Lesson № 4 (seminar – 6 hours)
Тhemes:
1. The traditions and peculiarities of the development of the Ukrainian philosophical thought.
2. The classic Ukrainian Philosophy
Aim: – to explain peculiar features of philosophy origin in terms of history, characteristic features of philosophical thinking the Ukrainian philosophy;
– to identify the peculiar features of the Ukrainian Mentality
Professional orientation of students: to enlarge outlook of future medical workers with knowledge about unique ability of human consciousness and thinking; to learn to manage patients of different religious and ethinic communities.
Students’ independent work program
I. The traditions and peculiarities of the development of the Ukrainian philosophical thought.
1. The Ukrainian mythology.
2. Christianity in
3. Yaroslav the Wise.
4. Brtotherhoods.
ІІ. The classic Ukrainian Philosophy
1.
2. Taras Shevchenko.
3. Hrygoriy Skovoroda and his “philosophy of heart”.
4. Ukrainian mentality.
1. The traditions and peculiarities of the development of the Ukrainian philosophical thought.
Ukrainian mentality was formed influenced by many factors: geographical location at the cross-roads of the West and East, specific climate conditions and complex, at times tragic historical destiny. Since time immemorial Ukrainians have been known as hardworking, thrifty, skilled farmers, emotionally strongly. They are typically kind-hearted, friendly, hospitable and well wishing to both fellow countrymen and foreigners; they are cautious yet inclined to romanticism and sentimentality. But come the time of ordeal and they are determined, resourceful, brave, ready for self-sacrifice. Among themselves, despite their interest emotionalism, Ukrainians have always valued restraint, consideration and a realistic view of life. Theirs is a very rich imagination reflection the surround realities in a colourful at times paradoxical way.
An intellectual discipline (literally, ‘love of wisdom’ in classical Greek) that, in the course of its history, has been variously defined as the study of the basic principles of being, the testing of the foundations of knowledge, the general guide to the good life, the analysis of basic scientific concepts and methods, and the examination of certain concepts of ordinary language. Unlike the specialized sciences, it does not have its own subject matter or distinctive method. Hence, only a vague definition, such as ‘the critical and systematic reflection on questions of the greatest concern to man,’ may be broad enough to cover the various forms assumed by philosophy.
Because it was adopted from other cultures to address certain pressing political or religious needs, philosophy in Ukraine has been preoccupied with practical rather than theoretical problems. The political calamities and attendant cultural disruptions in the history of Ukraine account to a large extent for the lack of durable philosophical tradition in Ukraine and for the absence of a distinctively Ukrainian system or worldview. For this reason some important Ukrainian thinkers (eg, Hryhorii Skovoroda) have been assigned mistakenly to Russia’s more stable philosophical culture; others (Pamfil Yurkevych, Volodymyr Lesevych) did in fact work in a non-Ukrainian tradition. Lacking its own philosophical literature and institutions, Ukrainian culture could be considered to have been incomplete during some periods of its development. At such times writers and poets rather than philosophers were the propagators of philosophical ideas and theories among the Ukrainian public.
Medieval period. The period from the adoption of Eastern Christianity (see Christianization of Ukraine) to the Mongol invasion (10th–13th centuries) was marked by vigorous intellectual development. The assimilation of Byzantine culture was not passive, but an active rethinking that gave rise to original speculation. Because of a common literary language and alphabet, the work of Bulgarian translators and thinkers was readily transferable to Kyivan Rus’. The ideas of Greek philosophers and the Church Fathers entered Kyivan Rus’ through Bulgarian translations of Greek collections or original Bulgarian compilations, including the Izbornik of Sviatoslav (1073), Zlatostrui, Pchela (The Bee), the chronicles of John Malalas and Georgios Hamartolos, the Lives of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, the Hexaëmeron of Exarch John of Bulgaria, The Source of Knowledge of Saint John of Damascus, and apocrypha. The new, imported ideas, which themselves were not systematized and were often opposed, did not displace old folk beliefs, but were set alongside them. Thus, many conflicting answers to the same basic questions were found in different and even the same sources. Neither a single dogmatic scheme not a unified worldview was worked out.
Since political motives played a decisive role in the religious conversion of Kyivan Rus’, the emergent philosophical thought was focused on political rather than religious questions. Authors of the first original works produced in Kyivan Rus’ were not concerned much with personal salvation or the defense of Christian doctrine, but with a higher justification of the political order. Metropolitan Ilarion‘s ‘Slovo o zakoni i blahodati’ (Sermon on Law and Grace), the finest theoretical work written in Kyivan Rus’, shows how the Christianization of Rus’ is the fulfillment of universal history. Grand Prince Volodymyr Monomakh‘s Poucheniie ditiam (Instruction for [My] Children) and the Rus’ chronicles portray the ideal prince, a combination of the pagan warrior and the fatherly Christian ruler. Besides these works, the sermons of Bishop Cyril of Turiv, the letters of Metropolitan Klym Smoliatych (reputedly the best philosopher in Kyivan Rus’), and the writings of Nestor the Chronicler contain philosophical ideas, but fall far short of the kind of articulated, systematic thinking characteristic of scholasticism. The worldview expressed in the literature and folklore of Kyivan Rus’ was practical, optimistic, and life-asserting. The Church Fathers’ Christian Neoplatonism reinforced the sense of divine presence in the world and the expectation of happiness in this life that were characteristic of the earlier pagan outlook. The sharp opposition between God and nature, as well as the spirit and the body, and its attendant rejection of the joys of this world was confined to a relatively narrow class of ascetic works (see Asceticism).
The Mongol invasion of the mid-13th century began a long period of political turmoil and cultural decline in Rus’. For almost three centuries nothing significant was added to the Kyivan intellectual heritage. As a mood of historical pessimism set in, people turned to religion and mysticism for comfort. In the mid-14th century Hesychasm, a form of monastic mysticism, spread from Bulgaria to Ukraine, and in the 15th century a rationalist sect of Judaizers appeared in Kyiv.
Renaissance period. Philosophical ideas and methods of argument gained a new importance in the period of religious struggle in Europe. At the end of the 15th century the ideas of humanism were brought to Ukraine by foreign travelers and by Ukrainians studying at foreign universities. The Reformation, which was carried into Galicia and Volhynia by rationalist sects, such as the Socinians, was very different in origin and purpose from the humanist movement, yet their programs coincided and reinforced each other on many points: the extension of education and learning, the use of the vernacular, the right to individual opinion, and the need to return to the original sources and to reassess critically the traditions built on them. Protestant anticlericalism, public-mindedness, and national awareness had an important influence on the church brotherhoods in Ukraine.
Although these two movements contributed to the cultural revival in Ukraine, it was the Counter-Reformation spearheaded by the Jesuits that threatened the very existence of the Orthodox faith and Ukrainian culture and aroused the Ukrainian Orthodox nobility and burghers to vigorous organized action. At first the Orthodox adopted a defensive strategy: they turned inward toward their own Greco-Slavonic tradition and rejected anything belonging to the Latin-Polish tradition. Returning to the roots of their culture, they revived the use of Greek and Church Slavonic, translated the Bible, and studied patristic theology. The achievements of the Catholic West—scholastic theology, philosophy, and logic—were viewed with suspicion as a devilish ploy to lure believers away from the true faith. New institutions were set up toward the end of the 16th century to carry out this program: the Ostrih cultural center, consisting of the Ostrih Academy and Ostrih Press, a learned circle, and a string of brotherhoods modeled on the Lviv Dormition Brotherhood. The leading Orthodox proponents were Ivan Vyshensky, V. Surazky, Khrystofor Filalet, Herasym Smotrytsky, Ostrozkyi Kliryk, Zakhariia Kopystensky, Kyrylo Stavrovetsky-Tranquillon, Isaia Kopynsky, and Yov Boretsky. To them philosophy was part of theology, and most of their ideas were derived from the same sources on which medieval thinkers had drawn—Pseudo-Dionysius, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint John of Damascus, and Exarch John of Bulgaria (see Polemical literature).
This defensive strategy led to isolation from the larger society and from the dominant culture. Withdrawal from this world for the sake of another world did not appeal to the upper classes of the nobility, clergy, and burghers, who continued to drift away from the Orthodox faith and culture. The Orthodox countered by proposing to study and assimilate the tools (Latin, Polish, rhetoric, and logic) and ideas (scholasticism) of their rivals. This was a dangerous policy, for it diminished the differences between the competing cultures, but it was the only policy that offered some hope of success. The turn to scholasticism was a return to an outlived intellectual tradition, but it created the preconditions for the separation of philosophy from theology and the introduction of modern ideas into Ukraine. The chief proponents of the new strategy were Meletii Smotrytsky, Kasiian Sakovych, Lavrentii Zyzanii, and Petro Mohyla. The Kyivan Mohyla College (later Kyivan Mohyla Academy) was the leading institution to carry out this program.
In spite of royal prohibition, philosophy began to be taught at the Kyivan Cave Monastery School (1631), and the practice was continued when the school was reorganized into the Kyivan Mohyla College, later Kyivan Mohyla Academy (1632–1817). The philosophy courses, read in Latin, usually required three years and covered three main fields, logic, physics (natural philosophy), and metaphysics. Each instructor prepared his own course; hence, the courses differed significantly in content and style. Some of the professors who offered philosophy courses at the academy were Yosyf Kononovych-Horbatsky (1639–42), Innokentii Gizel (1645–7), Yoasaf Krokovsky (1686–7), Stefan Yavorsky (1691–3), I. Popovsky (1699), Y. Turoboisky (1702–4), Kh. Charnutsky (1704–5), Teofan Prokopovych (1707–8), Y. Volchansky (1715–18), I. Levytsky (1723–5), I. Dubnevych (1725–6), Amvrosii Dubnevych (1727–8), S. Kalynovsky (1729–30), Sylvestr Kuliabka (1735–9), Mykhail Kozachynsky (1741–5), Heorhii Konysky (1749), Tymofii Shcherbatsky (1751–3), and Davyd Nashchynsky (1753–5).
The general character of these courses was syncretic—the result of blending elements of Christian Neoplatonism with Aristotelian doctrines. The Kyivan Mohyla Academy’s professors drew ideas freely from the ancient philosophers (mostly Aristotle and Plato, but also the Stoics and Ptolemy), the patristic tradition (Origen, Saint Basil the Great, Saint Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius), medieval scholasticism (Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, J. Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham), and neoscholasticism (T. Cajetan, F. Suárez, P. Fonseca, L. de Molina, R. de Arriaga, and F. de Oviedo). They often criticized Thomas Aquinas, using the arguments of his scholastic opponents. Aristotle was quoted more than any other thinker but was not treated as an infallible authority. The logic course, which consisted of an introductory part called dialectic or minor logic and a more sophisticated part called major logic, was based on Aristotle’s Organon and supplemented with refinements introduced by scholastic logicians. On the central problem discussed in logic—universals—the academy’s professors rejected Platonism and accepted some version of Aristotelian realism. Iatural philosophy they adopted Aristotelian hylomorphism, but tended to stress the ontological primacy of prime matter over form. Tymofii Shcherbatsky was the first to proffer the Cartesian concept of matter instead of Aristotle’s. While accepting creation the Kyiv thinkers tended to minimize God’s subsequent intervention in the natural world. This deistic tendency contrasted sharply with their Neoplatonist metaphysics, which emphasized God’s immanence iature. A growing interest in modern science and philosophy is evident in their discussion of Copernican, Galilean, and Cartesian theories (Shcherbatsky first adopted the heliocentric theory and Descartes’s vortex theory) and the rejection of Aristotle’s distinction between celestial and sublunar bodies (Teofan Prokopovych, Mykhail Kozachynsky, Heorhii Konysky, Shcherbatsky). Some added ethics treatises to their courses (Prokopovych, S. Kalynovsky, Sylvestr Kuliabka, Kozachynsky, Konysky, Shcherbatsky). They tended to reject a narrow, ascetic view of life and to assert the desirability of happiness in this as well as the next life and its attainability in an active, rationally governed life. In style the courses looked much like scholastic treatises: the chief problems of philosophy were discussed one by one by proposing a thesis, listing objections, and replying to the objections.
Modern period. During the second half of the 18th century the Kyivan Mohyla Academy, Chernihiv College, Pereiaslav College, and Kharkiv College were gradually reduced to mere seminaries. At the beginning of the 1760s the Kyiv metropolitan ordered philosophy at the academy to be taught according to C. Baumeister’s texts based on C. Wolff’s system, and thus discouraged any individual originality and intellectual independence.
