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Liminality and Museums in Ukraine: the Khanenkos’ Case

By Hanna Rudyk

Due to Ukraine’s complex entanglement in the history of Russian imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet political and semantic systems that silenced and slandered Ukrainian culture, the latter is still little known and poorly read by both the outside world and by itself. This essay attempts to make use of “liminality” as a conceptual tool for reading Ukraine’s modern culture history and particularly museums.

The term that comes from the Latin word “limen” meaning a “threshold” was introduced in the early 20th century by the ethnologist Arnold van Gennep to designate the condition of “in-betweenness” defined by instability and uncertainty that humans experienced in the rites of passage.[1] In the 1960s, the anthropologist Victor Turner expanded the concept of liminality emphasizing it being “a fructile chaos…, a gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate to anticipating post-liminal existence.”[2] Later the construct was successfully extrapolated to the areas of political, social and cultural theory, psychology and other fields.[3] Besides, “liminality” was productively redefined in the 1990s by Homi K. Bhabha, a key postcolonial theorist, who linked it to the idea of the “third space of enunciation” — a specific contact zone characterized by ambiguity, high potential to hybridization of identities and subversion of authority allowing new opportunities and forms of culture to emerge.[4]

Hardly anyone would doubt that Ukraine today is a place of extreme liminality. War is a liminal situation sui generis.[5] Ukrainian people are daily being killed, forced to migrate, overwhelmed with grief and melancholy caused by compounded loss. In May 2024, the major Ukrainian book and literary festival “Book Arsenal” took place in Kyiv with the key theme “Life on the Edge”, problematizing the extremely turbulent and uncertain, exhausting and joy-of-life-sucking liminal condition of war.[6] A month later a public discussion/event “Dislocation, Liminality & Resilience. The Case of Ukraine” took place in Berlin to discuss, among other issues, the war as a stimulus of a society’s rapid maturation, radical self-reflection and rearticulation.[7]

On the left: Poster of the Book Arsenal “Life on the Edge”, Kyiv 2024. Official website.
On the right: Poster of the public discussion within “KuK-Tuesdays: Dislocation” series, TU Berlin, June 2024. Official website.

Historically, the relevance of the “liminality” as a potential tool for “reading Ukraine” was mediated by the concept of a “frontier”, one of the key explanatory metaphors in Ukrainian modern and contemporary historiography. A frontier or a borderland — a space “between and betwixt” different political and symbolic orders — is a place of constant liminality. Many Ukrainian historians starting with Mykhailo Hrushevsky explained Ukraine’s long statelessness through its position on the boundary of Steppe and Forest, nomadic and sedentary lifehoods, or by its role as a guard of a border of the Christian, the Slavic, the European, etc. ordered world. In the second half of the 20th century, the metanarrative of Ukraine as “the great borderland of Europe” was crystallized in Ukrainian diasporic historiography.[8] Actively taken up since the 1990s by historians of independent Ukraine (incl. J. Dashkevych, S. Lepyavko, I. Chornovol,  V. Brekhunenko and others),[9] the concept of a borderland / a frontier was reworked in the recent years into the concept of Ukraine as a multifrontier, a “crossroads of borders”, where multiple contact fields between big opposing social and semantic systems overlap.[10]

While Ukraine’s frontier-ness can account for its role of “European bloodlands,”[11] it hardly explains the “amazing”, “feisty” indomitable resilience of Ukrainians against Russia’s atrocious aggression nor the emergence of a new “golden age” of Ukrainian culture.[12] The “case of Ukraine” is likely not (not only) about challenges posed by its indelible frontier-ness, but also about the opportunities presented by a “gestation process” that takes place on the frontier as a liminal “third space of enunciation” in Homi Bhabha’s terms.

