"crystal palace"

[Robert S.]

Date: 6 maja 2001 05:41
Subject: Re: "crystal palace"


>On Sat, 5 May 2001, pynchon-l-digest wrote:
>> > Germans and your Love for Capital Letters.  :)  I take it as a
>> > reference to the ideas embodied/promoted by the Great Exhibition --
>> > knowledge, commerce, and empire coming together in glorious
>> > transparency.  The term "crystal palace" as a concept (not a building)
>> > appears in the literature of the Victorian era; Dostoyevsky used it in
>> > a few of his novels.
>>
>> The one Dostoevsky refers to is likely the one built for Catherine in
>> ice......
>
>Huh, I'd never heard of that.  When did they do that?
>
>Anyway, here's what I had in mind:
>
> "And it is then -- this is still you [the reader] speaking -- that
> the new economic relations will come, quite ready-made, and also
> calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible
> questions will vanish in an instant, essentially because they will
> have been given all possible answers.  Then the crystal palace
> will get built."
> --"Underground," chapter 7, Pevear & Volokhonsky trans. (Vintage)
>
>P & V have a footnote here:
>
> "...an allusion to...the Novel _What is to Be Done?_ (1863) by
> Chernyshevsky, one of D.'s main ideological enemies and the target
> of much of the satire in _Notes_.  C.'s thought combined the
> humanitarian socialism of the 1840s with the utilitarianism of the
> 60s....
>
> "C.'s "crystal palace," a vision of the the ideal living space for
> the future utopian communist society, based on the 'phalanstry'
> defined by the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, drew its
> physical details from the cast-iron and glass pavilion designed by
> Sir Joseph Paxton for the London Exhibition of 1851."
>
>A restaurant-hotel called the Palais de Crystal opened in St. Petersburg
>in 1862.  It was considered a ritzy hangout for the Westernized
>inteliigentsia.  In part two of _Crime and Punishment_, Raskolnikov visits
>a restaurant of the same name, though it's actually not located in the
>same part of town as the real hotel.
>
>--Kevin Troy
---
There is also this idea of "glass houses" by Stefan Zeromski, a Polish
novelist and political writer, in his "Przedwiosnie" ("The Daybreak" or
perhaps
literally "Before the Spring"), written in 1925 (filmed recently).  Two
guys, a father and a son, are on the train across the Red Russia, homebound,
to Poland. The father has a vision of a new civilization in Poland, a utopia
of economic and social proseprity, of an independent state after over two
hundred years of political non-existence.

Also, I don't know if it has been mentioned, as I'm a lurker, but in 1914
the German
architect Bruno Taut (a city planner for Berlin in 1921) designed his
Werkbund building of glass and ferroconcrete
in Koln, influenced by "Glasarchitektur" by Paul Scheerbart, trying later to
realize the idea of residential quarters being dominated by glass buildings
for public administration and institutions.



Robert S.





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