Ukraine’s loss of the last vestiges of political autonomy under Catherine II and its swift cultural decline account for the weak impression that the Enlightenment made on Ukrainian thought. Without royal encouragement or interest and without vigorous institutions of higher learning independent of church control, the Enlightenment could not grow into a full-fledged movement. It is represented by a few individual thinkers, such as Yakiv Kozelsky, Petro Lodii, Ivan Rizhsky, and Johann Baptist Schad, and propagandists, such as Vasyl Karazyn, Hryhorii Vynsky, Oleksander Palytsyn, and Vasyl Kapnist. A conservative form of Enlightenment based on G. Leibniz’s and C. Wolff’s ideas was propagated by the higher schools; the more radical form articulated by Voltaire, J.-J. Rousseau, D. Diderot, C.-A. Helvétius, P.-H. Holbach, and Montesquieu was cultivated and propagated by small circles of educated nobles. Some Ukrainians (Hryhorii Kozytsky, Semen Desnytsky, Kozelsky, I. Vanslov, Ya. Kostensky, Hryhorii A. Poletyka, Vasyl H. Ruban, and I. Tumansky) belonged to a society in Saint Petersburg (1768–83) that translated and published books by several French thinkers. Kantianism was propagated by the German thinker L.H. von Jacob, who was a professor at Kharkiv University (1807–9), and by Rev V. Dovhovych, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Kant’s moral theory made a strong impression on Schad.
Grounding a doctrine of natural rights in an ahistorical concept of humaature, the enlightened thinkers proposed to realize these rights (to individual freedom, equality before the law, and enjoyment of property) by restructuring society. All of them were opposed to serfdom, but apart from Yakiv Kozelsky and Vasyl Karazyn they urged the restriction of landowners’ rights rather than abolition. Karazyn and Petro Lodii preferred constitutional monarchy while Kozelsky preferred a republic. Following Rousseau, Kozelsky advocated not merely equality before the law, but limits to economic disparity. All of them believed in peaceful social reform through education and the moral improvement of the monarch and small elite. Karazyn pointed also to the importance of scientific and technological development for social progress.
In its practical (moral and social) consequences the philosophy of Hryhorii Skovoroda is very close to the teachings of the Philosophes, although it has no direct tie with the Enlightenment. It is rooted not in the new natural sciences, but in the humanist tradition going back to the ancient philosophers and in Christian Neoplatonism. In his writings Skovoroda denounced the injustice and exploitation he observed around him, and in practice he renounced this society by turning down a career in the church. His ideal society, which can be realized only by individual moral rebirth, is based on the fulfillment of each member’s inner nature. In this context equality is the full (hence equal) realization by all individuals of their unequal potentialities.
A number of Ukrainians played an important role in the growth of mysticism in the 18th-century Russian Empire. This trend of thought paved the way for the Romantic worldview and German idealism.
The development of Ukrainian culture, particularly literature and art, in the 19th century was influenced decisively by German romanticism. The Romantic outlook attained its fullest philosophical expression in the German idealists—J. Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and G. Hegel—and it was those thinkers who had a determining influence on philosophical thought in Ukraine during the first half of the 19th century.
Fichte’s ideas were introduced at Kharkiv University by Johann Baptist Schad (1804) and were spread to other educational institutions by his students. The first translation of Fichte was done at Kharkiv by one of Schad’s students in 1813. Schad also acquainted his students with some of Schelling’s doctrines, and his successor to the university’s chair of philosophy, A. Dudrovych (1818–30), absorbed Schelling’s mystical spirit and taught Schellingian psychology. J. Kroneberg, who taught classical philosophy at Kharkiv University (1819–37), attempted to construct his own esthetic theory using Schelling’s ideas. Mykhailo Maksymovych, the first rector of Kyiv University, formulated his ideas oature under the impact of Schelling’s and L. Oken’s doctrines and was inspired in his later ethnographic work by Schelling’s views. K. Zelenetsky, who tried to reconcile Schelling and Kant, N. Kurliandtsev, who translated Schelling, and H. Steffens taught at the Richelieu Lyceum in Odesa in the first half of the century. P. Avsenev followed C. Carus in his psychology lectures at the Kyiv Theological Academy and Kyiv University in the 1840s and probably had some influence on the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. But the most influential German thinker was Hegel, whose system encompassed all the diverse trends within romanticism (moral, religious, esthetic) and subsumed them all under reason. Hegel’s historicism and dialectic made a strong impression on Orest Novytsky, Osyp Mykhnevych, and Sylvestr Hohotsky. They not only adopted some of his ideas but also tried to apply his methods of interpretation. Hegel’s theory of history influenced a number of historians, such as M. Lunin, who in turn influenced Mykola Kostomarov, and P. Pavlov, some literary historians such as Amvrosii Metlynsky and M. Kostyr, and the philosopher of law Petro Redkyn (see Hegelianism).
The Christian Romantic ideology of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood is the finest example of a creative response by young Ukrainian intellectuals to new ideas from the West. As expressed in the Knyhy bytiia ukraïns’koho narodu (The Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People), their theory was a mixture of Enlightenment political ideals (equality, democracy, parliamentarism), pietist sentiment, and Romantic notions of historical providentialism and national messianism. A religiously colored faith in Ukraine’s mission to unite the Slavs in a federation of free national republics inspired the writings of the leading Ukrainian writers of the mid-century and stimulated the growth of national consciousness.
As the prestige of the natural sciences rose, the Romantic Weltanschauung lost its credibility. But the ambition to unify all human experience in one all-embracing philosophical system remained strong throughout the second half of the century. Pamfil Yurkevych, probably the sharpest philosophical mind in Ukraine at the time, set out to reconcile idealism and materialism. Although he did not complete this project, his critique of materialism, interpretation of Platonism, and suggestions for an integrated concept of humaature were promising beginnings. A unified metaphysical system was worked out by A. Kozlov, who taught at Kyiv University from 1876. Influenced by Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and A. Schopenhauer, he proposed a theory of critical spiritualism that admitted a multiplicity of spirits and denied the reality of matter. A similar system of ‘synechiological spiritualism’ was proposed later by Aleksei Giliarov, who viewed the universe as an infinite hierarchy of organisms.
Positivism was more popular among scientists than among philosophers in Ukraine. A Ukrainian positivist of particular note was Volodymyr Lesevych. He accepted A. Comte’s teachings at first, but later rejected them in favor of a stricter empiricism and worked out his own theory of knowledge, which was close to empiriocriticism. Some positivist ideas can be found in G. Chelpanov, who taught philosophy at Kyiv University (1892–1906), Petro Linytsky, and N. Grot, who began his academic career at the Nizhyn Lyceum and Odesa University (1883–6). All of them tried to make room for religious faith without weakening the authority of science. Following Kant they drew a clear line between knowledge and faith; they restricted the first to the realm of phenomena and accounted for it in empiriocritical terms. Mykhailo Drahomanov developed his political and social theory in a positivist framework. The sociologist Maksym Kovalevsky was influenced strongly by A. Comte, while Bohdan Kistiakovsky worked out a neo-Kantian foundation for the social sciences. Fedir Zelenohorsky of Kharkiv University emphasized the importance of the inductive method without denying the role of deduction and imagination in scientific knowledge. Oleksander Potebnia‘s and Dmitrii Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky‘s philosophy of language was based on associationist psychology.
After the First World War philosophy developed very differently in Western Ukraine under Polish rule, in Soviet Ukraine under the stifling restrictions of official ideology, and among Ukrainian émigrés. Denied their own university by the Polish authorities, Galicia’s Ukrainians were unable to compete with the Poles in the quality of philosophical education and writing. Some philosophy was taught at the Lviv (Underground) Ukrainian University (eg, by Stepan Balei) and at the Greek Catholic Theological Academy by Rev Yosyf Slipy (scholasticism), Mykola Konrad (ancient philosophy), and Havryil Kostelnyk (epistemology). The Western Ukrainian and émigré proponents of different political ideologies, such as conservatism, integral nationalism, socialism, and Marxism, discussed, with varying sophistication and objectivity, the philosophical grounds of their outlook.
Soviet period. In Soviet Ukraine, for the first few years philosophical activity developed in a normal way: philosophers expressed their views freely, formed associations, and published their own journals. In 1922 the government dismissed some of its ideological opponents from their academic posts and banished them from the Ukrainian SSR, thus warning intellectual circles that it would no longer tolerate criticism of the official ideology. Gradually the regime imposed its control over ideas by dissolving all independent associations and publications and by establishing its own institutions for defining and propagating the approved ideology, Marxism-Leninism. As political interference increased, philosophical debate degenerated quickly into servile dogmatism, invective, and denunciation. By 1931 all creative thinking on philosophical issues had been stifled.
The first philosophical institution in Ukraine set up by the Soviet regime was the Department of Marxism and Marxology in Kharkiv. It was established in the fall of 1921, and a year later it was reorganized into the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism, renamed the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism (UIML) in 1927. The institute had three divisions, each with three departments. The Philosophy-Sociology Division (chaired by Semen Semkovsky) consisted of the departments of Philosophy (headed by Semkovsky), Sociology (headed by Volodymyr Yurynets), and, from 1928, Law (headed by Yurii Mazurenko). Members of the philosophy department included Ya. Bilyk, Z. Luzina, Petro Demchuk, and T. Stepovy, who also lectured at other institutions in Kharkiv. Philosophical research was published in the institute’s journal Prapor marksyzmu (1927–30). In 1927 the Ukrainian Society of Militant Materialists (later of Militant Materialists-Dialecticians) was organized at the institute. At the same time (from 1921) two departments of the Social-Economic Division of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN)—those of the History of Philosophy and Law (headed by Aleksei Giliarov) and Sociology (headed by Semkovsky)—functioned in Kyiv. In 1931 they were replaced by the VUAN Philosophical Commission in Kharkiv, which was to prepare a philosophical dictionary. In 1926 the Kyiv Scientific Research Department of Marxism-Leninism (headed by R. Levik and then O. Kamyshan) was set up under the VUAN. Its philosophical-sociological section (chaired by Semkovsky) formed special commissions devoted to scientific methodology, historical materialism, the sociology of law, the sociology of art, the methodology of the history of technology, and atheism. Leading associates of the department were V. Asmus, Ya. Rozanov, M. Perlin, O. Zahorulko, M. Nyrchuk, and Yurynets. In 1930 the department was turned into the Kyiv branch of the UIML.
The Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism (UIML) and the VUAN departments had two chief tasks: to articulate and propagate Marxism-Leninism and to train political specialists and propagandists for work in higher educational institutions. Besides translating the basic works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin and preparing anthologies and textbooks, their associates conducted prolonged discussions on the nature of philosophy, the place of the Hegelian dialectic in the physical world and the natural sciences, and the weight of Lenin’s contribution to philosophy. Since dialectical materialism claimed to be both a scientific theory and a method of studying reality, its relation to the natural sciences and, particularly, the new theories of relativity and quantum mechanics aroused much interest (see Philosophy of science). The third branch of philosophy to receive some attention was the history of philosophy, which was limited to the philosophical traditions from which Marxism-Leninism had sprung: B. Spinoza and the French materialists, Hegel and L. Feuerbach among the German philosophers, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and G. Plekhanov among the Russians. In 1930 Petro Demchuk’s book on Spinoza and V. Bon’s book on 18th-century French materialism came out. Hegel’s Science of Logic was translated in 1929. Although the philosophy department at the UIML had a special commission for the history of philosophy in Ukraine (chaired by Semen Semkovsky), little was accomplished in this area. Only a collection of articles on Hryhorii Skovoroda (1923), some booklets, and a solid monograph on him by Dmytro Bahalii (1926) were published.
The so-called philosophical discussion in Ukraine culminated at a conference in Kharkiv in January 1931, where accusations of nationalism, mechanism, and Menshevik idealism were directed at the leading figures of the philosophical establishment. Despite the absurdity of the charges, everyone admitted his ‘errors’ in a published self-criticism. The Communist Party was thus able to call for a reorganization of the institutional system of research and the eradication of the vestiges of ‘bourgeois science.’ In June 1931 the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism (UIML) was converted by Party decree into the All-Ukrainian Association of Marxist-Leninist Scientific Research Institutes (VUAMLIN). The UIML’s three divisions were turned into three VUAMLIN institutes—Philosophy and Natural Science, Economics, and History—of the six that were created. Each institute had a three-year graduate program. The Institute of Philosophy and Natural Science (directed by R. Levik and then O. Vasileva, and A. Saradzhev) was divided into four sectors: dialectical materialism (including a section on the history of philosophy in Ukraine), historical materialism, natural science (with the Association of Natural Science), and antireligion. It published the journals Prapor marksyzmu-leninizmu (1931–3), Pid markso-lenins’kym praporom (1934–6), and Za marksysts’ko-lenins’ke pryrodoznavstvo (1932–3). Among its leading associates were Semen Semkovsky, Volodymyr Yurynets, T. Stepovy, O. Bervytsky, Ya. Bilyk, and V. Bon. So-called Red Professors institutes (est 1932) assumed the responsibility of training research and teaching cadres within each of the VUAMLIN institutes. At the Philosophy Institute of Red Professors (directed by Ya. Bludov and then O. Andrianov), Yurynets held the chair of dialectical materialism, T. Stepovy the chair of historical materialism, and O. Bervytsky the chair of the history of philosophy. In 1936 the separate institutes were merged into one Institute of Red Professors, with six departments. The philosophy department was chaired by A. Saradzhev and then Yu. Olman and M. Yushmanov. Philosophical research at the VUAMLIN had been long extinct by the time it was abolished in 1937. Many of the aforementioned leading thinkers perished in the terror of the 1930s.
