The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, Sydenham, and St Petersburg

Brown, Catherine (2024) The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, Sydenham, and St Petersburg. In: Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration. Bloomsbury Academic, London. ISBN 9781350242029

Abstract

This chapter describes the early 1860s dispute between the radical Russian philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky and the anti-radical Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, as centred on their contrasting responses to the Crystal Palace built for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. The Palace represented the cutting edge of modernity of the country that itself represented technological and social progress to Westernising Russians. By the same token it represented a sinister totalitarianism to Dostoevsky, who rightly identified in the younger generation of radicals who admired it the seeds of the Revolution that was eventually to come. Both went to London to visit the Russian expatriate philosopher Alexander Herzen, who tried but ultimately failed to keep the more conservative and more revolutionary wings of Russian reformism working together, and whose thoughts about London influenced Dostoevsky’s own. Moreover Dostoevsky’s visit coincided with the 1862 World Exhibition, which horrified him in the same way as the Crystal Palace (by then rebuilt in Sydenham), and which like the Great Exhibition had a cosmopolitan ethos which Slavophiles such as he rejected, and which Britain has arguably since lost.

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