Hryhorii Skovoroda, also Gregory Skovoroda or Grigory Skovoroda (; , ; , ; 3 December 1722 – 9 November 1794), was a philosopher of Ukrainian Cossack origin who lived and worked in the Russian Empire. He was a poet, a teacher and a composer of liturgical music. His significant influence on his contemporaries and succeeding generations and his way of life were universally regarded as Socratic, and he was often called a "Socrates".
Skovoroda, whose native tongue was vernacular Ukrainian, wrote his texts in a mixture of three languages: Church Slavonic, Ukrainian, and Russian, with some elements from Latin and Greek and a large number of Western-Europeanisms. Different views exist about how to characterize the base language upon which he developed his highly individual idiom. One scholar has identified this base language as the variety of Russian spoken by the upper classes in Kharkiv and the surrounding Sloboda Ukraine region; this version of Russian contained many Ukrainianisms. According to another view, he wrote some of his works in the Ukrainian variety of Church Slavonic and others in the old Ukrainian literary language. The majority of his surviving letters are written in Latin and Greek.
He received his education at the Academia Mohileana in Kiev (now Kyiv, Ukraine). He led the life of an itinerant thinker-beggar. In his tracts and dialogs, biblical problems overlap with those examined earlier by Plato and the Stoics. Skovoroda's first book was issued after his death in 1798 in Saint Petersburg. Skovoroda's complete works were published for the first time in Saint Petersburg in 1861. Many of his works existed only in manuscript form before this edition.
Life
Skovoroda was born into a small-holder Ukrainian Registered Cossack family in the village of Chornukhy in Lubny Regiment, Cossack Hetmante (In 1708 the territory of Cossack Hetmanate was incorporated into the Kiev Governorate, though the Cossack Hetmanate was not liquidated), Russian Empire (modern-day Poltava Oblast, Ukraine), in 1722. His mother, Pelageya Stepanovna Shang-Giray, was directly related to Şahin Giray and was of partial Crimean Tatar ancestry. He was a student at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy (1734–1741, 1744–1745, 1751–1753) but did not graduate.
In 1741, at the age of 19, due to his uncle Ignatiy Poltavtsev he was taken from Kiev to sing in the imperial choir in Moscow and St. Petersburg, returning to Kiev in 1744. He spent the period from 1745 to 1750 in the kingdom of Hungary and is thought to have traveled elsewhere in Europe during this period as well. In 1750 he returned to Kiev. From 1750 to 1751, he taught poetics in Pereiaslav. For most of the period from 1753 to 1759, Skovoroda was a tutor in the family of a landowner in Kovrai. From 1759 to 1769, with interruptions, he taught such subjects as poetry, syntax, Greek, and ethics at the Kharkоv Collegium (also called Kharkiv Collegium). After an attack on his course on ethics in 1769 he decided to abandon teaching.
Skovoroda's travels in Central Europe represent a formative period in his intellectual biography. In late 1745, having completed his philosophical studies at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, he joined the "Tokaj Commission for the Procurement of Wines for the Imperial Court," headed by Major General Fyodor Vishnevsky (1682 - 1749), a Serb from Transylvania in Russian service since 1715. During his years abroad, Skovoroda visited Pressburg (modern Bratislava), Ofen (Buda), Vienna, and other cities, engaging with local scholars. After Vishnevsky's death in January 1749 and the appointment of his son Gavriil as successor, Skovoroda returned to Ukraine, arriving in Kiev in 10 October 1750.
1750 Bishop Nikodim Skrebnitsky invited Skovoroda to teach poetics at the newly founded Pereiaslav collegium. Within several months, a dispute arose over his pedagogical methods and his refusal to conform to established methodology. Skrebnitsky subsequently dismissed him in 1751. After the scandal Skovoroda resumed his Studies at Kiev-Mohyla Academy enrolling in Theology taught by George (Konissky), but quit the faculty after 2 of 4 years required for graduation.
In the summer of 1753, on the recommendation of Kiev Metropolitan (senior hierarch of the Orthodox Church), he entered the service of the cossack noble Stepan Tomara (1719-1794) as tutor to his elder son Vasily (1746-1819) at the family estate in Kavrai Pereiaslav regiment. He remained in Tomara's household for approximately six years, during which time he began composing poetry, including several pieces for his collection The Garden of Divine Songs. In ealry 1755 he briefly traveled to Moscow and the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, where he declined a teaching position at the Lavra seminary. Skovoroda left Kavrai in the summer of 1759, when Vasily Tamara departed to study abroad in Zamość and then Vienna.
In summer 1759, Skovoroda accepted an invitation from Joasaf Mitkevich, Bishop of Belgorod and Oboian, to teach poetics at the Kharkov Collegium - one of the most advanced Sloboda-Ukrainian educational institutions of that time, distinguished from the Kiev-Mohyla Academy by its emphasis on natural sciences and modern languages. He briefly stepped down in summer 1760 after refusing Mitkevich's attempts to pressure him to take monastic vows. Skovoroda returned to the Collegium in September 1762 to teach Syntax and Greek, largely motivated by his encounter with the young student Mikhail Kovalensky, who would become his closest disciple, first biographer and the scholar behind first publications of Skovoroda's manuscripts in St. Petersburg after his death. A circle of devoted students formed around him, but facing increasing hostility from the newly appointed bishop, Porfiry Kraisky, Skovoroda left the Collegium a second time in July 1764 amid accusations of moral corruption and heresy.