After the Second World War research and teaching continued to be assigned to two distinct types of institution: research to institutes, and teaching to higher educational institutions, including universities. In 1946 the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR was established in Kyiv. It published Naukovi zapysky Instytutu filosofiï (1951–61, 7 vols) and the bimonthly Filosofs’ka dumka (est 1969), which in 1989 became the monthly Filosofs’ka i sotsiolohichna dumka. Another research body—the Department of Philosophy of the AN URSR Presidium—was established in early 1950. It was headed by Mykhailo Omelianovsky and then M. Ovander, and I. Holovakha. Since any new work in dialectical and historical materialism was ruled out by Joseph Stalin‘s treatment of the topic in the offical short course on the history of the Bolshevik party (1938), and since the methodology of the natural and social sciences remained an uncharted mine field, the history of philosophy in Ukraine became the most promising area in philosophy. A few monographs and numerous articles on the philosophical ideas of 19th-century scientists (Mykhailo Maksymovych, Vasyl Danylevsky, and Illia Mechnikov) and the so-called Russian and Ukrainian revolutionary democrats (Aleksandr Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, D. Pisarev, Taras Shevchenko, Panas Myrny, Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Pavlyk, Ostap Terletsky, Pavlo Hrabovsky, Lesia Ukrainka, and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky) appeared. In a crude and obvious manner their authors imposed a predictable interpretation on their subject: materialist, atheist, or social revolutionary. In the 1950s some work, which was equally tendentious, was done also on 17th- and 18th-century writers, such as Ivan Vyshensky, Lazar Baranovych, Hryhorii Skovoroda, and Yakiv Kozelsky. Such studies proliferated in the 1960s; a collection of articles on the history of Ukrainian philosophy came out almost every year. The most important accomplishment of the period was the publication in 1961 of the first full and scholarly collection of Skovoroda’s work. The Latin transcripts of philosophy courses taught at the Kyivan Mohyla Academy began to be studied and translated, and excerpts appeared regularly in Filosofs’ka dumka. A Ukrainian translation of Teofan Prokopovych‘s courses was readied for publication, but appeared more than a decade later, in 1979–81. On the 250th anniversary of Skovoroda’s birth a second, improved edition of his works (2 vols, 1973), a new biography by Leonid Makhnovets (1972), and several collections of articles on Skovoroda came out. The more important contributors in the field of Ukrainian philosophy were I. Ivano, Danylo Ostrianyn, V. Dmytrychenko, Andrii Brahinets, I. Tabachnikov, V. Horsky, P. Manzenko, M. Rohovych, V. Yevdokymenko, and Volodymyr Shynkaruk.
A wave of arrests throughout Ukraine in January 1972 launched a concerted campaign to suppress Ukrainian culture and language. At mid-year the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR was purged: two of its associates, Vasyl Lisovy and Yevhen Proniuk, were imprisoned for criticizing the Party’s policy, and a number of junior researchers and graduate students were expelled. The number and quality of the institute’s publications declined: hardly anything was printed in Ukrainian, and the Ukrainian accomplishments had to be described as accomplishments of the three ‘fraternal’ (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian) peoples. The pace of publication picked up only in the 1980s. Valeriia Nichyk’s monograph on the philosophical tradition at the Kyivan Mohyla Academy (1978) was followed by a series of related studies by Yaroslava Stratii (1981), Ihor Zakhara (1982), I. Paslavsky (1984), and Volodymyr Lytvynov (1984), and a catalogue of surviving transcripts of the rhetoric and philosophy courses at the academy (1982). The scope of research was broadened to include the medieval era, on which several collections of articles appeared (1983, 1987, 1988, 1990). Before his untimely death, I. Ivano finished his survey history of esthetics in Ukraine (1981) and his notable study of Hryhorii Skovoroda‘s thought (1983). Volumes 1 and 2 of the ANU multiauthor three-volume history of philosophy in Ukraine were published in 1987. The most significant recent achievement has been the publication of primary sources of Ukrainian thought of the 16th to 18th centuries in Standard Ukrainian translation: ethics courses at the Kyivan Mohyla Academy (1987), the works of professors of brotherhood schools (1988), and Heorhii Konysky‘s (1990) and Stefan Yavorsky‘s (1992) philosophy courses at the academy. Among the leading scholars in the field today are Nichyk, M. Kashuba, V. Horsky, Stratii, Zakhara, Lytvynov, I. Paslavsky, M. Luk, and Andrii Pashuk.
Since 1972 the Ukrainian Philosophical Society has promoted and co-ordinated philosophical studies in Ukraine.
Outside Ukraine. In the interwar period philosophy was taught in Prague at the Ukrainian Higher Pedagogical Institute, at which the Skovoroda Philosophical Society (1925–30) was active, and at the Ukrainian Free University (UVU) by Dmytro Chyzhevsky, who established himself as the leading authority on the history of Ukrainian philosophy with his two monographs on philosophy in Ukraine, two books on Hryhorii Skovoroda, and a study of Hegel’s influence in the Russian Empire. Ivan Mirchuk, a historian of Ukrainian culture and philosophy, began his academic career at the UVU. Mykola Shlemkevych, who completed his PH D under M. Schlick in Vienna, developed a philosophical genre of journalism dealing with fundamental psychological-cultural problems of Ukrainian society. After the Second World War Mirchuk continued his work on the history of philosophy. Some contributions were made by his colleagues at the UVU in Munich Oleksander Kulchytsky and Volodymyr Yaniv. Kyrylo Mytrovych, a specialist in contemporary existentialism, has done some work on Skovoroda. Yevhen Lashchyk, a professor of philosophy in the United States, has worked on Volodymyr Vynnychenko‘s ‘concordism.’ Among Ukrainian émigré scholars who have gained a world reputation are Gregor Malantschuk, for his work on S. Kierkegaard’s thought, and Roman Rozdolsky, for his interpretation of Marx’s Das Kapital.
2. The classic Ukrainian Philosophy
Dmytro Chyzhevsky is quite rightly recognized as the founder of the history of Ukrainian philosophy.
(March 3, 1894 – April 18, 1977)
Not only did he produce the first more or less comprehensive survey of Ukrainian philosophy, which he supplemented with numerous articles on Ukrainian thinkers, such as Ivan Vyshensky, Hryhorii Skovoroda, Panteleimon Kulish, Taras Shevchenko, Mykola Hohol, and Viacheslav Lypynsky, and on the influence of foreign ideas in Ukraine, as well as a book on Hryhorii Skovoroda, he also laid out the theoretical framework and methodological requirements of the field. No one was more acutely aware of the shortcomings of his pioneering work in the history of Ukrainian philosophy than Chyzhevsky himself. In the preface to Narysy z istorii filosofii na Ukraini (Essays in the History of Philosophy in Ukraine), he remarked, “I should also point out that this work is a fruit of my leisure time, that the history of philosophy in Ukraine is not the principal subject of my studies, and therefore that the material I present cannot be taken as the culmination and completion of scholarly research in this field; rather it is an attempt to arouse interest in and draw attention to this field of research, which so far has been avoided in Ukrainian studies.” In my assessment of Chyzhevsky’s work in the field I concentrate on what in my opinion are his main contributions and point out their strengths and weaknesses. A much more comprehensive and detailed account of Chyzhevsky’s work in the history of Ukrainian philosophy can be found in Iryna Valiavko’s recent candidate dissertation.
The Concept of National Philosophy
Chyzhevsky begins his surveys with some brief methodological remarks about the purpose and scope of a history of the philosophy produced by a giveation. He distinguishes two views of philosophy and the corresponding types of history associated with them. According to what he calls the “rationalistic” view, philosophy is a science that discovers universal truths about the nature of reality, truth, justice, beauty, etc. Since there can be only one true answer to every question, a plurality of answers is indicative of falsehood. Insofar as national philosophies are distinguished by differing ideas on the same issues they are false and hence undeserving of serious study by the historian Chyzhevsky calls the other view of philosophy “Romantic” and associates it with Hegel. On this view differences among philosophical doctrines have a positive value. How can that be so? If absolute ideals can be realized only in the limited particular forms (science, religion, morality, law, religion, etc.) of a national culture, and the differences among national cultures manifest different aspects of the absolute, then these differences are important and valuable. Together they constitute a fuller, although never the full, manifestation of the absolute. Viewed from this perspective, philosophy is the self-consciousness of a given culture: it brings out what is distinctive and interesting in a nation’s beliefs about reality, justice, and beauty, and in doing so makes the nation aware of itself as a distinct entity; that is, gives rise to national consciousness. Here philosophy is essentially national, and all national philosophies, insofar as they are partial reflections of the absolute, are true. It follows that all cultures and their corresponding philosophies are equal. Obviously, this is the view of philosophy that Chyzhevsky favors for it gives maximal weight to national philosophies and their histories.
But then, surprisingly enough, Chyzhevsky goes on to say that at different stages in the development of world philosophy different nations play the leading role in carrying the process forward. This implies that only the philosophy of some nations reveals something new and valuable about the absolute, while the philosophy of other nations fails to do so and has no world-historical significance. Furthermore, according to Chyzhevsky, it is only when a nation produces a philosophy that marks a significant forward step in world philosophy that that nation fully discloses the distinctive character of its own culture and philosophy. Clearly, these two propositions are inconsistent with the Romantic account of national culture and philosophy.
The inconsistency can be easily removed by renouncing these two propositions and preserving the pluralistic conception of culture and philosophy. An essentially similar conception has been elaborated by a leading contemporary historian of Ukrainian philosophy, Vilen Horsky, into what he calls the “culturological approach to the history of philosophy.” On this approach philosophy is an integral part of culture. As a reflection on the possibilities of individual and collective existence, it can be described as the self-consciousness of a national culture.
This conception of the history of philosophy gives rise to two sets of criteria that define the scope of Ukrainian philosophy: first, the criteria for Ukrainian and secondly, the criteria for philosophy. For politically independent nations with a long and continuous cultural tradition and a permanent territory the contours of their culture are quite distinct and the various criteria we use to assign a thinker to a given culture usually coincide and reinforce one another. A French philosopher is normally French-born and raised in the French culture, works in
This is a problem Chyzhevsky did not consider. To avoid a logical circle, traditions, whether philosophical or cultural, must be identified not by their properties, but by the place (territory) and the time (period) in which they originate or exist. To speak of a national tradition or culture there must be at least a period in a people’s history when it freely created its culture and institutions and these must endure in some way as the touchstone of national identity. Memory may suffice to maintain historical continuity and a sense of national identity over gaps in the independent life of a nation. In Ukraine’s history periods of cultural autonomy and creativity sometimes outlasted periods of political independence and it is the former that are crucial for determining the national affiliation of intellectual traditions.
Chyzhevsky is certainly aware of the importance of intellectual traditions for determining the Ukrainianness of various thinkers. A few of Chyzhevsky’s brief comments give the impression that likenesses in the content or the form of thought are sufficient to establish the existence of a tradition. I do not think that they are: to show that a tradition exists we must establish actual influence and to do this it is necessary to establish not only similarities in ideas or patterns of thinking but also causal links.
Chyzhevsky’s concept of national philosophy implies quite generous criteria for philosophy. Without explicitly formulating the conditions for counting a thinker as a philosopher and a work as philosophical, Chyzhevsky includes in his surveys of Ukrainian philosophy not only academic philosophers and philosophical treatises but also writers such as Mykola Hohol, Panteleimon Kulish, and Taras Shevchenko and scientists such as Oleksander Potebnia and Bohdan Kistiakivsky. He has been taken to task for this by Andrii Khrutsky (Andrew Chrucky) who argues for a narrower criterion of philosophy as the “critical investigation of worldviews” and a stricter selection process. Khrutsky’s argument has found little sympathy among historians of Ukrainian philosophy and for good reason. His criterion would not only reduce the field of philosophy to a few academic thinkers, it would also practically ignore, contrary to the culturological approach to national philosophy, the influence of philosophical ideas in Ukrainian culture. To bring out fully the role of philosophical ideas in a given culture the historian must consider not only the texts of professional philosophers but also various literary and scientific texts reflecting popular worldviews and containing philosophical ideas. He should also take into account various attempts to define the distinctive features of the national worldview or character, which have the effect of raising national consciousness. This broad and rather complex criterion captures the range of texts and thinkers discussed by Chyzhevsky in his surveys of Ukrainian philosophy and by later specialists in the field.
Philosophy of the Heart
Chyzhevsky is the source of the often repeated and, in my estimate, meaningless claim that “‘the philosophy of the heart’ … is characteristic of Ukrainian thought.” In making this claim he immediately explained that “the philosophy of the heart” stands for three distinct theses:
1. that emotions have not only ethical and religious but also cognitive significance,
2. that conscious experience arises from a deeper source, a mysterious “abyss,” and
3. that man is a microcosm.
