هريهوري سكوفورودا

الأعمال

• نحو 1770نرجس: خطاب في «اعرف نفسك» (Narkiss)

  حوار فلسفي يقرأ أسطورة نرجس دعوةً إلى معرفة الذات: من يجد في داخله الإنسان الحقيقي غير المرئي يجد الله.

• 1785حديقة الأغاني الإلهية (Sad bozhestvennykh pesnei)

  ثلاثون أغنية وقصيدة كُتبت على مدى عقود في الحرية الداخلية وبطلان الثروات وسعادة الحياة البسيطة.

الموقف

Skovoroda is on the map as the founding figure of philosophy in Ukraine: Dmytro Chyzhevsky’s histories (1931, 1934) made him its starting point, while Vladimir Ern (1912) and Vasily Zenkovsky (1948–50) counted him among Russian thinkers – a classification that research today reads in the light of the imperial context. He wrote in the bookish language of his time, a mixture of Church Slavonic, Russian and Ukrainian elements, and drew on Plato, the Stoics, the Church Fathers and Christian mysticism. His starting point is the Delphic “know thyself”: every thing has two natures, a visible, transient one and an invisible, eternal one, and the human being finds God by discovering the invisible “true human being” within. The Bible, read symbolically, is a third world that teaches this distinction. From it follows an ethics of kindredness (srodnist): happiness lies in work that suits one’s nature, not in wealth or rank. Skovoroda lived what he taught, which made him a figure of legend. Readers have asked how far his thought forms a system rather than a web of images and paradoxes, and his relation to Orthodox teaching remains debated; Chyzhevsky stressed his closeness to German mysticism.

الحياة والسياق

Hryhorii Skovoroda was born on 3 December 1722 (22 November Old Style) in Chornukhy near Lubny, in the Cossack Hetmanate, into a Cossack family. He studied at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, with interruptions, from the 1730s; in 1742–44 he sang in the court choir in St Petersburg, and around 1745–50 he accompanied a Russian mission to Tokaj in Hungary, from where he travelled in Central Europe. He taught poetics at the collegium in Pereiaslav in 1750–51, was a tutor in the family of the landowner Tomara and from 1759, with interruptions, taught poetics, Greek and ethics at the Kharkiv Collegium; in 1769 his ethics course met with objections from the church authorities, and he gave up teaching. For the last quarter-century of his life he lived as a wandering teacher in Sloboda Ukraine, staying with friends and patrons, without a post, family or property. His dialogues, treatises, fables and songs circulated in manuscript and were printed only in the nineteenth century. He died on 9 November 1794 in Pan-Ivanivka near Kharkiv, today Skovorodynivka; his pupil Mykhailo Kovalynsky wrote his first biography. The museum at his grave was destroyed by a Russian missile strike in May 2022.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• Kharkiv Fables (Basni Khar’kovskiia, 1774)
• The Grateful Erodius (Blagodarnyi Erodii, 1787)