Monumental Sculpture in the Semantic Structure of a Provincial Russian City

Abstract

The rapidly growing cultural globalization, while strengthening the foundations of totalitarianism in social management, reveals the effect of losing the already not very bright identity of 'an ordinary' (and sometimes also 'historically young') provincial Russian city, even if this city has a significant name in history. This process is objective, natural, and needs to be understood. Understanding its basis is a necessary condition for managing its flow.Urban monumental sculpture is an important area that can be explored to aid this understanding.The subject of research is the historical evolution of the monumental and sculptural decoration of 'the capital of the Kuban Cossacks: Ekaterinodar/Krasnodar. The purpose of the study is to understand the processes that determine the historical variability of the 'soul of the city"', i.e. the most important indicator of its identity.The analysis shows that the essential basis of the process is the combination of the determining aspects of the 'spirit of citizens' and the 'spirit of the city administration'. In different historical periods, the juxtaposition of opposites changed. If the relative unity of 'administrative spirit of the city' and 'elements of the aggregate of the souls of the citizens is typical for the beginning of the city history, if the Soviet historical period is typical of the severe suppression of administrative-command management of manifestations of 'soul of people, the XXI century is characterized by the eclectic parallelism of opposite worlds. One of the worlds is filled with the 'spirit of the empty official pomposity', while the other shows the 'lightheadedness eclectic incarnation of sentiment'.Spontaneously, in such conditions, the identity of the city and the spirit of the historical center of culture of the Kuban Cossacks can no longer be restored. The development trend of the 'soul of the city', which is involved in the active processes of economic and cultural globalization, does not contain any other way of forming a 'Cossack identity', except through the artificial creation of its simulacrum.