One or another of these theses has been held, as he indicates, by Kyrylo Tranquillion-Stavrovetsky, Paisii Velychkovsky, Hryhorii Skovoroda, Semen Hamaliia, Mykola Hohol, Panteleimon Kulish, and Pamfil Iurkevych, but only Hohol seems to have held all held all three theses. Even if Chyzhevsky were to assert that these thinkers are somehow “representative” of Ukrainian philosophy, it would not be clear how any one or all three theses are characteristic of Ukrainian thought. Chyzhevsky can hardly claim that any one (let alone all three) of these theses was first proposed by a Ukrainian thinker or is accepted by all Ukrainian thinkers. It is not the case that the three theses are logically connected or that the seven thinkers mentioned in this context constitute a school or tradition of thought. In fact they were very different in their world outlook and in their philosophical interests. They used the common word “heart” not as a concept, but as a symbol for very different things. Thus I cannot imagine what Chyzhevsky might have meant by “characteristic” here, and he made no attempt to explain what he meant.
There have been some recent attempts to defend Chyzhevsky against my criticisms of his claim about the philosophy of the heart, which in my opinion have not been successful. Mykhailo Skrynnyk argued that Skovoroda, Iurkevych, Hohol, and Kulish share the view that there is something deeper in man than reason, and therefore they constitute a tradition of thought. But agreement on a very general and vague point such as this is not enough for a tradition. The fact is that the four mentioned thinkers were very different in their worldviews and intellectual interests. But even if they did represent a single tradition why would that tradition be more characteristic of Ukrainian philosophy than some other one?
Another of my critics, Iryna Valiavko, admits (1) that no one theory or trend can be representative of the thought of a nation and (2) that there is nothing distinctively Ukrainian about the first and second theses into which Chyzhevsky breaks down the philosophy of the heart. According to her, only the third thesis on man as a microcosm is characteristic of Ukrainian thought, and she tries to show that, although it is not found in Iurkevych, this conception of man is found in Skovoroda, Kulish, Taras Shevchenko, Mykola Kostomarov, Lesia Ukrainka, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Bohdan Ihor Antonych, Oleksander Dovzhenko, and Pavlo Tychyna.
There are several fatal flaws in her argument. First, she reduces the idea of microcosm to the distinction between “inner” and “outer” man or between soul and body. Although historically the conception of man as microcosm has been closely associated with the dualistic conception of man, it is not logically equivalent to or logically connected with the latter. There is no hint in Chyzhevsky that what he really meant by microcosm was dualism. Secondly, the idea of two natures or substances in man is almost universal. Even the language of “inner” or “internal” and “outer” or “external” man is widespread. Chyzhevsky points out that these very terms can be found in the Bible and in the works of ancient and Christian thinkers such as Philo Judaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Macarius of Egypt, Anthony of the Desert, Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme, Sebastian Frank, Angelus Silesius, Heinrich Suso, Johannes Tauler, and Thomas б Kempis. Many more names could be added to the list. Obviously, the language and the ideas behind it did not originate with and are not unique to Ukrainian thinkers and writers. Furthermore, the dualistic terminology that is used in describing man is part of ordinary language. Hence, the fact that some writers use this terminology does not indicate that they have the same or even any definite philosophical conception of man in mind.
Philosophy at the
Mykhailo Hrushevsky
Mykhailo Serhiyovych Hrushevsky was a Ukrainian academician, politician, historian, and statesman, one of the most important figures of the Ukrainiaational revival of the early 20th century. He was the country’s greatest modern historian, foremost organizer of scholarship, leader of the pre-revolution Ukrainian national movement, head of the Central Rada (Ukraine’s 1917–1918 revolutionary parliament), and a leading cultural figure in Soviet
Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the History of Ukraine-Rus’
The History of Ukraine-Rus’ is the most comprehensive account of the ancient, medieval, and early modern history of the Ukrainian people. Written by Ukraine’s greatest modern historian, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the History remains unsurpassed in its use of sources and literature, even though its last volume was written sixty years ago. In the development of the Ukrainiaational movement, it is the definitive scholarly statement that Ukrainians constitute a nation with its own historical process. For Ukrainians the work is comparable in significance to František Palacký’s History of Bohemia for the Czechs. The great work of Czech national historiography was published in the early nineteenth century, but its Ukrainian counterpart did not appear until the turn of the twentieth. To a considerable degree, the delay reflects the difficulties Ukrainians faced in demonstrating that they were not a subgroup of the Russians or Poles and that they had their own history.
Ukraine found its Palacký in the person of Mykhailo Hrushevsky. From 1894 to 1934, Hrushevsky not only wrote the magnum opus of Ukrainian historiography, but also organized and led the two most productive schools of Ukrainian historical studies in modern times, the Shevchenko Scientific Society of Lviv, from 1894 to 1914, and the Institute of History of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, from 1924 to 1930. Hrushevsky’s more than 2,000 works in history, literary history, and other fields were matched in accomplishment by his inspiration of scores of younger scholars and his leadership of the Ukrainian national movement. But while the individuals he trained and the institutions he nurtured were destroyed in the vortex of Stalinism, his History of Ukraine-Rus’—except for the lost volume ten, part two, which remained in manuscript—survived. It weathered the Soviet assault on Ukrainian culture because no collective of specialists commanded by Soviet bureaucrats was able to produce a comparable work.
Born in 1866 to the family of an educator, the descendant of Right-Bank clerics, Hrushevsky spent most of his formative years outside Ukraine, in the Caucasus. As a young gymnasium student in Tbilisi, he was strongly impressed by the classic works of Ukrainian ethnography, history, and literature. This impression was reinforced by the appearance in 1882 of the journal Kievskaia starina (Kyivan antiquity), which contained an abundance of material on Ukrainian affairs. After initial attempts to work in Ukrainian literature, the young Hrushevsky decided to go to Kyiv, the center of Ukrainophile activities, to study history.
The Ukrainian movement, organized in the Kyiv Hromada, was still reeling from the Ems ukase and the banishment of Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841–95), the leading Ukrainian intellectual of his generation. The Ukrainian leaders in Kyiv were withdrawing from political activities. Their goal became the mere survival of the Ukrainian movement. Professor Volodymyr Antonovych typified the trend with his decision that continuing to research and teach would be of more long-term significance than any hopeless political protest. His student Hrushevsky would prove to be the vindication of that decision.
Under Antonovych’s supervision, Hrushevsky received a firm grounding in the examination of extensive sources in order to describe Ukrainian social and economic institutions of the past. Antonovych’s work concentrated on the vast sources for the history of Right-Bank Ukraine in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, a time when, significantly, the area had not been part of a Russian state. Hrushevsky followed his mentor’s lead in brilliant studies of the medieval history of the Kyiv region and of the early moderobility and society of the Bar region. He might have been expected to follow Antonovych in making an academic career in the difficult political situation of imperial Russia, but developments in the neighboring Habsburg Empire were to provide him with a much more conducive environment for furthering Ukrainian historical studies.
In 1890 the dominant Poles of Austrian Galicia showed a willingness to reach an accommodation with the growing Ukrainiaational movement in the province. Although the Polish-Ukrainian accommodation proved abortive, it did yield some concessions to the Ukrainians, the most important of which was the establishment of a chair intended to be in Ukrainian history with Ukrainian as the language of instruction. Professor Antonovych was called to the chair, but declined, proposing that his student Mykhailo Hrushevsky be appointed instead. Hrushevsky’s arrival in Lviv was the culmination of the process whereby the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the Russian Empire circumvented the imperial authorities’ restrictions on Ukrainian activities by transferring them to the Habsburg Empire.
The young Hrushevsky’s inaugural lecture at Lviv University in 1894 sketched an image of Ukrainian history as the evolution of the Ukrainian people from ancient times to the present. He called for the application of methods and data from all scholarly fields, from anthropology to archaeography, to that endeavor. Addressing the audience in Ukrainian, he demonstrated that a scholarly language appropriate to both sides of the Zbruch River could be forged. In practice, Hrushevsky was initiating his life’s project, the writing of a history of Ukraine. He was to use his lectures at Lviv University to compose the work. He attracted students to seminars where research papers filled the gaps in the project. He reshaped the Shevchenko Scientific Society into a scholarly academy with a library and a source publication program that provided material for his history. By 1898 he had published the first volume of the Istoriia Ukraïny-Rusy (History of Ukraine-Rus’), which went up only to the end of the tenth century rather than to the end of the Kyivan Rus’ period, as he had originally planned. The last of the published volumes would appear, posthumously, in 1937, bringing the project up only to the 1650s.
The very title of Hrushevsky’s work was a programmatic statement. A history of Ukraine-Rus’ emphasized the continuity between Kyivan Rus’ and modern Ukraine. Written at a time when most Western Ukrainians still called themselves Rusyny (Ruthenians), the title served to ease the transition to the new name, Ukraine. In selecting a geographic name, Hrushevsky was defining the categories employed by his contemporaries. Ukraine was not an administrative entity at that time. In Russia the term was forbidden, and even the accepted ‘Little Russia’ often did not encompass all the territories inhabited by Ukrainian majorities. To Galician Ukrainians, Ukraine often meant the territories in the Russian Empire. The term ‘Great Ukraine,’ applied by Galicians to those territories, implied in some way that the Habsburg Ukrainian lands were ‘Little Ukraine.’ Hrushevsky defined the borders of his Ukraine as the lands in which Ukrainians had traditionally constituted the majority of the population, the object of the striving of the Ukrainiaational movement. Most importantly, his use of the term ‘Rus’’ and the emphasis on continuity with Kyivan Rus’ also challenged the monopoly that Russians had on that name and tradition in scholarship and popular thinking.
The subject of Hrushevsky’s history was the Ukrainian people and their evolution, both in periods when they possessed states and polities and when they did not. Hrushevsky rejected the view that history should deal only with states and rulers. Deeply imbued with the populist ideology of the Ukrainiaational movement, he saw simple people as having their own worth and history. This meant that elites in Ukrainian society, which had often assimilated to other peoples, were of little interest to him. He sought to write the history of the narod, and in his conceptualization it was relatively easy to conflate its dual meanings of populace and nation. That conflation has always made it very difficult for commentators to identify his orientation as either left- or right-wing oational or social issues.
In addition to his populist sentiments, Hrushevsky relied on his Kyiv training in the documentary school. He sought out all sources and perused masses of literature. His notes were replete with the latest Western works in archaeology, linguistics, and anthropology. He weighed and dissected sources in reaching a conclusion on any issue. His reader was drawn into the kitchen of scholarship and shown the full array of ingredients and utensils.
Between 1898 and 1901, Hrushevsky published three large volumes. In 1901 Hrushevsky wrote volume four, dealing with the political situation in the Ukrainian lands under Lithuanian and Polish rule from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. He began work on the fifth volume in 1902 and issued its first part in early 1905, but his efforts to disseminate his research slowed down the pace of his writing. Hrushevsky searched for a German publisher and prepared a new edition of volume 1 for translation into German. He also revised volumes 2 and 3 for a new printing when the ban on Ukrainian books lapsed in the Russian Empire in 1904.
The 1905 revolution in the Russian Empire improved the situation for the Ukrainian movement and for scholarship on Ukraine, providing an opportunity to repeat the Galician advances in the lands where most Ukrainians lived. During the revolutionary events Hrushevsky took an active role as a publicist. His Russian-language outline was reissued with a summary of more recent events. Hrushevsky began to transfer Ukrainian cultural and scholarly activities to Kyiv. The journal Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (Literary-Scientific Herald) made the move, and Hrushevsky established a scholarly society in Kyiv.
Ultimately the political reaction in the Russian Empire after 1907 and the relatively less favorable conditions for the Ukrainian movement there than in Galicia—above all, the ban on Ukrainian in schools—undermined some of these initiatives. One indication of continued opposition to the Ukrainian movement was the refusal to appoint Hrushevsky to the chair at Kyiv University for which he applied in 1908. Beginning in the late 1890s, Russiaationalist circles had begun to see Hrushevsky as the architect of ‘Mazepist separatism,’ and his manifest scholarly achievements infuriated them. They succeeded in denying him the chair. Taking advantage of whatever opportunities were available to him, Hrushevsky divided his energies between Kyiv and Lviv (and, to a degree, St. Petersburg), turning his attention to writing popular histories of Ukraine.
