Hryhorij Skoworoda

Dzieła

• ok. 1770Narcyz: rozprawa o „Poznaj samego siebie”

  Dialog filozoficzny odczytujący mit Narcyza jako wezwanie do samopoznania: kto odnajduje w sobie niewidzialnego, prawdziwego człowieka, odnajduje Boga.

• 1785Ogród pieśni bożych

  Trzydzieści pieśni i wierszy pisanych przez kilkadziesiąt lat o wewnętrznej wolności, marności bogactw i szczęściu prostego życia.

Stanowisko

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.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Garden of Divine Songs (Sad bozhestvennykh pesnei, 1753–85)
• Narcissus: A Discourse on “Know Thyself” (Narkiss. Razglagol o tom: uznai sebe, c. 1770)
• Kharkiv Fables (Basni Khar’kovskiia, 1774)
• The Grateful Erodius (Blagodarnyi Erodii, 1787)