mparisons to give an idea of something
that has no prototype. Let us try rather to describe Vassili-Blagennoi,
if indeed there exists a vocabulary to speak of what had never been
imagined previously.

There is a legend about Vassili-Blagennoi, which is probably not
true, but which nevertheless expresses with strength and poetry
the sense of wondering stupefaction felt at the semi-barbarous
period when that singular edifice, so remote from all architectural
traditions, was erected. Ivan the Terrible had this cathedral built
as a thank-offering for the conquest of Kasan, and when it was
finished, he found it so beautiful, wonderful and astounding, that
he ordered the architect's eyes to be put out--they say he was an
Italian--so that he could never erect anything similar. According
to another version of the same legend, the Tsar asked the originator
of this church if he could not erect a still more beautiful one,
and upon his reply in the affirmative, he cut off his head, so
that Vassili-Blagennoi might remain unrivalled forever. A more
flattering exhibition of jealous cruelty cannot be imagined, but
this Ivan the Terrible was at bottom a true artist and a passionate
dilettante. Such ferocity in matters of art is more pleasing to
me than indifference.

Imagine on a kind of platform which lifts the base from the ground,
the most peculiar, the most incomprehensible, the most prodigious
heaping up of large and little cabins, outside stairways, galleries
with arcades and unexpected hiding-places and projections, unsymmetrical
porches, chapels in juxtaposition, windows pierced in the walls at
haphazard, indescribable forms and a rounding out of the interior
arrangement, as if the architect, seated in the centre of his work
had produced a building by thrusting it out from him. From the
roof of this church which might be taken for a Hindu, Chinese, or
Thibetan pagoda, there springs a forest of belfries of the strangest
taste, fantastic beyond anything else in the world. The one in the
centre, the tallest and most massive, shows three or four stories
from base to spire. First come little columns, and toothed
string-courses, then come some pilasters framing long mullioned
windows, then a series of blank arches like scales, overlapping
one another, and on the sides of the spire wart-like ornaments
outlining each spire, the whole terminated by a lantern surmounted
by an inverted golden bulb bearing on its tip the Russian cross.