Hrushevsky did not, however, abandon his major scholarly work. In 1905 he published the second part of volume five, followed by volume six in 1907, thereby completing his account of the Polish and Lithuanian period. Next Hrushevsky began his discussion of what he saw as the third period of Ukrainian history, publishing volume seven under the title of a subseries, ‘The History of the Ukrainian Cossacks,’ in 1909. This volume, which covered events to 1625, was followed in 1913 by the first part of volume eight, dealing with the years 1625 to 1638. The increasing source base, due in part to Hrushevsky’s vigorous archaeographic activities, was overwhelming him. In addition, mindful of the importance of public opinion for the acceptance of his ideas and interpretations in the Russian Empire, Hrushevsky issued part of volume one in Russian translation in 1911; in the course of doing so, he revised the work and issued a third Ukrainian edition of that volume in
The outbreak of World War I found Hrushevsky, a Russian citizen, vacationing in the Ukrainian Carpathians of Austrian Galicia. Realizing that his presence abroad would provide propaganda for reactionary Russian forces, which had already begun a campaign against the Ukrainian movement before the war, Hrushevsky decided to return to Kyiv. He was immediately arrested. The intervention of highly placed friends changed his place of exile from Siberia to Simbirsk. Later he was permitted to take up residence in the university city of Kazan. In 1916 the intervention of the Russian Academy of Sciences succeeded in gaining permission for him to live in Moscow under police surveillance.
Before the war Hrushevsky had written a draft of his history up to the Zboriv Agreement of
The Russian Revolution of February 1917 gave Hrushevsky his political freedom. It also resulted in his becoming president of the first independent Ukrainian state, which took him away from scholarship. During 1917 he headed the Ukrainian Central Rada, which developed into the autonomous and then independent government of Ukraine. In taking the city of Kyiv in early 1918, the Bolshevik artillery specifically targeted Hrushevsky’s house, thereby destroying his library, priceless manuscripts, and museum, as well as the materials he had prepared for the History of Ukraine-Rus’. On 29 April 1918, he was elected president of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR), which evolved out of the Central Rada, but the German military authorities, whom he called in to protect Ukraine from the Bolsheviks, supported a coup by General Pavlo Skoropadsky to depose Hrushevsky and the UNR and to establish the monarchist Hetmanate. The fall of the Central Rada at the end of April removed Hrushevsky from power and the subsequent loss of Kyiv by its successor, the UNR Directory, in January 1919, made him a political refugee. He then served as the foreign representative of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which he had supported since 1917. After extensive travels through Western Europe, he settled near Vienna, the initial center of the Ukrainian political emigration. He had lost considerable political authority among the tens of thousands of Ukrainian political émigrés, in part because of his failure to back the UNR fully and because of his political move to the left. He was, however, looked upon as the greatest Ukrainian scholar and was expected to organize Ukrainian scholarly and intellectual life.
Initially Hrushevsky fulfilled these expectations. He organized the Ukrainian Sociological Institute and published a French version of his general history, a discussion of early social organization, and an account of the development of religious thought in Ukraine. In 1922 he turned his attention to his second monumental work, the Istoriia ukraïns’koï literatury (History of Ukrainian Literature), and published the first three volumes in Lviv. Hrushevsky’s attention, however, was already directed to events in Soviet Ukraine. Although the Ukrainian movement had failed to maintain an independent state, it had succeeded in institutionalizing its view that Ukraine should be a distinct administrative entity and that the Ukrainiaation had its own language and culture. While the Bolsheviks had accepted those tenets, they remained a group with relatively few ethnic Ukrainians in their leadership and even fewer followers versed in Ukrainian culture. When the Soviet leadership adopted a policy of indigenization, accompanied by a reversal of its more radical ideological and social policies, the government in Kyiv sorely needed cadres who would be perceived as legitimately Ukrainian.
In 1923 Hrushevsky began seriously to consider returning to Kyiv. Rumors to that effect caused consternation in Ukrainian political circles, which saw such an action by the first president of the Ukrainian state as a major blow to the cause of Ukrainian independence. Hrushevsky was offered a professorship at the Ukrainian Free University and a number of other posts in hopes that he would abandon his plans. In 1924, however, he decided that he would go to Kyiv instead of Prague. The reasons for his decision have been debated to the present day. Certainly his assertion that he planned to bring his History of Ukraine-Rus’ up to 1917 and could only do so with access to libraries and archives in Ukraine weighed heavily in his decision.
Accepting an offer from the Kharkiv government, Hrushevsky returned to Kyiv to take up a position at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He showed his customary energy in organizing scholarship. Reinvigorating the academy’s Zapysky (Annals), Hrushevsky also revived the journal Ukraïna (Ukraine). He gathered a talented group of co-workers and launched a number of new series, including Za sto lit (In One Hundred Years), a publication devoted to the nineteenth century. New journals specializing in unearthing and studying sources, such as Ukraïns’kyi arkheografichnyi zbirnyk (Ukrainian Archaeographic Collection) and Ukraïns’kyi arkhiv (Ukrainian Archive), were launched. He also continued his work on the History of Ukrainian Literature, publishing volumes four and five. Returning to his magnum opus, he prepared volume nine on the period from 1650 to 1658, publishing it in two separate massive parts in 1928 and 1931. Hrushevsky’s research on the History was indeed stimulated by his return to the academic environment and archives of Kyiv, but the city did not long provide a conducive environment for his work.
The very sweep of Hrushevsky’s activities threatened the communist leadership. They had sought legitimacy by inviting Hrushevsky to return, but then found his revitalization of non-Marxist Ukrainian historiography dangerous, particularly at a time when the Ukrainization policy presented opportunities for the old Ukrainian intelligentsia to reach the masses. Attempts to obviate Hrushevsky by promoting the newly developing Marxist cadres led by Matvii Iavorsky did not have the desired effect. Ultimately the communist authorities in Kharkiv did not decide the fate of Hrushevsky’s historical school, for the rising tide of centralization accompanying the ascent of Joseph Stalin engulfed them as well. Ukrainian national communism was judged to be as dangerous as the more traditional Ukrainiaational movement in a Soviet state that was increasingly becoming a successor to the Russian Empire. Beginning in 1928, Hrushevsky came under mounting attack by party officials. As arrests and trials of the Ukrainian intelligentsia proceeded, Hrushevsky became an isolated figure. Following an all-out attack by Volodymyr Zatonsky, Hrushevsky was warned to leave for Moscow. Departing in early March 1931, he was arrested in Moscow and sent back to Kyiv, but then returned to Moscow. As Hrushevsky was exiled to Russia, the Institute of History was dismantled and its scholarly programs halted. Deprived of his Ukrainian context, Hrushevsky nevertheless continued his scholarly work, publishing in Russian journals and completing volume ten of his history. Illness overtook him during a trip to Kislovodsk in 1934, and he died under somewhat mysterious circumstances, as the result of an operation. The best testimony to the power of his name is that he was accorded a state funeral in a Ukraine devastated by famine and terror. His daughter Kateryna even succeeded in printing the first part of volume ten of his History, dealing with the years 1658–60, before she herself was arrested in the new terror. The second part, sometimes called volume eleven, which covered the period to 1676, remained in manuscript in Kyiv until the 1970s, when it disappeared.
Hrushevsky did not complete his history, but he had written more than 6,000 pages outlining his vision of the Ukrainian past. His shorter histories allow us to see how he would have treated subsequent periods. He viewed the Ukrainian past as a process in which a people had evolved on a given territory under various rulers. Although he discussed the territory from the most ancient times, he dated the origins of the Ukrainian people to the fifth-century Antae, whom he viewed as Slavs. His goal was to use all available evidence to study periods of the Ukrainian past for which written evidence was sparse. Just as the nineteenth-century historians had turned to ethnography and folklore to understand the past of the common folk, who had left few written records, so Hrushevsky turned to the rapidly developing disciplines of historical linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and sociology to penetrate the distant past of the entire Ukrainian people.
The translation of Hrushevsky’s magnum opus into an international scholarly language is being realized ninety years after the historian sought to arrange the German translation. In issuing a work beguearly a century ago by scholar who died more than six decades ago, one must consider whether the work continues to have relevance and whether there is a need for a version other than the Ukrainian original. New archaeological finds have been made, new and better editions of sources have been published, new literature has appeared, and new theories and methods have emerged.
Hrushevsky’s Istoriia Ukraïny-Rusy is the major statement of a historian of genius. In breadth and erudition it still has no equal in Ukrainian historiography, and its examination of many historical questions remains unsurpassed. In some ways this is due to the unfortunate history of Ukraine, above all, the Soviet policies that not only imposed official dogmas, but also discouraged study of pre-modern Ukrainian history and the publication of sources. This policy, as well as the relative neglect of Ukrainian history in surrounding lands and in the West, has made new source discoveries and expansion of information more limited than might have been expected. The tragic fate of Ukrainian archives in the twentieth century—above all, the losses occasioned by wars and revolutions—frequently means that Hrushevsky’s discussions and citations are the only information extant. The reprinting of the History in Ukraine demonstrates to what degree Hrushevsky’s work is the starting point for rebuilding historical studies there. The appearance of the English translatioow permits a wider scholarly community, which has often only known of Hrushevsky as a “nationalist” historian, to examine the type of national history that this great scholar wrote. The appearance of the History of Ukraine-Rus’ should serve as a basis for understanding the Ukrainian historical process to the seventeenth century and as a tool for the examination of the thought of the Ukrainiaational revival and the views of one of its greatest leaders.
Ivan Yakovych Franko
(August 27 1856 – May 28 1916)
Ivan Yakovych Franko was a Ukrainian poet, writer, social and literary critic, journalist, interpreter, economist, political activist, doctor of philosophy, ethnographer, the author of the first detective novels and modern poetry in the Ukrainian language.
He was a political radical, and a founder of the socialist and nationalist movement in western
In 1876, Lesyshyna Cheliad and Dva Pryiateli (Two Friends) were published in the literary almanac Dnistrianka. Later that year he wrote his first collection of poetry, Ballads and Tales. His first of the stories in the Boryslav series were published in 1877.
Franko depicted the harsh experience of Ukrainian workers and peasants in his novels Boryslav Laughs (1881–1882) and Boa Constrictor (1878). His works deal with Ukrainiaationalism and history (Zakhar Berkut, 1883), social issues (Basis of Society, 1895 and Withered Leaves, 1896), and philosophy (Semper Tiro, 1906).
He has drawn parallels to the Israelite search for a homeland and the Ukrainian desire for independence in In Death of Cain (1889) and Moses (1905). Stolen Happiness (1893) is considered as his best dramatic masterpiece. In total, Franko has written more than 1,000 works.
He was widely promoted in Ukraine during the Soviet period particularly for his poem Kamenyari (stone breakers) which contains revolutionary political ideas, hence earning him the name Kamenyar.
In 1962 the city of Stanyslaviv in western Ukraine (formerly Stanisławów, Poland) was renamed Ivano-Frankivsk in the poet’s honor.
He also is associated with the name Kamenyar for his famous poem, Kamenyari (The Rock breakers), particularly during the Soviet regime, although his political views mostly did not correspond to the Soviet ideology. In the late 1970s astronomer Nikolai Chernykh named an asteroid which honored Franko in this manner, 2428 Kamenyar.
In the new world, Ivan Franko’s legacy is very much alive to this day. Cyril Genik, the best man at Franko’s wedding, emigrated to Canada. Genik became the first Ukrainian to be employed by the Canadian government – working as an immigration agent. With his cousin Ivan Bodrug, and Bodrug’s friend Ivan Negrich, the three were known as the Березівѕка Трійця (the Bereziv Triumvirate) in Winnipeg. Imbued by Franko’s nationalism and liberalism, Genik and his Triumvirate had no compunction about bringing Bishop Seraphim to Winnipeg in 1903 – a renegade Russian monk, consecrated a bishop on Mount Athos – to free the Ukrainians of all the religious and political groups in Canada who were wrangling to assimilate them. Within two years, the charismatic Seraphim built the notorious Tin Can Cathedral in Winnipeg’s North-End, which claimed nearly 60,000 adherents. Today, the bust of Ivan Franko, which stands triumphantly on a pillar in the courtyard of the Ivan Franko Manor on McGregor St. in Winnipeg, looks fondly across the street. Two churches stood here, the first (this building has since been demolished) that Seraphim blessed and opened for service upon his arrival, before building his Cathedral. The second was the Independent Greek Church (this building is still intact) of which Ivan Bodrug became the head after Seraphim was removed. Franko’s consciousness had been bold, and on the level playing ground of the new world it served Ukrainians in Canada to find their own identity as Ukrainian-Canadians.
Taras Shevchenko
T.Shevchenko Self-portrait with candle, 1861
T. Shevchenko Self-Portrait in Fur Hat. Etching. 1860
Taras Hryhorovich Shevchenko, the great Ukrainian poet, artist and thinker, was born on March 9,
Apprising the comparatively brief but very fruitful creative path of Shevchenko the artist, – authoritative sources indicate that he produced over 1,000 works of art – he is acknowledged as one of the most outstanding realist painters in mid-19th century Ukrainian and Russian art.
For over 150 years his writings – especially his poetry – have been published in thousands of volumes, including translations into the major world languages. Taras Shevchenko, founder of the new Ukrainian literature, is justifiably considered one of the greatest humanist writers of all times.
