The cultural environment of the city of Tambov in the late 19th — early 20th centuries and its influence on the spiritual image of a seminarian

Abstract

The cultural environment of the city of Tambov in the late 19th - early 20th centuries and its influence on the spiritual image of a seminarian
The artistic and aesthetic cultural environment in which the Tambov seminarian had to live in the late 19th - early 20th centuries could not but have a direct impact on the culture of perception, aesthetic taste and, in general, the worldview of the generation of future clergy and church ministers. A significant part of the seminarian's time was spent in the educational institution - Tambov Theological Seminary, one of the most beautiful buildings in the city, steeped in the high traditions of Russian classicism and romanticism. It is fundamentally important that the seminarians witnessed the large-scale events of the canonization of St. Seraphim of Sarov in 1905 and St. Pitirim in 1914. The personal life of a seminarian was extremely simple, almost ascetic, as evidenced by numerous memoir sources. Among the seminarians, there was a stratification into the well-off and the less well-off: the former lived in their own apartment, which was rented, the latter lived in a dormitory building, the difficult conditions of which are vividly presented in the descriptions of the "Russian seminary". The surrounding cultural environment was filled with the dynamics of modernization: everything changed - architecture, behavior patterns, that is, the locus of tradition narrowed, and it was in this locus that the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church was located, in our case - a church educational institution. Having grounds to consider himself an educated part of the urban population, the seminarian, making the corresponding demands on himself, logically came to the conclusion that the contemporary level of aesthetic, general cultural development required a variety of reading, hobbies, etc. The urban environment provided the conditions in this case: the theatrical repertoire expanded, an entreprise appeared, the number of periodicals increased sharply, the problems of philosophy, history, and sociology became the subject of discussion. All these requirements had to be met, which created a certain psychological tension and encouraged self-improvement and cultural self-identification.