By Sergei Nikitin

        The Russian "Modern" style passed like a bright comet in the history of the arts. It arose at the end of the 19th century, and by the early 1910s it was already in decline. After the October Revolution, the modern was dismissed once and for all as a remnant of bourgeois culture.

The List House (1898-99) in the Arbat quarter.

Considered Moscow’s first Art Nouveau building

    Architect Lev Kekushev is one of the era's tragic heroes. His professional career lasted a mere 20 years and coincided with the rise and fall of the modern, the Russian version of Art Nouveau.

    Kekushev was born near Warsaw, then part of the Russian empire, but the exact date is unclear — either 1862 or 1863. He studied in St. Petersburg from 1883 to 1888 at the Institute of Civil Engineers, and from 1890 he plied his trade in Moscow, where he executed more than 60 buildings while also designing decorative objects for mass production.

    Among Kekushev's signature accomplishments are the railway station at Odintsovo, and the Yaroslavsky Station in Moscow. In the latter case, he added the platform with its neogothic pillars to Fyodor Shekhtel's main structure. He also built the Praga restaurant on Arbatskaya Ploshchad (it was later twice modified). Kekushev's famous dokhodniye doma, or buildings with apartments to let, include the magnificent example at 28 Ulitsa Prechistenka.

    Yet Kekushev's fame began at home, quite literally, with the house he built for himself at 8 Glazovsky Pereulok, in the Arbat quarter. This is considered Moscow's first house in the Russian modern style. The unimposing, two-story house is most often referred to as the List House, after a subsequent owner. It was built in 1898-99 as a sort of manifesto of the new style.

    Russian modern architecture introduced a fresh approach to building that broke with the traditional emphasis, dating back to the Renaissance, on creating an impressive, usually symmetrical facade. Modern architects, by contrast, built from the inside out and paid much more attention to living space than to symmetry.

    The List House was a breakthrough in the development of the Russian modern. Its main entrance is quite modest and cozy, not meant to dazzle or awe. Also important for the modern architect was the texture of the facade: no more plain walls. At the List House you find compositions of various, often oriental, ornamental elements, mosaics and plaster designs about the windows. Note also the stone-gray tiles, a favorite of many Russian modern architects.

    The List House set off a new boom in construction of medium-sized private dwellings in Moscow. Similar homes in the neoclassical style had been all the rage during the rebuilding after the Moscow fire of 1812. Now the narrow lanes of the Arbat quarter were once more filled with two- and three-story houses in the modern style. Shekhtel's Ryabushinsky House (1902-1904), now the Maxim Gorky Museum, is probably the best of its kind, but it exhibits elements first introduced in the List House such as the open balcony and the use of mosaics.

    In 1901, just two years after he finished building his first home, Kekushev set to work on a new residence at 19-21 Ulitsa Ostozhenka. A wealthy merchant by the name of List, for whom the original house is named today, then bought it. List resold the house to Natalya Ushkova, the daughter of a wealthy tea merchant and wife of the legendary double bassist and conductor Sergei Kusevitsky. The Kusevitskys' holdings in Moscow were not limited to this house. They also owned the beautiful apartment house across the street, at 7 Glazovsky Pereulok, a variation on the theme of a Venetian palazzo, built by the architect Pavel Malinovsky before World War I.

    The Kusevitsky (or, strictly speaking, Kusevitskaya) house was forever filled with artists and friends of the family. Alexander Scriabin, one of Russia's greatest composers, lived there in 1908 after returning from Europe. In his memoirs, "Okhrannaya Gramota" (Safe Conduct), Boris Pasternak recalls a meeting one spring evening with Scriabin when he, then an aspiring musician himself, came to find out from his idol if music was his true calling. At tea with the Kusevitsky family, Pasternak found little to say, for he was eager to perform for Scriabin. Finally the company retired to the piano room. While he listened to Pasternak play, Scriabin nearly started dancing, and when the piece was finished he told the young hopeful that he had it in him to make his mark in music.

    Pasternak, however, was unsure if this laudatory judgment was genuine, or occasioned by Scriabin's close friendship with his father, the painter Leonid Pasternak. As it happened, Scriabin's real gift to Pasternak that evening had nothing to do with music. Scriabin told Pasternak to break off his study of law and switch to the philosophy department at the University of Moscow, which Pasternak promptly did. Shortly thereafter the future Nobel laureate would begin to write poetry in earnest.

    After completion of his house on Glazovsky Pereulok, Kekushev was engaged, along with Adolf Erichson, to build perhaps the most audacious building of this period, the Metropol hotel in downtown Moscow. In this structure, popularly dubbed "Moscow Babylon" for its exotic and luxurious ornamentation, Kekushev created one of the greatest monuments of the modern style.

    Kekushev worked tirelessly, and his workshop never wanted for commissions. But his days in the limelight were numbered. While other architects, such as Shekhtel, moved on to create a new, "rational" version of the modern style more modest than its predecessor, Kekushev continued to elaborate his distinctive turn-of-the-century early-modern esthetic.

    By 1910, however, the modern was suddenly out of favor, deemed too foreign, too German, for Russia. Architecture competitions began to exclude modernist submissions.

    For Kekushev, this spelled the end. In 1912 he abandoned both architecture and construction. Little is known about his last years, though it seems certain he quit Moscow as well. He is said to have died in 1918 or 1919 in the Simbirsk region. What he was doing there, and what he died of, remains unknown.