NICHOLAS II AND ALEXANDRA FEDOROVNA: HOUSING ISSUES OF THE CROWNED COUPLE

The personal space of the family of Emperor Nicholas II is of particular interest to study as the most vivid embodiment of aristocratic demand, coloured not only by privileged status, but also by completely unprecedented personal relationships. The formation of private apartments within palace complexes was subject to the logic of personal lifestyle and court ceremonial, inseparable from the monarch's life. The combination of these factors led to the fact that, erasing the historical memory of the last emperor, the Bolsheviks purposefully destroyed the Romanovs' quarters in the Winter and Alexander Palaces. To date, a complete picture of these interiors is based primarily on the study of a considerable corpus of of surviving pre-revolutionary photographs, which captured for posterity this unique layer of artistic culture of the late XIXth and early XXh centuries.

Lecturer: Evgenia Orlovskaya, PhD in Art History, lecturer at the School of Design of the National Research University Higher School of Economics and the School of Interior Design "Details", specialist and author of a number of scientific articles on Art Nouveau and Symbolism, practicing decorator with many years of experience in designing private interiors.