Chapter TWO: Hrihori Skovoroda

It was at the darkest hour when the rights and privileges of the Ukrainians were being consistently reduced in Russian Ukraine and all hope seemed lost, that there passed across the scene a strange figure. That was Hrihori Skovoroda, philosopher, poet and ethical teacher. Even today it is hard to understand his attitude toward life, for he was one of those men who are sincerely human but who stand aside from the vices and evil deeds of men and in their avoidance of the bad, refrain also from much of the good, if not from life itself. Had Skovoroda been ambitious, he could have occupied almost any post in the service of the Russian government. Had he been thoroughly moved by nationalistic fervor, he could have had anything that Ukraine could offer him. An able man, he wished for nothing except to be allowed to live his life in his own way, to teach whom he wished as he wished how to live, and perhaps because of his refusal to fit into the conventional mode of existence, he left an indelible but none too sharply defined imprint upon all who came into contact with him. All of the writers who remodelled the Ukrainian language at the close of the century speak of him with the greatest respect and he was a precursor of the Ukrainian Renaissance which was to follow just a few years after he ceased his wanderings.

Skovoroda was born in 1722 in the village of Chornukhi in the province of Poltava. His parents were Kozaks and his father had belonged to the Lubny Regiment. They were not of the lowest class materially and the young boy had the opportunity to secure what education was available. He was a remarkably sensitive child and unlike the majority of his fellows, he cared more for reading than he did for the rough sports of the day. Religion and the Bible interested him but he early declined to be bound by the conventional interpretation, and this grew upon him as he passed through life. Because of his beautiful voice, his father sent him to study at the Academy of Kiev. He stayed there for two years and then he went to St. Petersburg and had a position in the court choir of the Empress Elizabeth. She had secretly married Aleksyey Rozumovsky (1709-1771) and he induced her to do something for Ukraine. She even restored the post of Hetman after it had been abolished in 1734 and appointed her husband’s brother Cyril to the position. In 1744 Skovoroda returned to Kiev and resumed his studies. His talents and his voice were such that the Archbishop urged him to take holy orders. It was in vain. Skovoroda absolutely refused and expressed himself so forcefully that he was finally compelled to leave the Academy.

In 1750 he had an opportunity to visit Hungary with Major General Vishnevsky and he gladly took advantage of it. Then for a while he was a singer in the Orthodox Church of Pest. He travelled extensively around the neighborhood of Pest, to Vienna, Bratislava and the neighboring regions and he seems also to have wandered on foot through Poland, Prussia, Germany and north Italy. During this time he seems to have interested himself in the classical authors of Greece and Rome and in the writings of the Church Fathers. He also learned Greek, Latin, German and Hebrew. Yet we can be very sure that he was more interested in the world and the people whom he met than he was in serious and intensive study from books.

He finally returned home and then for about ten years lived almost the life of a recluse, endeavoring to understand his own character and feelings. Next he had an opportunity to teach poetry in the seminary at Pereyaslav but he obstinately refused to change his convictions and he declared that for the Ukrainian (Church Slavonic) language, the accentual system was better suited than was the syllabic system employed by the French and Poles. As a result he lost the post. He served for a while as a private tutor and lost that in consequence of too severe a scolding of the boy whom he was teaching. Then came a long series of offers. In 1759 he was asked to teach poetry at the College of Kharkiv and was compelled to leave because the bishop wanted him to enter a monastery. In 1764 he visited Kiev and in 1766 he was asked to teach ethics at the college of Kharkiv again but he was soon forced out because of the strangeness of his ideas.

From then until his death in 1794, he lived the life of a wandering scholar, welcomed wherever he might be, whether on the big estates of the nobles or in the poor huts of the peasants. He cared nothing for material success and little more for shelter. His death was characteristic of his life. He was visiting on an estate and at dinner was never more cheerful. A little later he disappeared and the host found him in the garden digging a hole. He remarked jokingly that it was where he wished to be buried. No one paid any attention or thought it strange when he disappeared after supper. It was not until the next night when he had not appeared that the host went to his room and found him dead, November 9, 1794.

Accustomed as we are to a life of constant and ceaseless activity with great emphasis on material success, such an existence as that of Skovoroda may seem to us the acme of uselessness and we may often regret that in him Ukraine lost a son who could have accomplished much for her regeneration. Perhaps the reverse was the truth. Skovoroda taught much and wrote a considerable amount, but his writings were intended for his close friends, especially a young student Kovalinsky, and were not published during his lifetime. He accomplished his work by oral instruction and still more by the powerful force of his example, for his life spoke more clearly than his words and proclaimed his utter indifference to the gradations of rank and honors that had been the means of bringing Ukraine to its fall. Here was the outstanding thinker of his day who dared to proclaim and act upon the principle that the great of the world were no more important than the small and who could not be hired or induced to do what he regarded as wrong and inexpedient.

It might be possible to compare Skovoroda with Socrates, for the Greek philosopher also accomplished much in ancient Athens by his constant and provoking habit of asking questions about all matters of moral and ethical importance. Nevertheless Socrates was married and played his part in the Athenian democracy. Skovoroda did not marry and avoided all public functions. He was not a voice crying in the wilderness and uttering a prophetic message. He was merely a quiet and educated Kozak moving among men, living his own life with a quiet dignity that showed both his self-respect and his consideration for other people. He could smile as easily and as bitingly at the aristocratic pretensions of the nobles as he could be indulgent to the whims and superstitions of the people. Yet wherever he went and whatever he did, he impressed upon all around him his own attitude toward life and allowed them to understand of themselves what he meant.

