NON FICTION

IMPERIAL SPLENDOUR: Palaces and Monasteries of Old Russia by Prince George Galitzine, photographs by Earl Beezly and Garry Gibbons; Viking: $50; 187 pp.). Blame the Mongols. Running on a platform of rape, pillage and burn, Khan Batu, son of Ghengis, set the agenda of a host of subsequent invaders who torched Russia’s architectural heritage. Built of wood, the early structures were “almost dateless . . . highly original and creative,” laments Prince George Galitzine in this handsome book. What remain are the more solid monuments to God, tsar and nobility: churches (like Chesme Church above), monasteries, kremlins (citadels), palaces and mansions. With unlimited serf power, 18th-Century aristocrats (among them the author’s ancestors) ordered up open-air theaters, orangeries, aviaries, even breweries to grace their digs, while the high holy men endowed their cathedrals with comparable opulence. The book’s rare photos range beyond the Moscow-St. Petersburg axis, to Pskov, Zagorsk, Novgorod. Galitzine’s commentary is spendid, whether telling the tale of the chapel of “St. Anne-What’s-in-the-Corner” or of the city of Suzdal’s sets of twin churches--airy and high-vaulted for summer, squat in winter to contain body heat. The prince stresses, though, that this “is primarily a book of pictures, and as such the essential requirement is that they should be beautiful.” They are.