Authors

Nikita Balagurov¹;  ¹ Lund University, Sweden

Discussion

The 1837 fire in the Winter Palace almost completely destroyed the Romanovs' official residence. As noted by several scholars, one of the recurring motifs in the publications that appeared after the catastrophe was the full salvage of the palace furnishings and the imperial family's personal belongings, conducted by the lower ranks. Drawing on the official reports dedicated to the fire, the paper argues that the tragedy functioned in a manner similar to the traumatic events of the French Revolution and Napoleonic campaigns, responsible for assigning a special aura to the artifacts that had witnessed the atrocities of the era while surviving looting, displacement, as well as exile and execution of their royal owners. The trauma of the devastating fire and the aura that the Romanovs' objects had acquired in the course of the salvage pushed the boundaries of the dynasty's private sphere. Alexander Bashutskii's Renewal of the Winter Palace (1839) featured the first detailed description of the Romanovs' private apartments in which royal objects functioned not only as vehicles of familial, dynastic memory but also as the artifacts of national pride and belonging. The paper then traces the change of attitudes towards royal objects in a series of texts from the second part of the 19th century.