No matter where you go to in
Born into a serf peasant family in the
Unfortunately, his nationalistic philosophy and anti-imperial ideals brought him under the immense scrutiny of Tsar Nikolai I. Shevchenko was brought into custody for being involved with the brotherhood of St Cyril and Methodius, a clandestine Ukrainian group. He was first imprisoned in
In
One of his greatest works is Testament (Zapovit in Ukrainian). Written in 1845, it has been translated in more than 60 languages and set to music in the 1870s by H.Hladky. This poem is second only to the Ukrainiaational anthem:
When I am dead, bury me
In my beloved
My tomb upon a grave mound high
Amid the spreading plain,
So that the fields, the boundless steppes,
The
My eyes could see, my ears could hear
The mighty river roar.
When from
Into the deep blue sea
The blood of foes … then will I leave
These hills and fertile fields –
I’ll leave them all and fly away
To the abode of God,
And then I’ll pray …. But until that day
I nothing know of God.
Oh bury me, then rise ye up
And break your heavy chains
And water with the tyrants’ blood
The freedom you have gained.
And in the great new family,
The family of the free,
With softly spoken, kindly word
Remember also me.
MykhailoVozniak
In one area of the history of Ukrainian philosophy—the development of philosophy in
Grigory Savvich Skovoroda
(3 December 1722 – 9 November 1794)
Skovoroda was Chyzhevsky’s favorite Ukrainian philosopher. The works he devoted to Skovoroda outnumber by far his writings on any other philosopher: a monograph and over twenty articles. His works are an almost inexhaustible mine of information and interesting observations, but the overall result of all his efforts is rather disappointing. After a lengthy (200-page) and detailed comparison of Skovoroda’s philosophical doctrines, terminology, symbols, images, and phrases with those of several German mystics (Franz von Baader, Boehme, Meister Eckhart, Frank, Silesius, Suso, Tauler, and Valentin Weigel), Chyzhevsky reaches the conclusion that Skovoroda is a mystic, or to be more exact, that Skovoroda’s philosophical system has all the constituents of a “mystical philosophical system:” it rests on a dualistic metaphysics and includes a doctrine of opposites, a metaphysical interpretation of symbols, a typically mystical anthropology and ethics. Chyzhevsky cautions us that, although Skovoroda’s philosophy is mystical, we cannot be certain that Skovoroda himself was a mystic, for we have no solid evidence of Skovoroda’s mystical experiences. After analyzing Skovoroda’s ideas and biographical data, Chyzhevsky concludes: “Although there may be a shadow of doubt about Skovoroda’s own mystical experience, there can be no doubt about the mystical character of his philosophy!” I have no objection to the first part of the conclusion, but I do have some reservations about the second part. First of all, in what sense is Skovoroda’s philosophy mystical?
I would claim that it is mystical only in a weak sense; that is, it is a version of Neoplatonism, a type of system that is typical of mystics but also often embraced by religious thinkers who are not mystics. Chyzhevsky admits as much when he says that “Skovoroda’s ‘methodology’ and ‘metaphysics’ have many analogies in mystical and non-mystical thinkers.” To be mystical in the strong sense, his philosophy would have to have not just a dualistic metaphysics and anthropology, but also a special kind of ethics—an ethics that posits mystical experience as the goal of life and outlines the methods or steps for attaining it. Chyzhevsky claims that Skovoroda does have an ethics that shows how the individual can transcend the bounds of his humaature and fuse with God to become divine. In support of his interpretation Chyzhevsky musters an impressive array of expressions in Skovoroda that are typical of mystical writers and suggest mystical experience. And yet I question this interpretation, and I do so for three reasons.
First, as Chyzhevsky himself points out, there is no doctrine of the degrees of the soul’s progress to fusion with God. Secondly, there is no union or fusion with God that involves loss of self. On the contrary, Skovoroda speaks of union with God as a discovery of one’s true self, as a form of self-knowledge. The transfiguration or divinization that one undergoes is a change from one’s superficial or false self to one’s true self, the inner man. Contrary to what Chyzhevsky suggests this kind of union with God is accomplished not through mystical experience but rather through knowledge and reason. It requires not self-denial, self-mortification, and self-renunciation, but self-knowledge and dialogue. Finally, the key to Skovoroda’s ethics lies in his doctrine of congenial work. According to this doctrine the goal of life is happiness, not mystical experience, and the way to happiness lies not in escape from society and the cares of this world but in activity, in self-realization through socially beneficial work. This is not an ethics of escape from either oneself or the world. Hence, there is no room for mystics or even hermits in Skovoroda’s ethics.
It is rather obvious that Skovoroda’s philosophy is mystical in the weak sense and this requires no great effort to prove. On the other hand, to contend that Skovoroda’s philosophy is mystical in the strong is to give too much weight to his language and to ignore the main thrust of his moral teachings.
It should be clear from this critical outline of Chyzhevsky’s contribution to the history of Ukrainian philosophy that for all his shortcomings it was Chyzhevsky who laid its foundations, which later researchers refined and expanded. Considering the materials available to him and the conditions in which he worked, his single-handed achievement is truly remarkable. During the Soviet period two areas of Ukrainian philosophy received much attention—the philosophical ideas in the culture of Kyivan Rus’ and the development of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the post-Soviet period, while research in these areas continues, historians of Ukrainian philosophy are turning their attention increasingly on the nineteenth century. The framework of the history of Ukrainian philosophy established by Chyzhevsky is being steadily filled in with new facts, texts, and interpretations.
Dmytro Ivanovych Dontsov was a Ukrainian nationalist writer, publisher, journalist and political thinker whose radical ideas were a major influence on the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
Dontsov was born in Melitopol, Taurida Governorate (today – Zaporizhia Oblast) to an old cossack officer’s family, and in 1900 moved to Saint Petersburg to study law. In 1905 he joined the USDRP. During that time he was arrested due to his involvement in socialist politics, and soon after that moved to Vienna in 1909. He then moved to Lviv, where in 1917 he completed his doctorate in law. In 1913 he quit the USDRP due to the conflict based on the national question.
During the time of the Ukrainian revolution Dontsov served in the government of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, where he became the head of the government’s official news agency. During that time together with Vyacheslav Lypynsky and Volodymyr Shemet he created the Ukrainian Democratic-Agrarian Party (Khliboroby-Demokraty). With the fall of the Ukrainian State between 1919 and 1922 he lived in Switzerland, where he headed the press bureau of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. In 1922-1932 he was the editor-in-chief of the “Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk” (Literary Scientific Herald), in 1933-1939 Dontsov was publishing and editing “Vistnyk” (Herald).
In 1922 Dmytro Dontsov moved to Lviv. Utterly rejecting the socialism of his youth, his theories came to be considered nationalistic, but authentically Ukrainian. Unlike many Ukrainian politicians of his time he opposed any ideas of consensus and cooperation with the Russian government (Moskvophobe). His views grew out the study of historical Ukrainian-Russian relationships, primarily. During this time he edited several journals and wrote numerous articles on Ukrainian nationalism. His writings lambasted the failures of Ukrainians to achieve independence in 1917-1921, ridiculed Ukrainian figures from that era, and proposed a new “nationalism of the deed” and a united “national will” in which violence was a necessary instrument to overthrow the old order. He condemned the Polonophilia, Russophilia, and Austrophilia of various segments of contemporary Ukrainian society. In his writings, Dontsov called for the birth of a “new man” with “hot faith and stone heart” (гарячої віри й кам‘яного серця) who would not be afraid to mercilessly destroy
In 1939, on the eve of the Soviet takeover of western
A romantic in the era of pragmatism. Dmytro Dontsov in the context of 20th-century Ukraine
In contemporary Ukraine, Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973) remains at best a partially acceptable but mostly controversial figure. It is difficult to imagine a non- Galician city that would name a street after this great patriot or a university that would readily agree to hold a conference devoted to this creative personality and his ideas. Yet Dontsov played an outstanding and fateful role in the formation of Ukrainiaational ideology, and he occupies a prominent place in Ukrainian culture.
THE SPIRITUAL LEADER OF AN ENTIRE GENERATION
The contradictory perception of this figure may be attributed to the destroyed nature of Ukrainians’ national awareness and mentality. They are so used to the idea that their leaders must take some “gradualist and humbly entreating” position and be “rank- and-file workers” in the hard daily routine that they are still unable to accept a personality who passionately rejected political indecisiveness and triviality and promoted constant national militancy and expansiveness.
But the most important thing is that Dontsov’s diverse activities were in fact a spur to radical, majestic, and heroic exploits, while Ukrainians are used to following the “middle of the road,” which Taras Shevchenko called rotten and futile. An ethnos that fell asleep at a certain historical stage cannot believe — even in conditions of relative freedom — that it has wings with which to fly.
The greatest obstacle that was slowing down the complete self- identification of the Ukrainiaation was, in Dontsov’s definition, the mentality of “Provencalism,” i.e., the fatal conviction that historically “we can’t do it by ourselves,” “our culture will only develop in a full-blooded manner if it interacts with some other, higher, culture,” and “we should content ourselves with small things, such as ethnography and social stability.” This moral and ideological curse still hangs over Ukraine. Our Provencalism (the deep-seated Little Russian complex) prompts Ukrainians to be conciliatory where they should firmly stand their ground, pacifies them when they must be especially active, and distracts them from what is crucially important.
In the period when Dontsov was engaged in especially dynamic and influential activity — the first half of the 20th century — the Ukrainiaation was facing three major unresolved problems: the formation of the ideology of a modern nation, the achievement of political independence, and the creation of a dynamic model of national culture. In all these areas Dontsov took decisive and strategic steps.
He categorically discredited the Ukrainian Little Russian spirit (his brochure Modern Russophilism , 1913) and the false internationalism of socialist parties and ideologies (his article “Engels, Marx, and Lassalle on ‘Non-Historical Nations,’” 1914), concurrently advancing the concept of Ukrainiaational and political identity (his books Regarding One Heresy , 1914; The Present Political Position of the Nation and Our Tasks , 1914; Mazepa and Mazepism , 1919; and a series of articles in the Lviv-based journal Shliakhy in 1913-17).
He conceptually proved the dire necessity for an independent Ukrainian state as a decisive factor in stabilizing all of Central and Eastern Europe at a time when almost all Ukrainian politicians were only talking about autonomy and federation, or did not believe in the very possibility of independence (“Charles XII’s Expedition to Ukraine,” 1915; The History of the Development of the Idea of a Ukrainian State , 1917; Ukraine’s International Position and Russia , 1918; Ukrainian Political Thought and Europe , 1918, etc.).
He radically reassessed the spiritual and mental foundations of Ukrainian culture, pointing out its fatal and strategically important flaws, such as the East-West rift and a Provencal-type orientation to provincial minor problems and sentimental ethnographism. Moreover, Dontsov convincingly proved that Ukrainian culture is Central European in essence, i.e., closer in its deeper meanings to, say, Polish or Romanian than to Russian (Eurasian) culture.
He also proved that in order to develop effectively, a culture should primarily rely on eternal, heroic, and romantic things and inherent traditions, and reject all kinds of negative and corrupting foreign influences (articles and books Russian Influences on the Ukrainian Psyche , 1913; “The Church Union” in Shliakhy , 1916; “The Culture of Depravation” in Shliakhy , 1917; and The Foundations of Our Policies , 1921). These esthetic and culturological ideas were later brilliantly developed on the pages of the journal Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (LNV) , which Dontsov edited from 1922 onwards (in 1933 the journal was renamed Vistnyk , only to be shut down, like all every other Ukrainian publication and institution in 1939, after the Soviets occupied Western Ukraine).
During the inter-war period, Dontsov was the ideological leader of a new generation. It was under his moral and psychological influence that the first nationalist underground organizations were formed, such as the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) headed by Yevhen Konovalets, which operated both in Western Ukraine and in exile; the Group of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth (Prague, 1922) which was mostly comprised of the emigre intelligentsia; the League of Ukrainian Nationalists (LUN, Prague) whose members consisted mostly of emigres from the Dnipro region; the Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth (SUNM) which was popular among Galician students and shaped such prominent personalities as Roman Shukhevych (later the head of OUN fighting units and the commander in chief of the UPA), Dmytro Hrytsai (the UPA’s chief of staff), Stepan Lenkavsky (the OUN’s top ideologist and theoretician of nationalism), Zenon Kossak (the organizer of the OUN fighting network), Stepan Bandera (the leader of the OUN), Stepan Okhrymovych, Ivan Habrusevych, Bohdan Kravtsiv, Volodymyr Yaniv, and others.
In 1923-24 Dontsov was the direct inspirer of the Ukrainian Party of National Work, which was building its network mostly in Volyn and pursuing the goal of organizing an anti-Polish revolution. In 1929 most of these political groupings merged into a single Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) for which Dontsov remained an ideological role model in the next few decades. The OUN, on its part, played an epochal role in the struggle for Ukraine’s freedom.
In culture, too, Dmytro Dontsov managed to do extraordinary things. After the National Revolution of 1917-1920, the young creative-minded generation was seeking new ways of spiritual and artistic development. These people were deeply disappointed with the cultural ideas of populism and positivism, the rationalist concepts of socialism, and the egocentric trends in modernism. They needed new synthetic ideas, a new mood, and the aesthetics of new heroics.
