www.byzcath.org Forums Mysteries: The Life of Worship Icons & Iconography Strange icons - new heresy?

Dear Natalia,

Thank you for this intelligent post. I see your point. You are most correct, and have chosen the correct words to describe these paintings.

In Christ,
Alice

The kitsch caused all of us to kvetch.

This discussion will not be quenched

Dear Nataly,

On a side note, I would like to congratulate you and your country on a brilliant and wonderful opening ceremony at the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Alice

When the hammer and sickle were part of the glorification of the communist period at the opening of the Olympic Games, I thought of my family who starved to death!!! at the time of the Stalin's Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор, "Extermination by hunger" 1932 1933 in Ukraine and all of those Christians who died as a result of Soviet persecution!

Yes part of the opening was fantastic and congratulations are due but......

Just how many died.??? ”In all, it is estimated that some 15 to 20 million Christians were martyred under the Soviet regime” - David Barrett, “World Christian Trends”

For info re the Holodomor en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Вічная Пам’ять
Eternal Memory

Garaj

I'm disagree with you. This part of the open ceremony wasn't a glorification of communist era at all! It was shown a great influence of the industrial period of the first Soviet years: all these machines and mechanisms, collectivization, this red color as symbol of blood, little figures of participants acting as parts of a great machine called Soviet republic. This scene was done in stylistics of Suprematism (Malevich, Rodchenko etc).
http://rusplt.ru/policy/olimpiada-v-sochi-otkryita-7956.html

This was a symbolic interpretation of pain and disharmony. It showed how a normal human civilization of Russians had changed into depersonalized masses. It was more a symbol of tragedy of the Soviet people, but not a glorification.

These hammer and sickle were parts of a very famous Soviet sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (showed at the World's Fair in 1937), a famous symbol of the Soviet period, was also showed crashed on the ceremony. You could see only parts of it (head, hammer and sickle were showed apart.
http://www.dp.ru/a/2014/02/08/Dmitrij_Medvedev_usnul_na/gallery/19304/143292/
This symbol of the Soviet Union was showed destroyed. And you think it was a glorification? It's a pity, you didn't catch the main idea, though everything on the ceremony was shouting about it, even music with its cacophonic and disharmonic tunes of Stravinsky and Schnitke.
Also there are rules of the Olympic Comittee which prohibit to show tragic times and wars in the historical parts of the ceremonies. That's why also the Second World War wasn't shown in the opening Ceremony in Sochi.

Dear Nataly,

Thank you for the interpretation of the brilliant artistic symbolic elements of the ceremony which apparently escaped many people.

In Christ's love,
Alice

Dear Alice,
thank you! I just move this topic into the Town Hall. It is very interesting to me, I think to all Russians, to know how did the foreign audience like the Opening Ceremony? What did they like most of all and what not?
Telling the truth, I was impatiently waiting for it but with not much expectations and hope for a good and intelligent show. I was expecting something patriotic with hymns, balalaika and matreshka etc. But they did it with much taste and, I wonder, with a good artistic flair. The first TV Channel showing all the time kitsch, propaganda and endless soap operas suddenly created a good show?! It means they can do it for the foreign audience, but why do they feed the Russian audience with low quality products all the time? It was a rhetorical question - the answer is obvious...

Dear Nataly, that's a great rhetorical question. Here in America, we have been asking ourselves the same question the last 50 or 60 years or so. And, why is it, that with several hundred cable channels available, there's nothing to see.

BTW, thanks also for your analysis of the Opening Ceremony. I didn't get to see it the first time around, but I'll make a point of looking for it on youtube.

Glenn