Fyodor Shekhtel is celebrated as the architect who gave Russian Art Nouveau some of its most enduring masterpieces. Yet the exhibition ‘Fyodor Shekhtel: Dreams of Russian Art Nouveau’ at Moscow’s Museum of Architecture argues that his true genius lay in something broader: the creation of immersive worlds in which architecture, theatre and spectacle became inseparable.

Magnificent in its scope and content, the exhibition ‘Fyodor Shekhtel: Dreams of Russian Art Nouveau’ at the Museum of Architecture in Moscow brings together an impressive array of works of art from numerous museums and private collections. As Natalia Shashkova, the museum’s director explains, the exhibition is dedicated to scholars who studied Shekhtel during the Soviet years, when his work had largely fallen into oblivion. The most dedicated of these scholars was Lyudmila Saigina, a leading researcher at the Museum of Architecture, where she worked from 1976 until her death in 2024. She devoted most of her career to Shekhtel’s legacy and compiled an extensive catalogue raisonné of his many architectural projects. The exhibition’s curator, museum researcher Anna Kistanova, emphasizes that the display was conceived in dialogue with Saigina’s ideas and curatorial vision.

The resulting exhibition presents Fyodor Shekhtel (1859–1926) less as an architect than as a director and visual artist. Its most original contribution is the emphasis placed on two periods of his career: his early years and the final Soviet decade of his creative life. In both, this celebrated architect emerges above all as a brilliant creator of scenic utopias.

Few people remember that Fyodor Shekhtel, like his close friend Anton Chekhov, came from an impoverished merchant family and began his career in popular entertainment. Chekhov published humorous stories under the pen name “Antosha Chekhonte,” while Shekhtel designed public celebrations for parks and theaters. These productions were organized by the impresario and actor Mikhail Lentovsky (1848–1906). Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, working under Lentovsky’s direction, Shekhtel created dozens of stage sets, ephemeral architectural structures, and costumes for spectacular extravaganzas. The grandest of these was the decoration for the “Spring the Fair” festivities held on Khodynka Field to celebrate the coronation of Alexander III in 1883.

Fantastic creatures, processions of legendary heroes, fairy-tale castles, voyages to the Moon – these were the images of performances now long forgotten. A selection of them fills the first gallery of the exhibition. Shekhtel’s earliest experiments in popular theater and street parties for the masses were first studied by the art historian Yevgenia Kirichenko, whose pioneering research in the 1970s effectively rediscovered the architect.

Theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) vividly described Lentovsky’s entertainments in Moscow’s Hermitage Garden, designed by Shekhtel: “What was not in that garden! Boating on the pond, and a water fireworks display of unbelievable richness and variety, complete with battles between ironclads and their sinking; tightrope walking across the pond; aquatic festivals with gondolas and illuminated boats; nymphs bathing in the water; ballet performances on the shore and in the pond itself. Countless promenades, mysterious gazebos, winding paths with poetic benches overlooking the water. The entire garden was flooded with tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lights, reflectors, illuminated screens… Processions, military bands, Gypsy choirs, Russian folk singers, and much more. All of Moscow, together with foreign visitors, flocked to this famous garden. The refreshment stands were constantly busy… Above all, the impresario Lentovsky wanted his garden to attract families and was exceptionally strict about anything that might damage the good reputation of his establishment.”

It is telling that Stanislavsky, the great reformer of Russian theatre, regarded himself as Lentovsky’s pupil. He seems to have inherited from him the idea of democratizing theatrical performance and involving as many members of the audience as possible in the spectacle.

Already in these early experiments – with fantastic characters and stage settings (anticipating fantasy animation and monster-filled video games), liminal backstage spaces, and Gothic atmospheres – Shekhtel revealed himself as far more than an architect. Rather, he began to realize his grand Neo-Romantic vision of the artist as the creator of a Gesamtkunstwerk. At the dawn of Symbolism, the idea of the synthetic work of art – embracing every artistic medium in the service of a universal spiritual idea – had been formulated by the composer Richard Wagner and the architect Gottfried Semper. Shekhtel transformed this concept into a version of the Gesamtkunstwerk intended for a broad public.

