SUMMARY:

Memories of Alexander Nevsky did not cease ever since the time of his death. However, the image of this legendary figure had undergone significant changes in the cultural memory of the Russians from its reception. Initially a classic saint of local significance, officially canonized by the Orthodox Church in the 16th century, Alexander Nevsky became the Saint-protector of the whole empire. Removed from the first lines of the history textbooks in the 19th century and inquisiotened by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, Alexander Nevsky was rehabilitated by the Soviet Party leadership in the mid-1930s as a soldier and strategist.
Alexander Nevsky is one of Russia’s central national myths. Not only the percepetions of the “own” history get reflected in the ever changing narrative of the Novgorodian Prince. The separate steps in the development in the formation of the political myth that are reflected in the texts and pictures of the reception history of Alexander nevsky can be interpreted as indicators of breaks in the development of collective idenity in Russian history. Three profiles of the figure of Nevsky – that of a warrior, a monk, a prince – formed until the end of the 19th century are understood as indicators of the three different abstract projects of the Russian collective identity: sacral, dynastic and imperial, and national.