SACRED TOPICS OF RUSSIAN CITIES
In this article, I analyze a traditional Russian city as a visual semiotic space. I demonstrate that the key ideological (sacred) archetypes are in the basis of the planning of urban inhabited space; these archetypes have their expression in a visual forms for structuring of life environment. I understand here a topics as a method and result of an artificial spatial organization of “place”. It is important that an urban environment has a communicative character: the topical organization of inhabited space reflects and produces human communication practices. I explore a city as a multi-layered and multi-valued semiotic space in which discrete objects and their complexes “are read” as ideological, mnemonic and suggestive signs or messages (texts). Traditional Christian city is also a sacred image or spatial icon; consequently his understanding involves the use of the semiotic procedures that are used for the interpretation of iconography. For this reason I make an ontological and semiotic analysis of Eastern Christian icons, and at the same time I assert an active iconic stance of person. My study of the city as an icon based on the concept of hierotopy (Alexey Lidov) and aionotopy (Valery Lepahin). The sacred topics of Russian city historically formed by implementing the four basic organizational models (or matrices): the cultural-historical, liturgical, eschatological and symbolic; a particular paradigmatic image is the deep content of each of these models. Cultural-historical matrix assumes the transfer (distribution) of sacred space. The concept of cultural and semiotic transfer as the mechanism of constructing semantic space complexes in the formation of culture as communication environment is explained in this article. I offer the version of the systematic describing of fundamental models of translocation systems and complexes of culturally significant meanings in the formation of living space in traditional city. I suppose three types of cultural and semiotic transfer: transfer of idea, transfer of image and copying. As an example of eidetic transfer (transfer of idea), I view the process of translation of Christian sacral topos from Jerusalem through Constantinople to Kiev.
Keywords: visual semiotics, space of culture, sacred space, city, architecture, Eastern Christianity, icon, spatial icon, models of sacred topics, Russia, cultural semiotic transfer
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Issue: 1, 2016
Series of issue: Issue 1
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 71 — 114
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