Śmierć świątyni
The Death of a Temple

Summary/Abstract: Tomasik explores international reactions – mostly those in centres of Russian white émigrés – to the demolition of the Russian Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw’s Saxon Square (1920-1926). Polish commentators tended to portray the demolition as an activity in the symbolic order (an iconoclastic gesture aimed at an immaterial symbol of servitude and oppression). Russian voices, however, as well as English and French ones, mostly took an anthropomorphizing perspective on the destruction-bound object. Here the demolition evokes tormenting and wounding; the object’s dramatic story brought to mind Christ’s passion.

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