HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

302 ANDRZEJ POPPEat Kiev as an apostolic act reduced Volodimer to the role of executor ofdivine and apostolic predestination. Some Kievan writings contradict thelegend: for instance, St. Paul is said to have been the first teacher of theSlavs. 40 Yet the departure from Ilarion's viewpoint must not be seen as aconscious attempt to discredit it. Rather, other accounts should be viewedas various answers to questions that began to emerge first among the clergy,especially in monasteries and at court. The frame of the PrimaryChronicle's account is providential, but at the same time it gave the reader acolorful historical portrayal. The description well suited the perceptions ofa generation whose grandfathers and great grandfathers had witnessed theconversion. A younger generation tried to reconstruct and to understand theconversion according to their own perceptions. In Kherson, traditionanimated and shaped anew this Greek city's role in the event. The adoptionin Rus' of Slavic writings of the ninth and tenth centuries, and the mostlyecclesiastical relations with the country of the '"true faith," added somecontradictory elements to the picture. Today, after the lapse of a millennium,scholars keep toiling over accumulated enigmas.Warsaw University40See PSRL, 1: 28; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 63. On the whole problem, see my article,"Two Concepts of the Conversion of Rus' in the Kievan Writings," to appear in HarvardUkrainian Studies 12 (1988).