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William Hastie in Russia

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century more buildings were erected in Russia than in any previous period of the country’s history. These ranged from palaces (both royal and private) and banks to country houses, churches and shops. On 23 August 1779 Catherine the Great wrote to her faithful correspondent and artistic adviser Baron Grimm: ‘Vous saurez en passant que la fureur de bâtir chez nous est plus forte que jamais et guère tremblement de terre n’a plus renversé de batiments que nous en elevons’. Foreign architects were eagerly welcomed. Of varying talents and abilities to conform to the main stylistic currents, many of these have been overshadowed by the more distinguished personalities of the time and consequently have been forgotten by posterity. Such has been the fate of William Hastie, a Scotsman by origin, who played a considerable part in Russian architecture at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. There has not hitherto been any comprehensive study of him and we have to rely therefore on brief references scattered in various Russian publications on different aspects of the architecture of the period. It is not until 1967 that the first English reference to him is found in the discussion of the Bahchisarai Palace in the Crimea in the catalogue of the Cameron exhibition at Edinburgh.