Cultural Activity
Despite the upheaval and devastation brought on by the 1648 revolt and the Ruin, cultural activity in Ukraine continued to develop and to reach broader segments of the population.
As the Christian Arab Paul of Aleppo, who traveled through Ukraine on his way to Moscow, wrote in 1655, “Even villagers in Ukraine can read and write… and village priests consider it their duty to instruct orphans and not let them run in the streets like vagabonds.”2 Teachers, trained in the brotherhood schools and hired by village communes, were numerous, and the wandering graduates of the Kiev Academy (bakalary) frequently served as tutors for the well-to-do. Higher education, even in the worst of times, was available in the Kiev Academy or its affiliates in Vinnytsia and, later, Hoshcha in Volhynia. In the forty years since Mohyla’s reforms, the academy developed a rigorous twelve-year course of study that emphasized, at various stages, the mastery of Latin, Greek, and Church Slavonic, rhetorical and oratorical skills, and (for the most advanced) philosophy and theology. Astronomy, geography, and mathematics were also taught, reflecting a growing interest in the natural sciences.Most of the academy’s students were the sons of the Cossack starshyna or rich burghers, although not infrequently the sons of simple Cossacks and even peasants also gained access. The old practice of sending youths to West European universities also continued, and even under Russian overlordship, Left-Bank Ukrainians maintained close contact with European and particularly with Polish culture. This openness of Ukrainians to foreigners and their ways was also noted by Paul of Aleppo, who stated that the Ukrainians “were all friendly and did not treat us as strangers,” while in Russia he felt “as if my heart was padlocked and all my thoughts repressed, for no one is able to feel free and joyous in Muscovy.”3
The faculty of the Kiev Academy, which included such luminaries as the famous ecclesiastical leader and writer Lazar Baranovych, the German-born polymath Inokentii Gizel, and the fiery polemicist lanokii Galiatovsky, constituted an impressive cultural elite that was famous throughout the Orthodox world. Many of their works were widely read, notably Gizel’s Synopsis, which dealt with early Ukrainian and Russian history and was permeated with a protsarist spirit.
In the 150 years following its appearance in 1674, the work was published in twenty editions. By and large, the Kievan scholastics, who were all churchmen, still perceived the central issues of life in religious terms. Anti-Catholic and anti-Greek Catholic themes predominated in their works and a favorite political idee-fixe of theirs, reflected in Galiatovsky’s “The Swan,” was the formation of a union of all Orthodox Slavs, led by the tsar, to combat the hated Muslims.They wrote in a florid, baroque style and used the artificial Church Slavonic language, which was far removed from the spoken Ukrainian of the day. Among these intellectuals, it was considered bad form to write in the language of the “commoners.” In contrast, the works of secular authors tended to use the vernacular and dealt with more concrete topics. For example, the “Eye-Witness Chronicle,” which was probably written by the Cossack official Roman Rakushka-Romanovsky, concentrated on the events of the period 1648–57. Books were not lacking in late 17th-century Ukraine. Despite the ravages of war, the land had 13 printing presses, of which 9 were Ukrainian, 3 Polish, and 1 Jewish. The most active Ukrainian presses were in Kiev, Novhorod-Siversky, and Chernihiv. Of the 20 books that the Novhorod-Siversky press put out, 15 were by Ukrainian authors; and in 1679 alone, the press published over 3000 copies of various textbooks for elementary schools.