Lecture by Olenka Z. Pevny

The Aesthetic of Homogeneity, Scientific Atheism and the Reconstruction of the Rus’ and Early Modern Past in Ukraine

Thursday, January 23, 2025, 12:00-1:15pm New York Time (find your time)

Olenka Z. Pevny (University of Cambridge)

Medieval Rus′ visual culture of the late 10th to the mid-13th century is usually essentialized as consisting of ubiquitous icons and cross-domed churches. This popularized reductive imagining of Rus′ culture is the product of later interpretations of the medieval past. This talk addresses the restoration of Rus′ monuments in Ukraine from the late nineteenth-century to the present and reveals how Imperial and Soviet ideology impacted our visualisation of Rus′ culture and erased our knowledge of early modern Ukrainian visual culture in favour of an imagined past that served to propagate Russian imperial claims. The unveiling of the visual and material past of the peoples and cultures of Eastern Europe and Eurasia requires understanding, careful study and on-site field work that reaches beyond official documentation emanating from Russian capitals.

Olenka Z. Pevny, Associate Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Slavic Culture, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Fitzwilliam College; Chair, Cambridge Committee for Central and East European and Eurasian Studies; she is a historian of visual culture and the author of articles and editor of books on Byzantine and Rus′ culture, including Perceptions of Byzantium and Its Neighbors, 843–1261 (2020), and "Art and Transcultural Discourse in Ukrainian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth," in Diversity and Difference in Poland-Lithuania and Its Successor States, ed. Stanley Bill and Simon Lewis (2023), pp. 84–112.

Image caption: Dormition Cathedral, Monastery of the Caves, Kyiv