Cultural Activity

The 18th century was a paradoxical era in the history of Ukrainian culture. It witnessed a remarkable flowering of Ukrainian arts and literature, expressed in the ornate Baroque style.

Almost simultaneously, however, it saw the creation of conditions that deprived Ukrainian culture of its distinctive features and forced it to adapt to Russian imperial models. The church

For centuries, the Orthodox church had been the focal point and generator of cultural activity in Ukraine. As a result of its struggle against Polish Catholicism, it came to embody Ukrainian distinctiveness. But this distinctiveness receded once the Russian Empire stepped forward as the champion of all the Orthodox – Ukrainians included. Deprived of its raison d’être, the Ukrainian church lost its driving force. At about the same time, it ceased to exist as a separate entity.

The absorption of the Ukrainian church into the imperial ecclesiastical establishment was a parallel development to the liquidation of the autonomy of the Hetmanate. For a time after it accepted the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Moscow in 1686, the Ukrainian church flourished: its schools were the best in the empire; its well-educated churchmen were eagerly sought out by Russia; and, thanks to Mazepa’s patronage, its economic base was sound. Yet, there were developments that did not bode well. As early as 1686, the diocese of Chernihiv was detached from the metropolitanate of Kiev and placed under the authority of Moscow. Somewhat later, the same was done with the diocese of Pereiaslav.

The authority of the Kievan metropolitan was curtailed even more between 1690 and 1710, when such old bastions of Ukrainian Orthodoxy as the dioceses of Lviv, Peremyshl, and Lutsk finally succumbed to Polish pressure and went over to the Greek Catholics. The most devastating blow came in 1721 when Peter I abolished the Moscow patriarchate and established the Holy Synod, a bureaucratic body consisting of churchmen and government officials, that supervised church affairs.

This in effect made the Orthodox church in both Russia and Ukraine a bureaucratic appendage of the state. Ukrainians were deeply involved in these changes: Teofan Prokopovych, the tsar’s closest adviser in ecclesiastical affairs, supported them, while Stefan Iavorsky, the leading Orthodox cleric in the empire, was opposed to them.

It was only a matter of time before bureaucratic centralism undermined the autonomy and distinctiveness of the Ukrainian church. In 1722, Varlaam Voniatovych was appointed by the Holy Synod to head the Ukrainian church, rather than elected by his peers, as had been the custom. Because he persistently protested against the reforms, he was exiled to the far north in 1730. Xenophobic Russian churchmen, long suspicious of Ukrainians whom they accused of being “contaminated” with Latin influences, proceeded to mold the Ukrainians in their own image. Under the pretext of rooting out “heretical deviations,” the Holy Synod forced Ukrainians to print their books, paint their icons, and build their churches according to Russian models. In 1786, all ecclesiastical lands were secularized and the church became totally dependent on the government for financial support. By the end of the century, most of the hierarchy in Ukraine consisted of Russians or Russified Ukrainians. The Ukrainian Orthodox church, once individualistic and Western-oriented, now became merely a ready medium for the dissemination of imperial Russian culture. Education

In comparison with Russia, the educational level in the Hetmanate was high. In the 1740s, data from seven out of ten regimental districts revealed that there were 866 primary schools that taught the rudiments of reading and writing in a three-year course. This structure contrasted sharply with the Right Bank, where the Jesuits controlled most of the schools and Polish-run primary education was practically unavailable to Ukrainian peasants. This was one of the reasons why the Right Bank played only a minor role in Ukrainian cultural life of the period.

On the secondary level, the Left Bank could boast several colleges, such as those at Chernihiv, Pereiaslav, and Kharkiv. The principal institution of the educational system was the Kiev Mohyla Academy, which was raised to the status of an academy in 1701. Generously subsidized by Mazepa, it became one of the leading schools in the Orthodox world. In the decade before the Battle of Poltava, it enrolled as many as 2000 students a year. Its faculty included such luminaries as Ioasaf Krokovsky, Stefan Iavorsky, and Teofan Prokopovych. So respected was the academy’s rigorous twelve-year course of study that hundreds of its teachers and graduates were eagerly recruited by Russian rulers to fill the highest ecclesiastical and government posts in the empire.

The Kiev Academy’s relations with Russian rulers were not always amicable, however. After the Mazepa episode, a tsarist crackdown reduced the academy’s student body to less than 200. During the 1740s, under the dedicated leadership of Rafail Zaborovsky, enrollment rose again to over 1000 and the academy experienced one last period of growth. Many of the causes for its ultimate decline were of its own making. Closely bound to the church and staffed by clerics, the academy continued to stress traditional subjects such as philosophy, theology, rhetoric, and logic. Its scholastic pedagogical methods were badly dated and attempts to assimilate the rationalistic, scientific currents emanating from Europe were halfhearted and ineffective. Because of its ecclesiastical orientation and traditionalism, the academy failed to attract students interested in acquiring modern knowledge. By 1790, over 90% of its 426 students were the sons of clerics. Eventually, the famous old institution was transformed into a theological seminary. Meanwhile, those Ukrainians who desired a modern education enrolled in great numbers in the new Russian institutions (such as Moscow University or the Medical Academy) that were established in the 1750s.

Aware that their institutions of higher learning were outdated, Hetman Rozumovsky and the starshyna requested permission from the imperial government to found a university at Baturyn, but it was denied. By the end of the 18th century, a complete reversal had taken place: it was no longer in Ukraine but in Russia that the leading educational institutions of the empire were to be found. Cultural achievements

From about the mid 17th to the late 18th centuries, the Baroque style dominated artistic and intellectual expression in Ukraine. Its advent coincided with and helped to mold an impressive cultural epoch in the history of the land. Catering to the tastes of the elite, the Baroque emphasized grandeur, sumptuousness, and decorativeness. It sought to stimulate the senses and thereby sway the mind. It stressed form over content, complexity over simplicity, and synthesis over originality.

