Enlightener of Rus': The Image of Vladimir Sviatoslavich across the Centuries by Francis s> Butler Prince, Saint and Apostle. Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavič of Kiev, His Posthumous Life, and the Religious Legitimization of Great Russian Power by Jukka Korpela (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 739 between Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, but also between a weak tsarist and equallyweak Soviet systemof government. The editor can be congratulated for compiling a stimulating collection of essays. It deserves to be included in undergraduate as well as graduate libraries. University ofLeicester IAN D. THATCHER Butler, Francis.Enlightener ofRus'. TheImageof Vladimir Sviatoslavich Acrossthe Centuries. Slavica,Bloomington, IN, 2002. Vi + 204 pp. Notes.Appendices . Bibliography. Index. $24.95 (paperback). Korpela, Jukka. Prince,SaintandApostle.PrinceVladimir Sviatoslavic of Kiev,his Posthumous Life, and the ReligiousLegitimization of GreatRussianPower. Veroffentlichungen des Osteuropa-Institutes Munchen. Reihe: Geschichte , 67. HarrassowitzVerlag,Wiesbaden, 2001. 267 pp. Notes. Bibliography . Index. ?49.00 (paperback). BY repute Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich is the pivotal figure of early Rus history, perhaps of East Slav history in general. By officially converting his people to ChristianityVladimir achieved many things, depending on one's perspective and values: he brought Rus the possibility of true Salvation, or located Rus in the European, Judaeo-Christian tradition, or made possible the subsequent development of East Slav culture, or put in place the ideological structuresto support the proper consolidation of statehood and nationhood. Whichever way you look at it, by repute Vladimir Sviatoslavich led and pushed Rus to take a giant stridein the march of Progress.By repute. The problem is that Vladimir Sviatoslavichis known almost entirelyby later repute, and barely at all on the basis of contemporaryreliablefactualrecord. He is a shimmeringmirage, apt to dissolveaswe tryto get close. This does not mean that he is wholly unknowable, merely that we have to be very cautious, for the reputation and the man may be two quite different creatures. It is particularlysobering to realize, for example, that St Vladimir, Apostle of the Rus, was not actually given formal Church acknowledgement as a saint until he had been dead for nearly three hundred years (by contrast with his sons Boris and Gleb, who were formally acknowledged within a few decades at most). But the reputationshould not be dismissedasjust an irritatingobstacle to the facts. Itjustifiesattention as a prominent factof culturein itself. English book-length studies of Vladimir and his reputation are like traditional London buses:you wait an age and none appears, then suddenly two turn up at once; except that the two London buses probably look much likeeach otherand aretravellingthe same route, whereas,despitetheirsimilar points of departure, these two books by Francis Butler and Jukka Korpela negotiate quite different paths through their chosen field, and in tone and substancethey bear remarkablylittleresemblanceto each other. The subtitle of Butler's book is a fair summary of its contents. This is unequivocally a book about the image, not the man. It reallydoes not matter to Butlerwhether or to what extent any of the portrayalsof Vladimir is true. His interest is in the ways the image changed over time, and how each 740 SEER, 8i, 4, 2003 successive recreation of Vladimir reflects the age in which it was produced. Butler's main method for elucidating and trackingthe image is the detailed exposition of texts about Vladimir. Thus he analyses the posthumous Vladimirscreatedin mid-eleventh-to early-twelfth-centuryKiev byMetropolitan Ilarionand the compilersof the Primagy Chronicle, then with an excursus on Novgorod and the problem of Vladimir's 'late' canonization he follows Vladimir through twelfth-to sixteenth-centurytexts (and frescoes, and textile portraits) from Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma and Moscow, culminating in the huge biography in the Stepennaia kniga.Kiev in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries merits a chapter to itself, drawing attention to the discovery of Vladimir'srelicsby PeterMohyla and to the influentialaccount in the Sinopsis. Kiev features again in the final chapter, but now in conjunction with its human exports to St Petersburg in the eighteenth century: here Butler provides a detailed exposition of FeofanProkopovich's Vladimir before ending with comments on GavriilBuzhinskii'sI 723 sermon on the subject. Butler does not have an overall thesis. He identifies several varieties of Vladimir: the innovator, the preserverof tradition, the fratricide,the apostle of his people, the reformer, the protector of his dynasty, or of Kiev, or of Moscow, or of Orthodoxy. Vladimir can be proclaimed analogous to Solomon, or to St Paul,or to Constantine the Great, or to Dmitrii Donskoi, or to Ivan the...