This book is devoted to a very special circle of works that have reached us from the art of Kyiv Rus of the late 10th—11th centuries, and from the artistic heritage of those principalities, which after the collapse of the vast Kyiv state were formed in the southern and south-western parts of its territory. These principalities continued to exist in the 12th—13th centuries, until the invasion of the Tatar-Mongol hordes in 1230–40s, i.e. in the pre-Mongol period, and partly survived in the following decades. When it comes to the artistic culture of that vast world, we usually remember, first of all, the ecclesiastical architecture, the mosaics and the frescoes of the churches of Kyiv and Chernihiv, the enormous 11th-century icons of Novgorod, made, apparently, by artisans then visiting Kyiv, the miniatures of the 1056–57 Ostromir Lectionary, the decorations of other outstanding illustrated manuscripts, as well as the precious gold and silver jewelry, decorated with cloisonné enamel and other exquisite methods of jewelry art. The monumental sculpture also existed in that world: carvings in white stone (limestone) on the facades of some churches, narrative and ornamental plastic of certain interior elements such as remarkable reliefs(both patterned and narrative) on the slate slabs that decorated Kyiv’s churches.

However, monumental sculpture and relief played relatively a modest role in that artistic world. This assessment of the role of sculpture will not change much even if we recall the existence of wooden sculpture, the art inherited from pagan times and known to us from the few surviving relatively late works of the north-east and north-west of Rus, which being largely primitive in nature have reached us only in small numbers due to the poor preservation of the material employed. (Foreword by Engelina Smirnova).