To be published: Q2 2025
Grimbosq. In June 1721, the French architect Étienne Grimbosq arrives in Petersburg with his wife and daughter. He was hired by Peter the Great to build a palace for his Chamberlain Romashkin. The new city, built on marshes without solid foundations, is the work of Peter the Great, built more or less on command. The Tsar left patriarchal Moscow and moved his court far north to St Petersburg, forcing everyone to build a house there according to the plans laid down by the state administration and to attend various eccentric festivals under threat of fines, reminiscent without exaggeration of Peter Breughel’s Kermeses and Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
Tsar is interested in everything, supervises everything, is omnipresent, scholarly, but offers a disturbing picture in which the wanderlust of the mind mixes with wisdom, the sordidness with the sublime. Grimbosq hates the life of luxury, barbarism, coarseness and ostentation imposed on him by the Tsar, and is aware of the threats that the intrigues of his surroundings are letting fall on his household. But he is guided by a single abiding thought: to create a work that will last for the ages.