Advisor: Karen Lloyd

St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral and National Imaginaries

St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral is in the center of Kyiv, Ukraine between what is now Taras Shevchenko Boulevard and Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street. Both streets were renamed after Ukrainian cultural and historical icons following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A similar process of re-identification is underway in political, religious, and popular rhetoric in Russia, and even more so in Ukraine. Following the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2013, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the ongoing warfare in eastern Ukraine, the impetus for Ukraine to break away politically and culturally from Russia has never been stronger. There is, however, no clear trajectory for this process. Ukraine has been inextricably linked to Russia for as long as either have existed in one state or another. Both trace their history to the early princes of the medieval state of Kievan Rus’, and both have likewise equated national identity with religious belief for centuries. Yet the quest for autonomy for Ukraine, and the efforts by the Kremlin to keep Ukraine as a vassal state have created increasingly conflicting claims to historical narratives and cultural patrimony. Nowhere does this process of cultural reinvention manifest itself more clearly than at St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral in Kyiv. While academic treatment of the work has largely centered around the contributions of Viktor Vasnetsov as the leading artist of the project, and his works’ central role in shaping the Russian Revival style, few have commented on the means by which the director of the project, Adrian Prakhov, unified the works of numerous artists from across the Empire trained in different artistic traditions which he hired to decorate the cathedral. This paper explores the formal methods by which such disparate works are bound together in an attempt to create a cohesive and unifying spiritual experience at St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral, and the ways in which those works mirror and serve the conflicting national mythologies of the Russian Empire and independent Ukraine historically and in the modern era.

St. Volodymyrs Cathedral and National Imaginaries