His great object in life was to know himself, to understand human nature and human capabilities, and that nature was as inherent in the serf as in the nobleman. As he once expressed it, “The wisdom of the lords that the simple man is ‘black,’ seems to me as amusing as the wisdom of the so-called philosopher that the earth is dead. How can a dead earth produce living children? And how from a ‘black’ people can there be born ‘white’ lords?”

A well-trained classicist, Skovoroda echoed the quotation of Terence, the Latin comedian, “Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto,” (I am a human being; I regard nothing human as alien to me.) All of life was his field and he studied in every situation how to obtain self-knowledge and self-happiness. His answer was very simple. “The necessary things for happiness are not difficult to secure. The difficult things are unnecessary.”

Happiness is not something that can be secured by wealth or by health. It is something that exists in the human heart as a gift from God and man has only to reach out and take it and know when he has it. It was a quietistic philosophy but it cut sharply across the social and political views of the time and the more Skovoroda tried to fit himself into the world, the more he became technically less dangerous to the established order, the more bitter and unflinching was his indirect criticism of it.

Perhaps Skovoroda was greatly influenced by the western Protestant teachings that he met on his travels. Perhaps he was in contact with the Masonry of the day, for it was the Masonic lodges that first printed many of his works. Perhaps he drew upon certain intangible strains of human motivation that had inspired the early Kozaks to seek for liberty in the wilderness and which led him as a scholar to try to attain the same kind of intellectual freedom that they had sought by force of arms and by emigration from their homes.

His thought was deeply affected by the classical authors whom he had read and still more by the Bible. Yet from childhood, while he knew the Bible thoroughly, he refused to accept it literally and he sought from it an inner meaning which alone could satisfy him. He practically rejected both theology and the Church in their conventional forms and yet he was profoundly religious and highly ethical in his outlook on life.

There was a certain pantheism in his teachings. “The greatest truth has no specific name. To the ancients God was the Supreme Reason. He had among them different names as Nature, the Essence of Words, Eternity, the Hour, Necessity, Fate. And among Christians His most common names are Spirit, Lord, Tsar, Father, Reason, Truth.” Elsewhere He is also Nature and Love.

Skovoroda saw in the universe the macrocosm which revealed God’s greatness and power. God was likewise in the microcosm, in the nature of the individual man, in his heart and in his innermost being. It is for this reason that happiness is to be found inside a man and not outside among acts, rewards, or possessions.

He lived according to his theories and so the people grasped his message without reading his philosophical dialogues. Their very titles are suggestive. There is _Narcissus or a discussion about self-knowledge_, _The book Ashkan on the knowledge of one’s self_, _A friendly Conversation on spiritual peace_, etc. They were constructed in the form usually of a Platonic dialogue but they expressed in written and permanent form the ideas that he was expounding in his constant talking and traveling.

He also wrote poems and fables in the conventional form which repeated the same ideas for the common people. Such subjects as the _Blessed Herod_ and the _Poor Quail_ show the way in which he popularized his ideas. Fables and similar poems had been cultivated as a literary form at the Academy of Kiev and Skovoroda turned it into a living form of writing.

His dialogues and essays on literature have been lost but they showed an appreciation, we are told, of the real nature of the Ukrainian language and accent. Yet Skovoroda was not an epoch maker in any way. He valued the vernacular speech but he was still too much under the influence of his training to use it in place of the stilted and artificial language which was then current in Ukrainian letters. He still preferred to write in that artificial mixture of Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and Church Slavonic that was the language taught at the Academy and as a result his writings passed into that oblivion which did not concern him at all. He had not cared whether or not they were published. It would not bother him, if they were forgotten, for they were but a subsidiary part of his work.

With his unmystical and individualistic religion and ethics, Skovoroda fits well into the picture of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, as it appeared in various countries of Europe. He was sharply opposed to the elegant scepticism of Voltaire which had become the ruling fashion in many of the European courts. He was nearer to the Deists and to certain eighteenth century Protestant theologians and on one side of his being, he was of that group of eighteenth century thinkers and scholars as Benjamin Franklin, Mikhail Lomonosov, and Dositej Obradovich who laid the foundation for the nineteenth century and the beginnings of Romanticism.

On the other side, he belonged rather with a group of Slavonic thinkers of all ages, as the Czech Peter Chelcicky and later in part Leo Tolstoy, who sought to avoid the evils of the world by living an existence apart from it. These men had a vision of an ideal existence to be secured by extreme simplification and abstention from the affairs of the world in the interest of a higher and a different utility.

With it all, in a demoralized and disorganized Ukraine, where the national life was flickering to a new low, he revealed the possibilities of a newer and different democracy and a kindly and humane outlook on life. His was not the task to sponsor or to lead a reaction against the prevailing system. His was not the task to defend the existing order. He endeavored to stand apart and thereby he kindled a spark of hope in the people by ignoring, rather than by defying the prevailing system. He taught the value of the individual in a day when the individual was neglected. He taught the dignity of man as man in a day when rank and external glory was the supreme good. He taught calm and deliberate thinking at a time when people cared for little except external pomp and show. He emphasized the reality of the spirit and of the truth when the will of the sovereign was the supreme law. That was his teaching and he proved it by his own example. It is small wonder that he did not take the next step and yet that the men of the next generation felt his influence and were glad to express their obligations to him in fields and in ways that he never would have believed possible or valuable.