Thus, taken in the richness of its up-to-date connotations the concept of liminality seems to be a useful lens for exploring Ukraine‘s contemporary and modern history, particularly the history of museums. In this essay, I apply “liminality” to examine the case of the Khanenkos, Ukrainian prominent collectors of cultural heritage, founders of first public museums in Kyiv in the late 19th and early 20th century.[13]

In the late 18th century, the Ukrainian Cossack‘s state lost its autonomy and became part of the Russian Empire resulting in a systematic transfer of cultural heritage from Ukraine to Russia. This process was driven not only by political importance of history and antiquities, but also by the empire’s well-realized need to tame its most economically stable and culturally developed province. “Collecting” Ukraine’s rich heritage was a critical precondition for rewriting the history of Russia and Ukraine from an imperial perspective. The extraction of culture reached enormous proportions. All valuable archaeological finds of the 19th and early 20th centuries that were excavated in Ukraine were transferred to St. Petersburg finally ending up in the Imperial Hermitage or in the Armory and the Historical Museum in Moscow. Since 1859, Imperial Archaeological Commission oversaw the process while the empire financed acquisitions by the mentioned museums. The extraction of Ukrainian heritage included not just archeology, but also manuscripts and incunabula, historical military and state regalia, liturgical relics, memorabilia, and archives of Ukrainian historical figures.[14] In the second half of the 19th century this comprehensive cultural plunder was compounded by the empire’s harsh assault on the Ukrainian language and identity. Leading intellectuals were arrested and exiled, and Ukrainian language banned in schools, liturgy, press, book-printing and theater. Moreover, unlike in other imperial provinces, Ukraine had an unspoken ban on the establishement of public museums. “There is no need for such an institution” – in these exact words the imperial government refused in the 1880s to allow a first museum of local history to be established in Kyiv.[15]

This was the moment when Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko stepped on the stage. They fit perfectly into Victor Turner’s definition of “liminal personae” — personalities, whose conditions slipped through “the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space.”[16] Bohdan Khanenko (1849—1917), an offspring of an old Ukrainian noble lineage boasting prominent statesmen and intellectuals, studied in Moscow and then lived, worked and engaged in old art collecting in Saint-Petersburg. In 1874 he married Varvara Tereshchenko (1852—1922) from the Ukrainian clan of emerging sugar magnates, just granted imperial nobility. Extensive travelling aimed at „treasure hunting“ quickly turned the Khanenkos into classical European art collectors with a solid network of experts, including such Western luminaries as Wilhelm von Bode, Hofstede de Groot, and Abraham Bredius.

Bohdan Khanenko, early 1910s (?). Courtesy of
the National Museum of Ukraine.
Varvara Khanenko, 1896. Photo of the portrait
painted by Aleksey Kharlamov. Courtesy of the
Khanenko Museum Archive.

In the late 1880s, the couple settled in Kyiv and plunged into the life of the Ukrainian social and cultural elite. A new agenda and value order entered their imagination and eventually took center stage. In his letter from 1889 addressed to Khvedir Vovk, a prominent Ukrainian anthropology scholar and public figure, Bohdan Khanenko wrote: “[…] regarding the treasure found in Kyiv […] It is premature and dangerous to announce a new find in Russia, as they can claim it to Petersburg that happened.”[author’s transl.][17] Yet in 1897, Khanenko was appointed chairman of the Committee for the creation of the first city museum in Kyiv. He immediately received the emperor’s personal permission to start the museum project and a donation of 100,000 rubles from the royal treasury for the construction of the building. In two years, a museum of Ukrainian history and culture opened its doors in Kyiv, showcasing the collection of archaeology of the Dnipro region from the Stone Age to first Slavic settlements, partially donated and partially raised for the museum by Bohdan Khanenko.

The Kyiv Artistic, Industrial and Scientific Museum named after the Emperor Nikolai Aleksandrovich, organized by Bohdan Khanenko. 1905. Courtesy of the Khanenko Museum Library.

This was a truly groundbreaking achievement. How did Khanenko accomplish it? And how a decade later did Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko dare to announce publicly about launching a new museum in Kyiv, a universal museum of world art? A museum supposed to turn Kyiv into a new cultural pole from which global history could be narrated—a privilege and right that until then had been reserved only for imperial metropolises.

