Great Pagoda at Kew Gardens and the Chinese House at Sanssouci, describing them as Western structural “skeletons” dressed in an exotic visual language. He also identifies four distinct modes of European adaptation of Chinese architecture (ranging from “Nomenclature China” to “Fantastic China” and contends that the encounter with Chinese aesthetics served as a vital catalyst for Western modernism.
The edition includes four black-and-white plates depicting the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, the Japanese Pavilion at Sanssouci, the Dragon Pagoda in Shanghai, and the pagoda in Kew Gardens designed by Chambers.
Vladimir Zgura was a Soviet art historian, architectural scholar, and Moscow studies specialist. He was the founder and first chairman (1922–1927) of the Society for the Study of Russian Estates (OIRU). After graduating from the Moscow Archaeological Institute in 1922, he became a junior researcher at the Research Institute of Archaeology and Art History (NIIAiI). From 1923, he worked at the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences (RAKhN), first as a researcher and later as academic secretary of its architectural studies commission. He died tragically at the age of 24 while on vacation in Crimea, drowning in the Black Sea near Feodosia in 1927. The exact circumstances of his death remain uncertain, with theories ranging from a heart attack to the effects of the 1927 Crimean earthquakes.

Worldcat shows copies of the edition at the Library of the Congress and Bavarian State Library.

Price: $350.00

Status: On Hold