Sviatoslav I of Kiev - in Art and Literature

In Art and Literature

Sviatoslav has long been a hero of Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian patriots due to his great military successes. His figure first attracted attention of Russian artists and poets during the Russo-Turkish War, 1768–1774, which provided obvious parallels with Sviatoslav's push towards Constantinople. Russia's southward expansion and Catherine II's imperialistic ventures in the Balkans seemed to have been legitimized by Sviatoslav's campaigns eight centuries earlier.

Among the works created during the war was Yakov Knyazhnin's tragedy Olga (1772). The Russian playwright chose to introduce Sviatoslav as his protagonist, although his active participation in the events following Igor's death is out of sync with the traditional chronology. Knyazhnin's rival Nikolai Nikolev (1758–1815) also wrote a play on the subject of Sviatoslav's life. Ivan Akimov's painting Sviatoslav's Return from the Danube to Kiev (1773) explores the conflict between military honour and family attachment. It is a vivid example of Poussinesque rendering of early medieval subject matter.

In the 19th century, interest in Sviatoslav's career waned. Klavdiy Lebedev depicted an episode of Sviatoslav's meeting with Emperor John in his well-known painting, while Eugene Lanceray sculpted an equestrian statue of Sviatoslav in the early 20th century. Sviatoslav appears in the 1913 poem of Velimir Khlebnikov Written before the war (#70. Написанное до войны) as an epitome of militant Slavdom:

He is the villain of Samuel Gordon's novel The Lost Kingdom, or the Passing of the Khazars, a fictionalized account of the destruction of Khazaria by the Rus'. The Slavic warrior figures in a more positive context in the story "Chernye Strely Vyaticha" by Vadim Viktorovich Kargalov; the story is included in his book Istoricheskie povesti.

In 2005, reports circulated that a village in the Belgorod region had erected a monument to Sviatoslav's victory over the Khazars by the Russian sculptor Vyacheslav Klykov. The reports described the 13-meter tall statue as depicting a Rus' cavalryman trampling a supine Khazar bearing a Star of David. This created an outcry within the Jewish community of Russia. The controversy was further exacerbated by Klykov's connections with Pamyat and other anti-Semitic organizations, as well as by his involvement in the "letter of 500", a controversial appeal to the Prosecutor General to review all Jewish organizations in Russia for extremism. The Press Center of the Belgorod Regional Administration responded by stating that a planned monument to Sviatoslav had not yet been constructed, but would show "respect towards representatives of all nationalities and religions." When the statue was unveiled, the shield bore a twelve-pointed star.

Svyatoslav is the main character of books "Knyaz" ("Князь") and "The Hero" ("Герой") writed by Russian writer Alexander Mazin.