M.N. Muravyev and the icons of St. Isaac’s cathedral in Vilna: imperial transfer of sacral images?

Introduction. In the Orthodox Nicholas Church in Vilna since the 1860s, there were icons brought from St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg. The reasons, mechanisms, and socio-political context of the transportation of the icons from the capital of the Russian Empire to the Northwestern Krai after the uprising of 1863 were not clear. The purpose of this article is to analyze the complex of archival and published sources and reconstruct the history of sending the icons of St. Isaac’s Cathedral to Vilna, to identify the factors that accompanied this process and to determine the circle of its participants. Methods and materials. The article is based on the archival sources from the funds of the Russian State Historical Archive (f. 472 “Chancery of the Ministry of the Imperial Court,” f. 502 “Cabinet of the Architect Montferrand,” f. 789 “Imperial Academy of Arts,” f. 1311 “Commission of the construction of St. Isaac’s Cathedral”). The study of archival sources and synchronous sources of personal origin and historiography made it possible to reconstruct the motives, the course, and stages of the transportation of icons from St. Isaac’s Cathedral to Vilna churches. Analysis. The solicitation of the Vilna Governor-General M.N. Muravyev about sending to Vilna the picturesque icons replaced by mosaics in St. Isaac’s Cathedral was caused both by his desire for economy and the speedy filling of Vilna churches by Orthodox icons and, apparently, by the very correspondence of the icons (depicting saints whose names coincided with the names of members of the Romanov dynasty) to his own political course aimed at imperial integration and the symbolic conquest of the space of the Northwestern Krai.