As said, the Khanenkos fall into Turner’s definition of “threshold people”. Mentally shaped by the empire(s), they started acting on both sides of the colonial divide since the 1890s, within two antagonistic orders: the imperial order of St. Petersburg and the anti-imperial order that had been gaining strength in Kyiv. At the Russian court, they played impeccably loyal subjects. Bohdan Khanenko was a member or a donor to dozens of pro-imperial organizations, including the State Council (the legislative chamber of the Russian parliament), the Russian Monarchist Party, the St. Petersburg Masonic Lodge, etc. He seized every opportunity to demonstrate his unwavering loyalty to the Russian emperor and the royal family, either by flattering them or outright bribing them, all to secure greater favor and trust as their most reliable “pillar” in the unreliable province.[18]

Simultaneously, in Kyiv, the Khanenkos converted the empire’s trust into a new freedom of action enabling grand, future-oriented cultural changes. The collection of world art and antiquities that the couple accumulated and later bequeathed to Kyiv laid the foundation to the five national museums of Ukraine. These and other projects they led or supported in the first decades of the 20th century[19] turned Kyiv from a culturally desolate colonial town into a modern center of knowledge. Certainly, the Khanenkos were not the only ones to bring about significant changes, but they were key contributors. The point was not only and not so much in their considerable material resources as in their ability to navigate the space between two opposing orders—imperial and anti-imperial. In doing so, the Khanenkos effectively used the former to serve the needs of the latter. Their strategy was ingeniously hybrid and hardly comprehensible to their contemporaries, both in St. Petersburg and Kyiv (the question remains to what extent they themselves were aware of it as a strategy).

However, from the distance of time, this strategy proved to be a winning one, and its incomprehensibility may have been a decisive factor in its success. I argue that the project of Ukrainian statehood of 1917—1921, along with the flourishing of Ukrainian academic science and avant-garde culture of the 1920s, was significantly nurtured by, among other influences, the modern museum culture established by the Khanenkos in Kyiv. Bolsheviks seemed to realize these essential connections very well: the entire Khanenkos’ archive was “lost” already in 1922 and their names were cast into systemic oblivion after 1924.[20]

Since the mid-1990s, Ukrainian historians have begun to return the Khanenkos to Ukrainian cultural memory.[21] However, at that stage, researchers failed to deal with their ambivalent, vague, and fluid—hybrid—identity. The Khanenkos’ history, full of gaps and contradictions, did not allow them to be easily fit into a clear typology of Ukrainian patriots, and therefore a number of facts and stories in their biographies were left aside as an unclassified residue.

This essay proposes to read the Khanenkos’ case more holistically and inclusively, following their transformational drift from Little Russian[22] fine art lovers to active builders of Ukrainian modern culture, envisioning and establishing in subimperial Ukraine the semantic order of the future. For them Kyiv became the Bhabha’s “third space” of their cultural self-articulation and adulthood.

The Khanenko Museum (the Khanenkos’ historic mansion), contemporary view. Courtesy of the Khanenko Museum Archive.

The Khanenko Museum that Varvara Khanenko had opened in 1919 in their beautiful Kyiv mansion has been working until now, with a three year break during World War II and a three month break during the current Russo-Ukrainian war. Today the museum keeps actively working in conscious radical opposition to the war-driven liminality with its anxiety and disorientation, anticipating post-liminal existence and fostering cultural change.

Curator’s talk at the Khanenko Museum, November 2024. Photo by Andrii Tsykota, the Khanenko Museum Archive.
Family tours on the museum’s history, January 2025. Photo by Andrii Tsykota, the Khanenko Museum Archive.

Notes

[1] Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage. University of Chicago Press, 1909, 18.

[2] Victor Turner. Dewey, Dilthey and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience. In V. W. Turner, & E. M. Bruner (Eds.), The Anthropology of Experience, University of Illinois Press, 1986, 42.

[3] For application of the concept in social and political theory see: Agnes Horvath, Bjørn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra. Introduction: Liminality and the Search for Boundaries. In Agnes Horvath, Bjørn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra (eds.) Breaking Boundaries. Varieties of Liminality, Berghahn Books, 2015, 1-8; in Psychology: Paul Stenner, Liminality and Experience: A Transdisciplinary Approach to the Psychosocial, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

[4] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, 2009, 36—39.