It was Dontsov who responded to this generation’s spiritual hunger. He combined the philosophy of national traditionalism (superbly expressed by Taras Shevchenko) with the concepts of artistic intuitionism (Emil Hartmann, Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, and Friedrich Nietzsche). Aware of the primitivism of realism and the destructiveness of avant-garde art, he discovered new facets of Neo-Romanticism by brilliantly reassessing the creative intentions of Lesia Ukrainka (his book The Poetess of the Ukrainian Risorgimento (1922), was based on many previous studies of Lesia Ukrainka whom Dontsov, even in his young years, considered a prophetess of genius and an artistic and psychological phenomenon).
Regularly publishing scathing articles on all kinds of literary and cultural issues in LNV , Dontsov managed to convey his new esthetic concepts to a generation of wonderfully talented writers and critics, such as Yevhen Malaniuk, Yurii Lypa, Leonid Mosendz, Ulas Samchuk, Oleh Olzhych, Olena Teliha, Oleksa Stefanovych, Oksana Liaturynska, Natalia Livytska-Kholodna, Rostyslav Yendyk, Olha Babii, Bohdan Krawciw, R. Kedro, Yurii Klen, O. Hrytsai, Lydia Luciw, M. Mukhyn, Natalia Gerken-Rusova, Mykhailo Ostroverkha, Mykola Shlemkevych, and many others.
The LNV soon became the most authoritative Ukrainiaational ideology-forming journal on which many later periodicals were modeled: Studentskyi visnyk, Rozbudova natsii, Derzhavna natsia, Proboiem (Prague), Studentskyi shliakh, Smoloskypy, Shliakh natsii, Dazhboh, Obrii, Naperedodni (Lviv), Samostiina dumka (Chernivtsi), and others. A whole ideological and cultural phenomenon —
vistnykism — thus emerged, one that was based oationalism, the philosophy of irrationalism and voluntarism, the idealistic aesthetics of intuitionism and neo-romanticism, eternal heroism and Parnassism, and the moral foundations of traditionalism and Christianity. This phenomenon gave rise to the brilliant psychology and ethics of the emigre and Western Ukrainian intellectual elites and aroused creative aristocratism in the nation.
Unfortunately, the views on this phenomenon of Dontsov’s contemporaries were dimmed by falsifications on the part of postwar diaspora scholars. After 1945, Ukrainian culture figures living abroad felt the need to integrate into the fully-liberalized Western world. Naturally, in the West they could not promote the ideas of vistnykism-based traditionalism and nationalism that in many aspects ran counter to liberal, progressive, and cosmopolitan values. Therefore, a group of scholars, including Viktor Petrov (who was later exposed as a Soviet agent), Yurii Shevelov-Sherekh, Ihor Kostetzky (Merzliakov), Yurii Lavrinenko, and others — sought to prove that vistnykism and “Dontsovism” were “outdated” and “erroneous.”
In an effort to undermine the above-mentioned outstanding writers, whose prestige and talent was undeniable, they concocted an artificial “theory” about the “Prague School,” a group of writers without Dontsov and the LNV/Vistnyk . In the 1990s, these utterly tendentious and biased opinions of a group of diaspora academics were uncritically accepted in Ukraine, which resulted in a false and warped vision of Ukraine’s inter-war culture and literature, while the role of Dontsov was belittled. Today the truth must be restored in order not only to rehabilitate this figure but, above all, to gain a correct understanding of the logic according to which Ukrainiaational history and culture developed.
LIFE STORY
This task logically raises the question of explaining the phenomenon of Dontsov in Ukrainian 20th-century culture and politics. What are the international contexts and repercussions of his ideology and aesthetic concepts? What positive things from the legacy of this indefatigable political journalist and ideologist are still valid today?
Dmytro Ivanovych Dontsov was born into the family of an entrepreneur and official in Melitopil, where he attended high school and was shaped as a Ukrainian intellectual. As Dontsov recalled, the cosmopolitan atmosphere of this southern Ukrainian city sparked his lively interest in foreign cultures. He was especially fond of Western European literary works that were marked by a Romantic world outlook and the desire for individualistic and heroic actions. At the same time, life in Melitopil reinforced in him the sense of his Ukrainian identity and dignity vis-a-vis the alien Muscovite imperial world, which was especially aggressive in southern Ukraine.
The fiery, dynamic, and enterprising nature of this boy from Tauria contributed to his early civic activism. At the young age of 20, Dontsov, who was a student at St. Petersburg University, took an active part in the political protests of the local Ukrainian community. He soon joined the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, the most radical one at the time. He met Symon Petliura, and their friendship turned into mutual ideological support in the sea of the Ukrainian Little Russian mentality and political myopia.
His first articles were published in the Social Democratic newspaper Slovo edited by Petliura. Dontsov’s talents as a political writer were quickly noticed, and he became the editor of the St. Petersburg-based newspaper Nasha duma , the unofficial organ of the Ukrainian faction in the Russian Empire’s 2nd State Duma.
Dontsov was twice arrested in Kyiv in 1905-07 for taking part in the underground revolutionary movement. Released on bail, he went abroad, to Lviv, in April 1908. The move was a truly fateful event: the young, shrewd, and radical political activist received an opportunity not only to see a broader picture of the Ukrainian world and the pulsation of its culture (Ukrainian life was burgeoning in Galicia) but also to acquaint himself with a number of different ideas and attitudes.
At this time Russian intellectuals and urban residents were preoccupied with socialist ideas. In this way it was radically different from other European countries: socialism seemed to have turned into a new morality and faith for that generation. There were almost no viable democratic forces outside the socialist movement, all the others favoring the unpopular and hidebound idea of monarchy. This is why socialists of all hues so convincingly won the democratic elections in
This explains why so many nationalist-minded people, including Dontsov, found themselves members of socialist parties. Meanwhile, in Galicia, where a typical Central European ideological and social situation was emerging, socialism had not become a quasi-religion. There was no Bolshevik or anarchist fanatical destructiveness there at all. On the contrary, socialist ideas were of an agrarian rather than a proletariaature, and were aimed at gradual reforms, not revolution, and they coexisted with well-developed national democratic, conservative, and liberal ideologies.
All this had an impact on Dontsov: his national outlook found broad support here, his traditionalism received new ideological and theoretical incentives, and there were real opportunities for him to apply himself. An important factor in Dontsov’s change was his meeting with the well-known Ukrainian conservative and historian Viacheslav Lypynsky at the Polish mountain resort of Zakopane in 1909. This was reflected not only in his ideological persuasions but also in his new symbolic peame — Zakopanets.
In 1910-14 Dontsov right- wing tilt became more pronounced. His publications become more scathing and contained far- reaching conclusions. He criticized socialism from all sides and plunged into the eddy of liberatioationalism. From approximately 1911 onwards he was an “independentist,” i.e., he had a clear idea of building and working for Ukrainian statehood. In 1913, at the 2nd Students’ Congress in Lviv, Dontsov was regarded as the most radical leader of the younger generation. (This was confirmed by Yevhen Konovalets, who attended the congress and took Dontsov’s speech as a testament.) In Vienna in 1914, together with a group of emigres from the Dnipro region, he formed an independence-seeking organization called the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine and became its leader.
HERALD OF UKRAINIAN SOVEREIGNTY
No other person exerted himself to promote Ukrainian sovereignty in the world in 1914-17 more than Dontsov. He was a regular contributor to dozens of German, Austrian, Swiss, and Polish newspapers, and some of his translated articles were published iewspapers in other European countries. All of his writings raised urgent problems, made fundamental conclusions, and were stylistically brilliant.
When the 1917 National Revolution broke out, Dontsov was abroad. He could not come to Kyiv for a long time because of strict border security. In early 1918 he could only see the chaos and decline of Ukrainian liberation policies. Cherishing no illusions about the constructiveness of the socialist leaders (Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Serhii Yefremov, among others), he immediately joined the small conservative Party of Ukrainian Democratic Peasants led by Serhii Shemet and Viacheslav Lypynsky.
He scathingly criticized prominent Ukrainian politicians for their non-statist thinking, blind pacifism, and naive internationalism in the face of the threat of Russian imperial revanchism. For this he was labeled the archenemy of the socialist camp. In May 1918 Dontsov supported Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky’s coup, which he viewed as a successful response to socialist anarchy and a version of Ukrainian Bonapartism. But in November 1918, after the hetman proclaimed an alliance with monarchist Russia, he became totally disillusioned with Skoropadsky’s policies and soon went abroad again, thus escaping rough treatment by the socialists, who had regained power in the shape of the Directory.
This short biographical sketch shows how Dontsov came to understand the need for a new, strong-willed, mystical, and emotional nationalism as a program and life philosophy for Ukrainians. His conclusions were basically as follows. Historically deprived of their owobility, a leading stratum that had played a decisive role in the liberation of the Hungarian or the Polish nations, for example, the Ukrainian people could only obtain an historical opportunity if they found a replacement.
The only thing that could replace the leading stratum (elite) in a stateless nation was an ideological and political order comprising not those parties that had degenerated into doctrinairism and endless particularism, but an organization-order based on a new morality and sacrificial heroism, permeated with a Romantic sensitivity and an irrational and voluntarist world outlook, and featuring a multi-vector program of actions. This order should develop not so much in quantitative terms as on the basis of a qualitative selection of members according to the principle of effective action. Its philosophy should never stoop to the level of social pragmatism: instead, it should always emanate boundless idealism, a conviction in the indestructibility of the religious (Christian) postulates of existence, the eternal supremacy of heart over reason and spirit over matter, and the inevitability of a heroic and noble spirit as crucial factors in the progress of the individual and the nation.
Its actions and program must have nothing in common with the philosophy and tendencies of conformity, Little Russian subservience, or social slavery. This order’s essence and strategy must forever eradicate the traditional Ukrainian spirit of reconciliation and concession, blind absorption in details, and escape from historical choice. It should constantly rouse militant and expansive feelings of grandeur and struggle in the people.
The field of culture also needed cardinal changes. The nation must reject its provincial mentality and inferiority complex, understand that its spirit should develop as a result of a profound understanding of tragic existence and feel a fateful optimistic impulse for the Exalted and Eternal (the concept of Neo- Romanticism), rather than remain under the influence of an endless realistic description of our national woes (the theory of aesthetic positivism/realism), personal sorrow at our never-ending misfortunes (everyday Ukrainian sentimentalism), morbid egocentrism, and excessive use of formal and complex methods in art (the theory of modernism).
This kind of spiritual reorientation of the people would radically change their vital foundations: instead of “lackeys” and “cabbage heads” (Taras Shevchenko) and a “nation of paralytics” (Ivan Franko), it would form a dynamic and strong-willed nation rich in its own artistic visions and aspirations. It was in fact the vistnykists , the generation of writers who had been formed by Dontsov, which displayed this kind of artistic impulse.
Their legacy allows one to feel what a strong and precise word is (Malaniuk, Olzhych), how the dynamics of plot can affect the reader (Klen, Lypa, Stefanovych), what national tenacity and energy can do (Samchuk’s novels The Hills Are Speaking and the novelette Kulak , the novelettes collected in Avengers and Rediscovered Paradise ), what national erotica is (lyric poems by Olena Teliha and Natalia Livytska-Kholodna), what the national soul can discover (poems by Liaturynska and Stefanovych), how the national character is forged (novelettes by Mosendz and Lypa, Mosendz’s novel The Last Prophet ), and how the national dream and faith reverberates (Malaniuk, Olzhych, Lypa).
Dontsov and his followers are still criticized for having a one- sided national ideology, their failure to understand modern aesthetic theories, the forcible imposition of their doctrine on others, etc. It should be noted that such complaints have been made from liberal philosophical angles by people who were essentially unable to accept the philosophy of traditionalism-nationalism. But if we compare the concepts underpinning Dontsov’s works with similar European ideological and culturological theories at the turn of the 20th century, we will see that in his synthetic conclusions and penetrating assessments he was on the level of such prophetic thinkers as Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Scheler, Werner Sombart, Georg Simmel, Vilfredo Pareta, Gaetano Mosca, Gustave Le Bon, Charles Morras, Oswald Spengler, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Stanislaw Brzozowski, and Mariam Zdziechowski, the only difference being that he did his conceptual theoretical studies in the Ukrainian context and succeeded in filling the common European ideology with Ukrainian content.
His finest books — The Foundations of Our Politics (1921), Nationalism (1926), Our Era and Literature (1936), Where to Seek Our Historical Traditions? (1938), The Masses and Leadership: Quantity or Quality? (1939), The Spirit of Our Antiquity (1944), Bemoaning the Heroic (1953), The Poetess of the Fiery Limits: Olena Teliha (1952), Russia or Europe? (1955), From Mysticism to Politics (1957), The Bard’s Unseen Tablets (1961), and The Watchword of the Era (1968) — allow the reader to understand the creative style of a thinker and promoter of an idea, a philosophically integrated approach to history and culture, the expressiveness of political journalistic writing, and pulsation of living thought. What is striking about these works is not only the author’s broad erudition but primarily the very depth of the questions that he raises, questions that appeal to Eternity.