This notion is particularly intriguing when viewed through the lens of directing utopian performances. Educated within the traditions of Historicism, Shekhtel drew upon catalogues of historical styles, prints featuring grotesque and fantastical monsters – especially those by the French illustrator Alfred Grévin (1827–1892) – as well as theatrical costumes and decorative motifs. He then blended this eclectic material in his own aesthetic "mixer" and orchestrated it into a unified festive vision. The ornamental and decorative character of Art Nouveau combined seamlessly with an organic interpenetration of forms and a burlesque exaggeration of individual motifs and historical styles. As Shekhtel’s contemporaries memorably observed, the result was an “abyss of garishness and taste.” It is precisely this combination of the vulgar (garishness) and the refined (taste) that gave rise to a popular version of the Gesamtkunstwerk during the Art Nouveau era of the 1890s–1910s.

In the mansions of his mature period, Shekhtel remained faithful to this curious synthesis of popular theatrical extravaganza and the elite craftsmanship of the Great Master of Form. The exhibition prominently features a mansion built in 1893 for merchant and industrialist Savva Morozov on Spiridonovka Street in Moscow. Its Gothic castle seems to have stepped directly out of the ephemeral architecture of Lentovsky’s theatrical marvels. Yet the beauty of its details and the overall spatial dramaturgy create an entirely different experience. This is no longer a theatrical illusion. The space is alive and dynamic, inviting visitors to explore it, delighting them with adventurous surprises concealed in its intricate turns, shifting scales, and tactile encounters with beautifully carved medieval ornament.

It is difficult to understand why the exhibition’s organizers dedicate only a few small photographs to what is universally acknowledged as Shekhtel’s masterpiece: the mansion of the banker and patron Stepan Ryabushinsky on Malaya Nikitskaya Street in Moscow (1900). Here the synthesis of the arts reaches its fullest expression, comparable to Scriabin’s music or paintings by Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910). It is a building that embodies Shekhtel’s own formula for Art Nouveau in terms of its use of form and space.

Volumes of varying heights are grouped around a dominant vertical axis – the great stone staircase cascading into the entrance hall. Here a biomorphic theme is established: stone transformed into flowing seawater, complete with a jellyfish-shaped lamp. Yet the staircase also carries profound symbolic meaning. It evokes the eternal ascent toward the light of Truth, embodied by the house chapel, while simultaneously suggesting the universal fluidity, movement, and diversity of life itself. At the same time, the staircase becomes a World Tree, its branches unfolding into the rooms of the mansion. Within these interiors, optical illusions arise through contrasting scales, enormous windows, and supple floral ornamentation. The summit of this symbolic tree is the Old Believer chapel – the Ryabushinsky family sanctuary – at the very top of the house, its dome crowning the entire building.

Art historian Yevgenia Kirichenko compared the unique spatial experience of Shekhtel’s architecture with the ideas of his apparent opposite, the avant-garde architect Nikolai Ladovsky (1881–1941). Despite their fundamentally different artistic convictions, both regarded space as the primary generator of architectural form and the ultimate measure of its quality. It is regrettable that this specifically architectural dimension dissolves in the exhibition into a dazzling firework of ornamental displays, stage designs, amusing monsters, chimeras, and floral decorations. One is left with the impression that the organizers ultimately view Shekhtel chiefly as a director of public festivities who emerged from the traditions of Eclecticism (Historicism), and as a refined decorator of life itself. Yet from today's perspective, such an interpretation is entirely understandable.

In a sense, Shekhtel himself seemed to reinforce this reading during the late Soviet period of his career. His designs for the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station (1924–1925) evoke once again the utopian worlds of theatrical scenography. A lighthouse tower resembles a Romanesque fairy-tale castle, while the dam recalls the stage set of an ancient city gate. A similarly fantastical Orientalism shapes his design for the Turkestan Pavilion at the All-Russian Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow in 1923.

The idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk for mass audiences accompanied Fyodor Shekhtel throughout his entire life. It ultimately alienated him from the avant-garde. Yet today it is precisely this vision that makes his work newly relevant. For this hybrid style – this new eclecticism – has become one of the defining modes of thought among the postmodern and metamodern generations of the new millennium.