[5] Maria Mälksoo, The Challenge of Liminality for International Relations Theory. In Agnes Horvath, Bjørn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra (eds.) Breaking Boundaries. Varieties of Liminality, Berghahn Books, 2015, 226—245.

[6] https://book.artarsenal.in.ua/en/programs/life-on-the-edge-focus-theme/ (accessed 27.03.2025).

[7] https://www.tu.berlin/en/kuk/events/event-series/kuk-tuesdays/season-4/dislocation-liminality-resilience-the-case-of-ukraine (accessed 27.03.2025).

[8] Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky, Ukraine between East and West. In Peter L. Rudnytsky (ed.) Essays in Modern Ukrainian History, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1987, 1—11.

[9] Viktor Brekhunenko, Frontyr Ukrainy. In Entsyklopedia istorii Ukrainy: V. 10: T-Я. (Frontier of Ukraine. In Encyclopaedia of the history of Ukraine: V. 10: Т-Я), Naukova Dumka, 2013. http://www.history.org.ua/?termin=frontyr_ukrajiny (accessed 28.03.2025) [author’s trans.]; Ihor Chornovol, Komparatyvni frontyry: svitovyi I vitchyznyanyi vymir (Comparative frontiers: Global and Domestic Dimensions), Krytyka, 2015 [author’s trans.].

[10] Serhii Hromenko (ed.), Ukrainskyi Multyfrontyr: nove schema istorii Ukrainy (neolit — pochatok ХХ stolittya) (Ukrainian Multifrontier: a New Scheme of the History of Ukraine (Neolithic period – early 20th century)), Fabula, 2024 [author’s trans.].

[11] Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books, 2010.

[12] Kateryna Botanova, “Zolota doba” (“The Golden Age”), Dwutygodnik, # 407, marzec 2025 https://www.dwutygodnik.com/artykul/11786-.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawJKSr9leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHY2NCDyTvWf3XJUK0qBwcJRjeJSABLL5KKHINa1qFGMShoqzUBFhHHvUsw_aem_PDu1ndHdm9mhu05Cm5VTFA (accessed 24.03.2025) [author’s trans.].

[13] Hanna Rudyk, Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko and their universal art collection: unfolding a vision of the public museum in Ukraine at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In Agnieszka Kluczewska-Wójcik, Ewa Bobrowska (eds.) From collections to museums. Collectors and cultural mediators in the time of Felix Jasienski (1861-1929), Polish Institute of World Art Studies & Académie Polonaise des Sciences – CentreScientifique à Paris & Tako Publishing House, 2022, 67—76.

[14] Serhiy Kot, Povernennya i restytutsia kulturnykh tsinnostei u politychnomu ta kulturnomu zhytti Ukrainy (XX poch. XXI st.) (Return and Restitution of Cultural Property in the Political and Cultural Life of Ukraine (XX – early XXI centuries)), Instytut istorii Ukrainy, 2020 [author’s trans.].

[15]Osvyashcheniye i otkrytiye Kievskago Khudozhestvenno-promyshlennago i nauchnago muzeya Imperatora Nikolaya Aleksandrovicha (Concecration and opening of the Kyiv Artistic, Industrial and Scientific Museum of Emperor Nikolai Alexandrovich), Typohrafyia Kulzhenko, 1905 [author’s trans.].

[16] Victor Turner, Liminality and Communitas. In Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure, Cornell University Press, 1969, 95.

[17] Letter of  Bohdan Khanenko to Khvedir Vovk (Volkoff) from 10/22.12.1889. Research Archive of the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Fedir Vovk Fund, #4291 [author’s trans.].

[18] Several examples of Khanenko’s pragmatic pleasing of the Russian emperor and his family are discussed in the lecture: Hanna Rudyk “Russian Pavilion in Venice: The Khanenko Gambit”, presented 19.11.2022 within the interdisciplinary programme “Decolonising Art. Beyond the Obvious” organised jointly by the Ukrainian Institute and the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAjZOBRe5wg&t=981s (accessed 03.04.2025).

