Customer Reviews

The Art and Architecture of Russia: Third Edition (The Yale University Press Pelican Histor)

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This book is a volume in a scholarly series designed to present the largest number of pictures and plans at a reasonable price (I know, $30 is hardly cheap, but look at some prices for scholarly books). It is not meant to be much fun. Sorry!

I'm very disappointed in this book. Except for the cover, there is not a single colored picture. The text is difficult both because it is too technical and because the type is too small. For a $30 soft cover book, I expected stunning pictures of Russia's fascinating architecture and art, accompanied by interesting text. Each museum in Russia has a beautiful, full color book at a much lower cost than this one. If you get to Russia, make sure you buy everything you want there, because there seems to be nothing comparable available in this country.

English books about Russian art history are usually just covering separate areas. This book gives a nice overview covering early architecture, icon painting up to modern times. There are other books out there that are more comprehensive, but the once I could find were all written in Russian. And although I can read Russian, for ease of reading I was happy to at least find one book written in English to complete my Russian library and prepare for my exams. The book covered most I needed to know and I could find little places were the information was not in sync with the information I got from Russian books and my lectures.

It would, like other reviewers already pointed out, had been nice if at least some pictures were printed in colour, but I didn't find this a very big problem since pictures of the art presented in this book are easily found on the internet. More important to me is that the text, although dry at times, is well written, correct, informative and covering a lot of ground.