Landlord Russia

This text was published over a hundred years ago—back in 1910—under the title “Old Estates: Essays on Russian Art and Everyday Life.” In the decades that followed, the “steamroller” of history passed over the landed gentry Russia. From the remnants of the former grandeur that the author still witnessed, little remained—something destroyed, something rebuilt, but something has, of late, also been revived. We won’t tell you whether or not this or that estate survived into the 1920s of the 21st century and in what condition it is, nor will we make any comments on the text of that earlier edition. We’ll simply listen to Nikolai Nikolayevich Wrangel—the poet and historian of art—who in the summer of 1909 toured 25 landed estates across all of Russia and wrote this article.