Floristic compositions in the interiors of the Pavlovsk Palace - an attempt to resurrect the past, to restore it from the aroma of flowers, from the aura that they create

Passing the gallery

A photo: George Shablovsky

Text: Maria Kriger

Magazine: N11 (56) 2001

Pavlovsk is one of those pearls that make up a precious necklace - Petersburg country residences. After these words, which are the traditional beginning of any guidebook or a sightseeing tour, it becomes unbearably boring. But it's true. In fact, Pavlovsk is one of the most perfect creations of the palace and park architecture of the end of the XVIII - beginning of the XIX centuries. In Pavlovsk, in the evenings with the widowed empress Maria Feodorovna, it was considered an honor to be Karamzin, Krylov and Glinka. Pavlovsk was dedicated to his poems by Zhukovsky and Akhmatova. The glory of this palace is not covered in a few stingy lines. However, among the royal luxury, the richest decoration of the palace halls, the casual visitor does not leave the feeling of some abandonment and desolation: it seems that it is always uncomfortable and lonely here. Now it is difficult to imagine that life here once pulsated, with its royal ordinariness and idle course of time. The house left by the owners will never be the same, and all that remains for us is to write a little fairy tale about the distant times of his youth. The rustle of heavy brocade dresses, cheerful children's laughter, fragments of a porcelain cup, which inadvertently slipped out of agile hands, and the subtle, slightly stupefying smell of flowers - in all rooms. In Pavlovsk, a magnificent park with a rose garden was laid out, and Maria Fedorovna’s chambers were decorated with fresh-cut flowers from May to October. Floristic "event" in the Pavlovsk Palace, organized by Moscow and St. Petersburg florists (led by the famous Swiss master Peter Hess), is a kind of tribute to the memory of the Russian empress's passion for flowers. A distinctive feature of all the works is an extraordinary delicacy and refinement of execution: the flowers were placed only where they were supposed to be two centuries ago. They took their places, according to strict court etiquette; each color and compositional combination is carefully thought out and verified, so as not to go beyond the strict limits of style dictated by the interiors of the palace. The compositions echo floral designs on the ceiling, walls, heavy curtains and carpets - this is perhaps the most popular motif of the decorative decoration of the apartments of the Empress. Flowers, with their characteristic ability to mimicry, change their mood in accordance with the "tonality" of the interior: in the front dining room of the White they look very solemn and even pathetic, and in the bedroom these same seemingly fragile creatures are homely and cozy. Nabokov once remarked that "memory resurrects everything except smells, but then nothing revives the past as completely as the smell once associated with it." The theme of the compositions created by florists can be described precisely as an attempt to resurrect the long-gone past - at least for a few days to restore it from the sweetish aroma of flowers, from the unique aura that they create.