After several years without a formal position, Skovoroda was invited by the governor of Sloboda Ukraine, Yevdokim Shcherbinin, to teach in the Collegium's newly established "Supplementary Classes" for the nobility. He composed the treatise Entrance Door to Christian Morality for this purpose and began teaching catechism in 1768. However, the newly appointed bishop, Samuil Mislavsky - a former classmate of Skovoroda from the Kiev-Mohyla Academy - objected to an unordained scholar, teaching catechism, and critiqued parts of Skovoroda's treatise. Skovoroda resigned April 1769, this time permanently to never again hold another institutional position.
Following his final departure from the Kharkov Collegium, Skovoroda adopted the life of a wandering philosopher. He settled initially at an apiary in the Huzhvynsky forest near Kharkov, where he began composing philosophical fables (later collected as Kharkov Fables, the first fable collection in Ukrainain literature) and philosophical dialogues, including Narcissus and the Symphony Called the Book of Askhan. From 1770, he frequently stayed with Aleksey Soshalsky, a squire land owner in Gusinka, and in 1772 spent several months at the estate of the retired colonel Stepan Teviashov in Ostrogozhsk, where he composed six philosophical dialogues.
Throughout these years, Skovoroda traveled extensively across Sloboda Ukraine, visiting Kharkov, Babai, Balky, Izium, Kupyansk, Akhtyrka, and other towns, forming a circle of admirers among clergy, minor gentry, and educated laypeople. He maintained a lifelong correspondence with Mikhail Kovalensky, who later wrote his foundational biography.
In his final year, Skovoroda walked from Sloboda Ukraine to visit Kovalensky near Oryol, entrusted him with his collected works, and returned to Sloboda Ukraine.
Skovoroda was also known as a composer of liturgical music, as well as a number of songs to his own texts. Of the latter, several have passed into the realm of Ukrainian folk music. Many of his philosophical songs known as Skovorodskie psalmy (Skovorodian psalms) were often encountered in the repertoire of blind traveling folk musicians known as kobzars. He was described as a proficient player on the flute, torban and kobza.
In the final quarter of his life he traveled by foot through Sloboda Ukraine staying with various friends, both rich and poor, preferring not to remain in one place for too long. During this time, he dedicated himself to individual hermit-like monastic life and study.
This last period was the time of his great philosophical works. In this period as well, he continued to write in the area of his greatest earlier achievement: poetry and letters in Church Slavonic language, Greek and Latin. He also translated a number of works from Latin into Russian.
Three days before he died, he went to the house of one of his closest friends and told him he had come to stay permanently. Every day he left the house with a shovel, and it turned out that he spent three days digging his own grave. On the third day, he ate dinner, stood up and said, "my time has come." He went into the next room, lay down, and died. He requested the following epitaph to be placed on his tombstone:
He died on 9 November 1794 in the village called Pan-Ivanovka (today known as Skovorodinovka, Bohodukhiv Raion, Kharkiv Oblast).
Language Different views exist about the nature of the language in which Skovoroda wrote his works. He spoke his native vernacular Ukrainian in his everyday life; his student and biographer Mikhail Kovalensky writes that Skovoroda "loved his native language and rarely compelled himself to speak in a foreign one." However, except for his works in Latin and Greek, Skovoroda wrote in a mixture of Church Slavonic, Russian, and Ukrainian. He also integrated some elements from Latin, Greek, and other languages, including a significant amount of Western-Europeanisms. Slavic linguist George Shevelov characterizes his language (not counting quotations from the Bible and numerous poetic experimentations) as "R[ussian] as it was then used in Xarkiv and Slobožаnščyna [Sloboda Ukraine] by educated landowners and the upper class in general," a form of Russian which "grew up on the Ukrainian substratum," contained many Ukrainianisms, and differed from the Russian of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Upon this linguistic core, writes Shevelov, Skovoroda developed a very individual idiom not equivalent to its base colloquial language. In his study of Skovoroda's language published in 1923, linguist Petro Buzuk describes the philosopher's idiom as mainly based on the written Russian of the 18th century, albeit with forms from Ukrainian, Polish and Old Church Slavonic.
Literary scholar Leonid Ushkalov states that Skovoroda's language is a "lingua mixta [mixed language]" which differs greatly from the Russian of 18th-century Ukrainian authors from Kharkiv. He writes that Skovoroda "had reasons to consider his 'language of writing' to be Ukrainian." (On a few occasions, Skovoroda referred to the language of his works as the "common [dialect]," the "local dialect [zdeshneie narechiie]," or "Little Russian [malorossiiskii]"; the term Little Russia then referred to most of the territory of Ukraine.) It contains parallel Ukrainian and Russian words and mixed Russian-Ukrainian word forms. According to Vitaly Peredriyenko, 84% of the word forms in Skovoroda's poetry collection Sad bozhestvennykh pesnei (The Garden of Divine Songs) corresponds to the new Ukrainian literary language in terms of vocabulary and word formation; his philosophical dialogues were found to contain a somewhat lower percentage (for example, 73.6% in his Narkiss). According to philologist Lidiia Hnatiuk, while some modern Ukrainian readers perceive Skovoroda's language as Russian, the overwhelming majority of Skovoroda's philosophical works are written in the Ukrainian variety of Church Slavonic, whereas his poems and fables are in the old Ukrainian literary language; she states, however, that the boundary between these two varieties is "very conditional."