Pink Pagoda

Snarkout has a good post in praise of follies, which starts:

At one point in R. A. Lafferty's story "Nor Limestone Islands", a Miss Phosphor McCabe requests zoning permission to build a structure on her plot of land: a thirty-acre pagoda, four hundred feet high and built of three hundred thousand tons of pink limestone. It will be, she asserts, real pretty, and a tourist attraction to boot. This being a Lafferty story, Miss Phosphor has an entirely sensible plan for obtaining a three hundred thousand ton limestone pagoda: she will ask her friends on the Grecian flying island to touch down and cut off a chunk...

...and ends:

As Miss Phosphor wrote:

Please come and see my Pink Pagoda. All the people and all the officials avert there eyes from it. They say that is impossible that such a thing could be there, and therefore it cannot be there. But it is there. See it for yourself (or see plates IV, IX, XXXIII, LXX especially). And it is pretty (see plates XIX, XXIV, V, LIV). But best, come see it as it really is.

You will most certainly want, as I do, to come see the pink pagoda that Russian architect Yuri Velten, otherwise Georg Velten (his father came to Russia from Germany to be a chef for Peter the Great in 1703) really did build in St. Petersburg in the late 1770s. Being as it is, so very Gogol out of Thomas Love Peacock by way of Ronald Firbank (anachronisms are permitted in phantasy), I cannot believe it has never figured in a work of literature. An exhaustive ten-minute search in Google has, however, failed to turn up any citations. So I'm relying on any Russophile readers of mine (I'm looking at you, language hat), to come up with one. There is, by the way, a real pagoda of sorts, the Creaking Pavilion, designed by the same architect.

Meanwhile, here are some of Snarkout's links:

Baldasare Forestiere's underground gardens.

Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens and Benedictine monk Joseph Zoettl's Ave Maria Grotto

The Winchester Mystery House.

Please note, incidentally, won't you, the expressiveness of the omnipresent green frog in the dinner service made by Josiah Wedgwood for Catherine II for use at her wayside palace at a spot called Kekerekeksinen, which means "frog marsh" in Finnish, which was a few years later renamed Chesme, after a Russian naval victory against the Turks.

Comments

[language hat]

Well, I've been googling around in Russian and haven't come up with anything, but it's not surprising, since the thing was built in a swamp well to the south of the city, and as striking as it is it's pretty far off the beaten track. But it was on the front lines in WWII (I think it had been converted to a military or naval institute), so you might find it mentioned in war memoirs.

[dave]

Gosh, thanks for spending the time (I hope you found other things in the process). It's a miracle the building survived at all, isn't it? As it happens, there is a war veterans cemetery nearby, I believe, that predates WWII, as well as memorials to those killed in the Great Patriotic War.