For some reason, it is common practice here to claim that Dontsov’s postulates are “unscholarly,” that he was “intolerant” and supported the right- wing totalitarian ideas and movements of the time. True, Dontsov’s works are not scholarly, because he was not and did not wish to be a scholar in the true sense of the word. He was a great political writer and essayist, and these forms of interpreting reality differ from the principles of scholarly research. This accusation is therefore absurd.
He wanted to rouse the slumbering Ukrainiaation with biting words and give it a clear vision of ideological, political, and cultural prospects — and he accomplished this mission. He was only intolerant to those who were either destroying the nation from the inside, maintaining harmonious, albeit concealed, cooperation with its enemies, or distracting it from its urgent tasks through the false theories of “humanism,” “aestheticism,” “cosmopolitanism,” etc.
Dontsov lived in a cruel age, when the Ukrainiaation was perpetually facing the dilemma of “to be or not to be,” and totalitarian and aggressive movements and ideologies, from communism to Nazism, which were dominant in Europe. Under such conditions, therefore, was it a good idea to preach lamblike meekness, complacency, and indecisiveness of action?
There is something truly non- Ukrainian in the personality and works of Dmytro Dontsov, but not in the sense of a “destructive moskal ,” as his adversaries described him, although he was not a Russian. The point is that his firm adherence to principles, his fantastically astute writing talent (a rarity in Ukraine, Franko being the exception) and his ideological leanings to maximalism and “globalism” sharply contrasted with the traditions of national culture building. He instilled a truly southern — Italian — temperament (there was some Italian blood among his ancestors), with its categorical judgments, passionate feelings, and brilliant images and reactions, into Ukrainian culture and public life, which were too mentally inert. Thus, Dontsov’s heritage will always remain a “meteorite” in the space of a nation that has some of the vitality of the South, but which has gone down in history, for some reason, as a characterless and irresolute entity.
Petro Mohyla
Metropolitan Peter (secular name Petro Mohyla) was a Metropolitan of
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But after Peter’s death, the school revived. Moderew courses were added to its curriculum. Graduates were encouraged to complete their education in European universities and many sons of wealthy Cossack families studied abroad. The Academy continued to educate the civic and ecclesiastical elite. However, Catherine the Second’s abolition of the Hetmanate in 1764 and secularization of the monasteries in 1786 deprived the Academy of its chief sources of financial support. The school became a ward of the Russian imperial government and its importance declined rapidly. In 1817 the
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Hryhorii Savych Skovoroda (Ukrainian: Григорій Савич Сковорода; Russian: Григо́рий Са́ввич Сковорода́, Grigory Savvich Skovoroda; 3 December 1722 – 9 November 1794) was a Ukrainian philosopher, poet, teacher and composer who lived in the Russian Empire and who made important contributions to Russian philosophy and culture. He lived and worked in Ukraine and passionately and consciously identified with its people, differentiating them from those of Russia and condemning Russia’s interference in his homeland.Skovoroda was so important for Russian culture and development of Russian philosophical thought, that he is often recognized as a Russian philosopher. He has been referred to as the “Russian Socrates.”
Skovoroda received his education at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy in Kiev. Haunted by worldly and spiritual powers, the philosopher led a 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
Skovoroda was born into a small-holder Ukrainian Cossack family in the village of Chornukhy in Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire (modern-day Poltava Oblast, Ukraine), in 1722. He was a student at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (1734–1741, 1744–1745, 1751–1753) but did not graduate. In 1741, at the age of 19 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
Skovoroda is 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 “Skovorodyski psalmy” were often encountered in the repertoire of blind itinerant 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 Ukraine staying with various friends, both rich and poor, preferring not to remain in one place for too long.
This last period was the time of his great philosophic works. In this period as well, but particularly earlier, he wrote poetry and letters in Ukrainian language, Greek and Latin and did a number of translations from Latin.
There is much debate regarding the language Skovoroda used in his writings. Skovoroda used a form of written Ukrainian which differed somewhat from the vernacular Ukrainian. As a scholar studying in a religious institution that relied heavily on various forms of the Church-Slavonic language although the foundation of his written language was Ukrainian.
Apart from written Ukrainian, Skovoroda was known to have spoken and written in Greek, Latin, German and Hebrew. His poetry has been analysed for foreign non-Ukrainian elements. After an in depth study of Skovoroda’s written works the Slavic linguist George Shevelov was able to deduce that apart from Ukrainian it contained 7.8% Russian, 7.7% non-Slavic, and 27.6% Church Slavonic vocabulary, and that the variant of Church Slavonic he used was the variety used in the Synodinal Bible of 1751.Skovoroda’s prose however a higher content of non-Ukrainian vocabulary: 36.7% Church Slavonic, 4.7% other non-Slavonic European languages, and 9.7% Russian.
After an in depth analysis of Skovoroda’s language, G. Sheveliov came to the conclusion that the high incidence of Church-Slavonic and the occurrence of Russian words reflect the circle of people with which Skovoroda primarily associated himself with, and on who he was materially dependent – and not the villagers and the village language that he knew and spoke.
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 early 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:
“The world tried to catch me? But hadn”t succeeded”.
Quotes
“Water does not exist without fish, just as air without birds, just as time without humans”
“Your feet can’t help but lose their way, when your heart has lost it”
“Can a person, who is blind at home, see clearly on the marketplace?”
“Wisdom was not created by the books, but the books were created from the wisdom”
On September 15, 2006, Skovoroda’s portrait was placed on the largest banknote in circulation in Ukraine, the 500-hryvnia note.
The Hryhoriy Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy, founded in 1946, operates under the auspicies of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine (until 1991 Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR).
Skovoroda’s works during his life were not printed, because the then censor found that his sacred writings were offensive to Monasticism. Brought up in a spirit of philosophical and religious studies, he became an opponent of dead church scholasticism and spiritual oppression of the Moscow centred Orthodox Church, based in its philosophy to the Bible. “Our kingdom is within us” he wrote “and to know God, you must know yourself..People should know God, like themselves, enough to see him in the world..Belief in God does not mean belief in his existence and therefore to give in to him and live according to His law…Sanctity of life lies in doing good to people.”
The official Moscowite stance divided humanity into more or less blessed by God and blessed, and those that are cursed, such as the serfs. Skovoroda taught that “all work is blessed by God”, but distribution of wealth outside the circle of God called unforgivable sin. The Muscowite Orthodox clergy was intolerant to Skovoroda’s teachings as considered them heretical. Skovoroda taught that the only task of philosophy was to seek the truth and to pursue it. But in terms of human life, this goal is unattainable, and human happiness lies in the fact that everything has to find the truth. This goal can go in different directions, and intolerance of those who think differently, has no justification. Similarly, religious intolerance does not find justification for eternal truth revealed to the world in different forms. In relation to himself he was utterly uncompromising however in complete harmony with their teaching and their lives. He was very gentle and observant in relation to others.
Skovoroda defended the right of the individual in each person, but translated this into concrete political language of the time. This meant a strong democratic trend that was associated with sympathy for enslaved peasant masses, with sharp hostility to the Muscovite oppressors.
It was only in 1798 that his “Narsisis or Know thyself” was published in the Russian Empire and even then without the inclusion of his name. In 1806 the magazine “Zion Vyestnyk” printed some more of his works. Then in Moscow in 1837-
List of works
· Skovoroda, Gregory S. Fables and Aphorisms. Translation, biography, and analysis by Dan B. Chopyk (New York: Peter Lang, 1990) Review: Wolodymyr T. Zyla, Ukrainian Quarterly, 50 (1994): 303-304.
· Skovoroda, Hryhorii. Piznay v sobi ludynu. Translated by M. Kashuba with an introduction by Vasyl’ Voitovych (L’viv: S$vit, 1995) Selected works (original: Ukrainian language).
· Skovoroda, Hryhorii. Tvory: V dvokh tomakh, foreword by O. Myshanych, chief editor Omelian Pritsak (Kiev: Oberehy, 1994) (original: Ukrainian language, translated from other languages).
· Skovoroda, Hryhorii (Gregory), “A Conversation Among Five Travelers Concerning Life’s True Happiness” (original: Russian language).
· Skovoroda, Hryhorii (Gregory), “Conversation about the ancient world”.
The soul of the Ukrainiaation
We often hear the terms: “national mentality”, “national nature” or “the soul of the people”. They mean the understanding of the people as uniform integrated living organism allotted by ethnic mentality. In socionics each separate nation is esteemed as uniform mental-information system, for which one the same typology, as for the separate person is fair. The essense of existance of each nation as well as a person is trying to the self-assertion.
Socionics discovered the typology of national cultures unexpectedly – description of national natures have appeared as two peas similar to the description of certain socionic personality types. For example, the English national mentality corresponds to a personality type of logic-sensory extravert (ESTJ), Japanese – sensory-logical introvert (ISTP), American – logic-intuitive extravert (ENTJ), Ukrainian – ethic-intuitive introvert (INFJ). The conviction in it considerably has increased after revelation of correspondences of interethnic relations to objective interpersonal relations.
The history of Ukraine has an example of positive influence and fruitful interplay with the Great Lithuanian Principality, which has national mentality of logic-sensory extravert (ESTJ), and consequently between it and Ukraine there were dual relations. The Great Lithuanian Principality had come to Ukraine as the conquerors, but the attitude to the domestic population was so tolerable, that just in those times there was a real growth and heyday of the Ukrainian nation. Actually authority was in arms of Ukrainian shlyahta, domestic traditions were almost maintained, government and legal proceedings were conducted in Ukrainian language, the cities had saved the Ukrainiaature, education, science, economics considerable progressing had achieved. Lithuania inreached itself by the positive influencing of higher Ukrainian culture.
Another conformation of national nature ethic-intuitive introvert (INFJ) and the feeling of duality is the recent example. In one of telecasts the Ukrainians were asked to choose a president among popular actors if they had such a chance. An overwhelming majority of the participants of the game have elected Mykola Tyhonov, known for his performance Stirlits – the dual of the Ukrainian nation – logic-sensory extravert (ESTJ).
If the power spirit of Ukraine has the nature inherent of ethic-intuitive introvert (INFJ), it does not mean, that this personality type is generic in all or majority of the people. In Ukraine people of different socionics personality types live, but the spirit of ethic-intuitive introvert is novercal fractionally in each person. It has directivity to moral, norms of behavior, personality, his inner world and world of relation between people. And the spiritual attitude of the person of any type will inclination to the side of human relations, to the soul, which is boosted also by earth energy of territory.
On the basis of the testimoniesof reseachers of the Ukrainiaature it is possible to draw a conclusion, that the Ukrainian people are:
ethic:
” … the Ukrainian mental pattern is defined by the emotional – sensual nature, focusing about “hearts”, … the feature of mental structure of Ukrainian is tend to emotions, sentimentality, sensuality, lyric.” (O.Kulchytsky). The philosophy of the Ukrainiaational poet T.G.Shevchenko, philosopher G.S.Skovoroda, who were ethic-intuitive introverts, was the philosophy of heart with the attitude to a world through love and condoling.
Intuitive:
“Have you noticed, that the majority of the outstanding prophets, predictors, visards, have the Ukrainian surnames … It is not incidentally. The Ukrainian people in a magic ratio is, perhaps, almost not most gifted in a world” (O.Nyvko).
introvert
“Among Ukrainians there are a lot of secretive, close natures, hermits. Such was G.Skovoroda, I.Vishensky. “As the important edge of pattern of the Ukrainian spirit can be marked introvert, the sensitive directivity on an own internal world.” U.Bojko.
Rational:
“This patience, silent courage, modesty, caution, persistence from a selected line, the coldness in failures – is an image of the abode and a type of the Ukrainian peasant”. U.Bojko.
The Ukrainiaation is characterised by disgust for violence and scandals, impressionability, delicasy, optimism, faith in higher force, diligence, aiming to harmony and beauty, interest by new ideas and possibilities.
Now Ukraine is in confused, amorphous state. A bewilderment and despondency among the population are reasons of instability in economical and political life. Comprehension by each person itself and calling, formation of elite, according to national spirit, both giving significance to a science and culture – only under such circumstances Ukraine can realise enormous possibilities. And, probably, the old prophecies will come true:
“The time will come and Ukraine becomes new Ellad. A fine location of this country, tender nature of the people, their musical gift, fertile ground – still will wake up.” (I.G.Gerder).
References
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2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
3. Copleston F. С. History of Philosophy, 8 vol.
4. Edwards, Paul, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vol.
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6. Ostrianyn, D. Rozvytok materialistychnoï filosofiï na Ukraïni (Kyiv 1971)
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11. Shynkaruk, V.; et al (eds). Filosofskaia mysl’ v Kieve (Kyiv 1982)
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13. Zakhara, I. Bor’ba idei v filosofskoi mysli na
14. Gorskii, V. (ed). U istokov obshchnosti filosofskikh kul’tur russkogo, ukrainskogo i bolgarskogo narodov: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Kyiv 1983)
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