William Craft Brumfield is Professor of Slavic Studies at Tulane University. Brumfield, who began photographing Russia in 1970, is the foremost authority in the West on Russian architecture. He is the author, editor, and photographer of numerous books, including
Along the Northern Dvina and Beyond to the Arctic Circle
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Published:June 2015
The final chapter focuses on the basin of the Northern Dvina River, which originates from a confluence of the Sukhona and Yug Rivers at Veliky Ustiug. One of the most important sites is the small town of Solvychegodsk, once the center of commercial operations for the Stroganov dynasty. After examining the surviving magnificent churches endowed by the Stroganovs from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the chapter includes photographs of traditional architecture in villages located in forests near the small Uftiuga River. The route then crosses to the left bank of the Dvina, with the towns of Krasnoborsk Cherevkova, which have some of the best-preserved examples of late nineteenth-century merchant houses in the North, and then to historic settlements along the northern reaches of the Dvina. It concludes with another village near the Arctic Circle, Kimzha—one of the most distinctive sites of traditional culture in the Russian North.
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