Moscow and the roots of Russian culture

At the beginning of the 12th century, the political center of gravity shifted in Russia, away from Kiev, which had fallen to the Mongols to the Northwest. It was almost by chance that the city of Moscow would arise to become the leading city of what became Russia. It was founded by Yuri Dolgoruky, a member of a family that would be prominent even up through the 19th century. It was first mentioned in passing in one of the national chronicles in 1147, but some settlement on the site of Moscow was present dating back to the 9th century. From the 1100s, Moscow grew in prominence, politically, economically and culturally up to the 1430s when it was unquestionably the first city of the land. The book, "Moscow and the Roots of Russian Culture" by Arthur Voyce charts the development of Russian culture and the role that the institutions in Russia played in its establishment. No history of Moscow could be complete without tales of the various rulers. Throughout its history culture has been a state function and this, as Voyce demonstrates included popular culture as well. This was not just the development of churches, the sponsorship of icon painters, and the development of the decorative arts, but also restrictions on culture, particularly that rooted in the pagan past or deemed as unseemly by the Russian ecclesiastical and political authorities. Voyce is a well-known expert on Russian architecture and art and this book is a testimony to his erudition. He focuses not only on the forms that buildings assumed, which owed much to early peasant building designs as much as ideas from Byzantium, but also on the importance that materials played in the development of Russian building design. These factors lead to the development of a purely Russian language of design. A parallel process occurred with the development of painting which was in the period up to 1713, when the book ends, was limited purely to icons. Moscow was a late starter in the development of a school of icon painting, behind both Novgorod and Pskov. Its early efforts resembled those of Vladimir, but by judicious patronage of men of genius such Rublev and Dionisi in the 14th century, Moscow was able to come into its own. While the period of Alexsi I was marked by religious conflict, there was one thing both reformers and traditionalist agreed upon and this was the undesirability of the introduction of "Frankish" innovations in painting, borrowing concepts common in Western art of the Renaissance and the Baroque. Predictably, the attempts to suppress Western style painting were undone a generation later by Alexsi's son who sent people who wanted to paint in the Frankish style to Europe and laid the basis for the development of a genuine Russian style of painting in the 19th century. One of the book's great strengths was its examination of folk or popular culture. This was both bawdy and lively at the time, well entrenched due to its pagan origins and viewed with suspicion by the ce