«Звартноц, соединённый с Колизеем»: от Нардома Таманяна к Театру оперы и балета

Abstract

The article examines one of the most enigmatic constructions of Alexander Tamanyan – the People’s House, which was the basis of the current Opera and Ballet Theater in Yerevan. The People’s House was strictly criticized by young proletarian architects, the Armenian representatives of the revolutionary Culture One – the author follows the concept proposed by V. Paperny, according to which in the early 1930s the “spreading” egalitarian Culture One has been replaced with the Stalin-era Culture Two, characterized by “hardening” and hierarchy. It is shown that Tamanyan’s People's House was horizontally consonant with Culture One, however, it did not imply an egalitarian proletarian daily life, but a nationwide festival in the spirit of carnival festivities studied by M. Bakhtin and Ur-festival reconstructed by the author. In the vertical plane, People’s House was likened to the best achievements of medieval Armenian church architecture, in particular, the 7th-century temple of Zvartnots. Tamanyan generally conceived his People’s House as a conjunction of the Armenian Zvartnots with the Roman Coliseum, which should have been constructively realized by the closed part of the People’s House (the Tamanyan’s Culture Two) and its open part, which, together with the horizontal function of the closed part, provided the festive Culture One.