In 2015 William Brumfield published Architecture at the end of the earth (rev. this Journal lxx [2019], 216–18), a study of buildings – mainly churches – in the extreme north of Russia, most of which have, perforce, to be made of wood. The churches, in particular, are amazing constructions, attempting with great skill to reproduce the forms and shapes of churches further south, with their multiple domes and spires and apses, different kinds of wood being used for bearing the weight of the structures and for making the fine slivers of wood used to make shingles for the roofs. This volume echoed, to some extent, the theme of a still earlier book by Brumfield published in 1995, Lost Russia: photographing the ruins of Russian architecture, for the wooden churches of northern Russia are, in many cases, rapidly disappearing, as a result of the depopulation of that part of Russia owing to the harshness of the climate. In making his many journeys to Russia, photographing its buildings, Brumfield was following in the footsteps of a Russian photographer of the beginning of the twentieth century, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky who, between 1907 and 1916, embarked on a series of journeys, building up an unparalleled documentary record of the buildings of the Russian Empire. Prokudin-Gorsky had devised a camera that produced three separate negatives that could be recombined to create a colour image. It was a relatively slow process that required the object photographed to be still while the three exposures were made with the different negatives: a process that worked best with buildings. Prokudin-Gorsky undertook a number of journeys: the ‘ancient heartland’ – the historic settlements north-east of Moscow, and then a series of journeys from Smolensk to Samarkand, and also to the north, to the Solovetsky Islands. Brumfield had begun his own photographic forays in Russia before he had heard of Prokudin-Gorsky's photographic archive which, after the Russian Revolution, finally just after the end of World War II, made its way to the Library of Congress, where it lay, mostly unknown, until the publication of a book by Robert Allshouse in 1980, entitled Photographs for the tsar, and a subsequent exhibition in 1986, which Brumfield curated, and for which prints were produced from the negatives; in 2000 it was decided to digitise the collection. After the discovery of the Prokudin-Gorsky collection, Brumfield made further journeys to Russia to follow the Russian photographer in the regions as yet unvisited by him. The book under review consists of prints from the Prokudin-Gorsky collection set side-by-side with Brumfield's photographs taken, for the most part, about a century later, though the earliest of his photographs date from the 1970s.

Prokudin-Gorsky made his photographic survey to record mostly monumental buildings, especially churches, in their then-contemporary setting, in some regions in the midst of an industrial landscape: his purpose being to record a Russia that he perceived to be fast vanishing. He could have had no idea how rapid change would be after the Revolution, with churches, in particular, not just falling into decay, but actively being destroyed under Communism. Some of Brumfield's photographs were taken in the 1970s – for instance, his pictures of Central Asia, from Bukhara to Samarkand – and reveal considerable decay compared with what Prokudin-Gorsky had recorded, but most of Brumfield's photographs belong to the period after 1989, and record the restoration that has been taking place since the fall of Communism. Brumfield's text sets the regions he covers in the context of Prokudin-Gorsky's expeditions, as well as in the context of the history of the region. Sometimes, Prokudin-Gorsky was performing an act of historical recollection, notably in the region west of Moscow – from Smolensk to Borodino – which he visited on the centenary of Napoleon's reaching Moscow in 1812, recording the sites of the Napoleonic battles (also, for Brumfield, where the German army advanced on Moscow in 1941), as well as, in his own time, approaching the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913, an event recalled particularly in the chapter on the upper Volga basin from Uglich to Yurevets. There are all sorts of details to be noticed by the attentive reader: the solitary mosque in Perm, looking all but indistinguishable from a domed Orthodox church, in contrast to the many mosques of Bukhara and Samarkand, looking proudly themselves. It is astonishing, too, how strikingly similar in many cases the same church looks in Prokudin-Gorsky's prints and Brumfield's photographs – a testimony to the speed with which churches, especially, are being restored, once returned to the Church.

Brumfield's commentary is terse and to the point: enough to remind one of what one needs to know, without detracting from the interlocking photographic surveys. In his conclusion, ‘Above the abyss’ – the title taken from a sentence in Nabokov's Speak, memory: ‘The cradle rocks above the abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness’ – Brumfield reflects on the ambiguities of what Prokudin-Gorsky and he himself, have recorded. His first book, published more than a quarter of a century ago, was called ‘Lost Russia’; Brumfield now reflects on what has been ‘lost’ since 1917 and who it is that has lost it. He reflects, too, on memory – what it is that is being remembered, and why – drawing attention to the figures that sometimes appear on the fringes of Prokudin-Gorsky's images – ‘haggard prisoners held under barbaric conditions’ in the shadow of ‘splendid Islamic monuments in Bukhara’, or a group of children sitting on the grass with the church of St Paraskeva in the background opposite Brumfield's photograph of that church in ruins in 2010 – which speaks eloquently of the building, but what of the children, what fate awaited them? This is a volume of ‘places of memory’, lieux de mémoire, in Pierre Nora's phrase – but the memories are more than physical, and deeply ambiguous.