It’s lumpy, massive, crudely-formed. It sits brooding beside Zoloti Vorota, staring blankly at nowhere in particular, with a roughly-fashioned model of Sofia cathedral perched on its huge granite hand.
It’s the new statue of Yaroslav Mudriy in Kyiv. But it might as well be Lenin, or Marx or any other person the previous regime thought fit to immortalize in stone it’s so Soviet.
At a time when Ukrainians are tearing down ugly Soviet statues all over the country, it defies all logic to replace them with equally bland works in an attempt to build up a bit of state identity.
Compounding the error, a white plaster copy of the same Yaroslav statue – though this, thankfully, is only a bust has been deposited beside the whitewashed gable end of a building near the top of Andriyivskiy Uzviz, as if the city authorities had placed it there temporarily while they decide where its final resting place should be. (Who knows, perhaps that really is the case?)
The site is a little crowded now: only a few yards away stands a rendition of St. Andrew, pointing piously toward the Uzviz bar.
It seems the city authorities, bereft of artistic inspiration, have taken to commissioning the same statue twice to fulfill this year’s quota for new monuments.
Another newly-erected Kyiv city monument is a case in point.
Princess Olga, bless her, stands before the Foreign Ministry, proud, motherly and firm – and bearing an uncanny resemblance in posture and expression to Rodina Mat, that metal-clad monstrosity on the banks of the Dnipro. To make matters worse, the Olga statue is actually a replica of one previously torn down. You might argue that, since Olga came first, the Soviets must have ripped off her image in building Rodina Mat, but why repeat the same mistake twice, no, three times, by resurrecting poor Olga?
Please note, I’m not arguing against commemorating famous Ukrainians in stone, I just think a break with the old artistic style is called for – especially in a newly independent state which should be aspiring to be un-Soviet in every way it can.
Those in Ukraine responsible for statues like Olga and Yaroslav should look to other cities for new ideas, perhaps even to my home city of Glasgow, Scotland. There, in the city center, perhaps 15 or 20 years ago, some drunken joker first placed a traffic cone on the head of an iron equine statue of Wellington. The bright orange and white striped plastic road marker, reminiscent of a dunce’s cap with a thick brim, set the piece off wonderfully and has survived numerous attempts by the city fathers to remove it – the same prankster, or a similarly-minded individual, keeps replacing the cone during the night.
The image has since become something of an icon, and was recently used on art festival brochures in Scotland. Whether or not you regard it as demeaning to art, this kind of thing does add a bit of humor and freshness to otherwise dull, formulaic Victorian statuary. I suppose it’s too much to expect Ukrainians to go about redecorating their cities with humor – nation-building is a serious business after all – but a bit of freshness would go down monumentally well.
Euan MacDonald is the Kyiv Post’s business editor.
