THE SPACES OF HOPE IN PLAGUE’S RUSSIAN AND EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE OF THE XIV–XVI CENTURIES
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2019-3-89-97
The article is devoted to the specific behavior of the community, responded to the experience of the plague with creating the sacral architecture. By referring to Russian and European materials of 14th – 16th centuries the colossal existential- ontological role of these reactions is investigated – the re-creation of the existential structures of the openness of future and the compatibility, exterminated during pandemics. Author reviews Russian tradition of creating obydennye temples and European model of building sacral vow architecture intrinsic for periods of the plague pandemic and analyzes their values for restoring the social and temporal tissue of human existence that is extremely thin during the spread of the plague. The act of their creation represents the experience of the collective’s uniting, extremely atomized in the pandemic situation. The semantic resource of this architecture is the affirmation of the good’s imperishability in the circumstances of high death rate. Lively attitude toward the instance of good embodied with its forms and conveyed with the artistic motives of its interiors opens the otherness beside the life seized by the plague. So its presence creates for the collective dimension of the future’s openness, disappeared during stability of the mortal threat’s. The paper presents the understanding of the unique experience created these architectural forms – saturating the present is always only coming and recreating the principle of being together. These analytical materials lead to the problem of the ontology of hope.
Keywords: visual semiotics of architecture, sacred space, epidemic, rituals of community, sacrifice, temporality, openness of future, “obydennye” churches, cult of saints
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Issue: 3, 2019
Series of issue: Issue 3
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 89 — 97
Downloads: 892