[19] On the Khanenkos’ other cultural projects, and, particularly, on Varvara Khanenko’s passionate involvement in the movement for preservation of national Ukrainian folk heritage see: Hanna Rudyk, “Varvara Khanenko. Bona stvoryla v svoyemu domi myzei mystetstv” (“Varvara Khanenko. She turned her home into an art museum”). Istorychna Pravda (Historical Truth), July 31, 2013, https://www.istpravda.com.ua/articles/51f9b71a7bb1d/(accessed 03.04.2025) [author’s trans.].

[20] Hanna Rudyk, Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko and their universal art collection…, 76.

[21] Olena Roslavets, “B.I. Khanenko – zasnovnyk Kyivskoho muzeju zakhidnoho ta skhidnoho mysteztva” (“B.I. Khanenko – the founder of the Kyiv Museum of Western and Eastern Art”) and Natalia Kornijenko, “Varvara Khanenko – zhyttya, podii, fakty” (“Varvara Khanenko – life, events, facts”), both textі in “Do 150-richchya vid dnya narodzhennya Bohdaba Ivanovycha Khanenka, metsenata, kolektsionera, fundatora muzeju” (“To the 150th anniversary of the birth of Bohdan Khanenko, philanthropist, collector, founder of the museum”). Proceedings of the scientific-practical conference. Kyiv, 1999, [author’s trans.]

[22] “Little Russians” is an ethnonym used to describe Ukrainians in the 14th-20th centuries. In the 19th century, under the influence of the chauvinistic policy pursued by the Russian Empire, in particular the doctrine of the triune Slavic-Russian nation, the term acquired discriminatory features. In Ukrainian historiography and literature of the 20th century, the term “Little Russians” and “Little Russianism” is usually associated with ethno-cultural assimilation of Ukrainians and the sense of inferiority imposed on them by so-called “Great Russians”,Please use the recommended reference style:  (accessed 03.04.2025).Yas O.V. MALA RUS [Elektronnyi resurs] // Entsyklopediia istorii Ukrainy: T. 6: La-Mi / Redkol.: V. A. Smolii (holova) ta in. NAN Ukrainy. Instytut istorii Ukrainy. – K.: V-vo “NauURL: http://www.history.org.ua/?termin=Mala_Rus (accessed 03.04.2025).


About the Author

Hanna Rudyk is a Ukrainian museum art historian, curator, and educator with a PhD in the history of culture (2001). Since 2002, she has curated the Islamic art collection at the Khanenko Museum in Kyiv. She has also conducted archival research on the history of the Khanenko family and their collection of non-European heritage. In 2011, Rudyk assumed the role of Deputy Director for Public Programs at the museum. From 2022 to 2024, Rudyk worked in Berlin, Germany, where her research project on decolonizing European museums of non-European heritage was funded by the Alexander Humboldt Foundation. This project was carried out at the Department of Modern Art History of the Institute of Arts Studies and Historical Urbanistic, TU Berlin. Since September 2024, Dr. Rudyk has resumed her work at the Khanenko Museum, focusing on the decolonial revision of its historical narrative and the redesigning of its educational and communicative strategies to support visitors affected by the Russian war of aggression. Her key professional interests include museology of non-European heritage, museum decolonial turn, and trauma-sensitive communication.


Other recent articles in the TRAFO series Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval:

Olena Komar, ‘Fight your Emotions’: Affective Injustice in Wartime, 06.05.2025.

Anastasiya Leukhina et al., Rethinking Slow Science from the Perspective of Warzone Academics, 17.04.2025.

Tomasz Hen-Konarski, The Bells of Klevan′: Was the Polish-Lithuanian Rule in Rus′ a Form of Colonial Oppression?, 15.10.2024.


Citation: Hanna Rudyk, Liminality and Museums in Ukraine: the Khanenkos’ Case, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 27.05.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/59132

 

 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (May 22, 2025). Liminality and Museums in Ukraine: the Khanenkos’ Case. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved June 19, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13zum


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