De-Heroicizing War in Sculpture of The Soviet Georgian Modernist Era

At the end of the 1970s, The Memory Cube, a memorial commemorating World War II, was erected in the small
Georgian town of Senaki. The work betrays an unconventional, non-Soviet vision of war. Our essay focuses on
this forgotten monument and views it in the context of Soviet memorial statues dedicated to World War II. In such
ideologically oriented countries as the Soviet Union, the priority themes of monuments commemorating war—these
including the image of a heroic Soviet soldier, the pathos of war, heroics—were replaced with different accents (in
the monuments by Merab Berdzenishvili, Elguja Amashukeli, and Giorgi Ochiauri, for example) in the Georgian sculpture
of the Soviet Modernist era of the 1960s-1980s. The heroic understanding of war is eclipsed by the idea of war
as a disaster in The Memory Cube by Vazha Melikishvili. Here, besides idea and meaning, the form of expression is
brought to life in a novel artistic way.