But it was perhaps the penchant for synthesis that made the Baroque especially appealing to Ukrainians. Situated between the Orthodox East and the Latin West, they were naturally attracted to a synthesizing style. The Baroque did not bring new ideas to Ukraine; rather, it provided new techniques, such as paradox, exaggeration, allegory, and contrast, all of which helped the cultural elite to define, elaborate, and expound old truths more effectively. Many members of this elite were not “Ukrainian” in the sense of showing interest in local affairs or national causes. Their primary frame of reference was the whole Orthodox world or the empire. For this reason, some modern Ukrainian cultural historians have criticized them for their lack of national roots, their aridness, and their isolation from the life around them. Nonetheless, the Baroque brought to Ukraine a cultural dynamism, a desire to shine, and a thirst for Western contacts. It would be a long time before Ukrainian cultural life would again be as ebullient. Literature and the arts

Many of these Baroque features were reflected in the works of the so-called migratory birds – Ukrainians who had studied in Polish or West European institutions and had returned to Kiev to teach in the academy.

Because of their European sophistication, they were summoned by Peter I to Russia to head its ecclesiastical and educational institutions. Foremost among them were Teofan Prokopovych, Stefan Iavorsky, Dmytro Tuptalo, and Simeon Polotsky. But there were many others. Indeed, between 1700 and 1762, over seventy Ukrainians and Belorussians occupied the highest ecclesiastical posts in the empire. The much more numerous Russians filled only forty seven. Although most of their careers were spent in the north, some of these peripatetic churchmen-scholars made significant cultural contributions when they were still in Kiev. As a professor of poetics at the Kiev Academy, Prokopovych wrote his famous historical drama, Vladimir, in 1705 to commemorate the introduction of Orthodoxy to Rus’. Dedicated to Mazepa and Peter I, the play contained strong traces of patriotism, elements of which were also evident in Prokopovych’s concept of Kiev as the “second Jerusalem.” However, these sentiments did not prevent Prokopovych from becoming the leading ideologist for Peter’s secularizing and centralizing reforms. Stefan Iavorsky, a rector of the Kiev Academy, who in 1721 rose to the highest position in the Russian church, was famous for his elegant poems written in Ukrainian, Polish, and Latin. While in Russia, he wrote “The Rock of the Faith,” an eloquent attack on Protestantism.

The Kiev Academy also produced another breed of writers. Neither clerics nor professors, they were students who went on to become Cossack officers or chancellorists. In contrast to the theological issues, flowery panegyrics, and learned disputations that absorbed their teachers, these writers were primarily interested in the history of their homeland and composed the so-called Cossack chronicles. The most interesting of these works was written by Samuil Velychko, a chancellorist who completed his “Tale of the Cossack Wars with the Poles” in 1720. In the introduction to his work, this bookish Cossack asked: “Is there anything so pleasant, kind reader, and so satisfying to the curious disposition of man … as the study of books and the knowledge of past events and human actions?”³ Velychko then explained how the devastation of Ukraine had kindled his interest in his land’s past:

I saw in various places many human bones, dry and bare under the naked sky and I asked myself, “Whose bones are these?” My answer was: “The bones of all those who died in these wastes.” My heart and spirits were oppressed, since our beautiful land, Little Russian Ukraine, which before was inundated with the blessings of the world, has now been turned by God’s will into a desert, and our own famous forefathers have been forgotten.

I have asked many old people why this happened, for what reasons and by whom was this land of ours turned into ruin, but their replies were varied and contradictory. Therefore, I found it impossible to learn from these various explanations the true reason for the downfall and destruction of our country.⁴

Another work of this genre was written by Hryhorii Hrabianka. Entitled “The Most Bitter Wars of Bohdan Khmelnytsky,” it proposed to show that “the Ukrainians are the equal of others.” In their analyses of the recent past, both Velychko and Hrabianka strongly supported the claims of the starshyna to socioeconomic and political dominance in Ukraine. The liquidation of the Hetmanate also sparked a literary response. For example, in 1762, Semen Divovych wrote a long, polemical poem entitled “The Dialogue of Little Russia with Great Russia,” in which he defended Ukraine’s right to autonomy. The works of Hryhorii Poletyka were written in the same vein. A revealing insight into the mentality of the Cossack elite was provided by the diaries and journals of Mykola Khanenko, Iakiv Markovych, and Pylyp Orlyk.

The arts also reached a high point in the 18th century. Ukrainian artists, most of whom worked in Russia, were especially prominent in music, with composers such as Dmytro Bortniansky, Maksym Berezovsky, and Artem Vedel laying the foundations for the great Ukrainian and Russian choral traditions. Many of their works were influenced by Ukrainian folk melodies. In painting, Dmytro Levytsky, and in architecture, Ivan Hryhorovych Barsky, achieved widespread recognition. Early in the century, Mazepa’s financial support led to the construction of a series of churches in the so-called Cossack Baroque style which was more restrained and elegant than its West-European models. Later in the century, such glorious examples of Baroque architecture as the church in the Kievan Cave Monastery and the cathedrals of St Andrew in Kiev and St George in Lviv were erected. In the countryside, meanwhile, folk theatre (vertep) proliferated and wandering minstrels or bandurists appeared in great numbers. Skovoroda (1722–94)

Undoubtedly, the most original Ukrainian intellectual of the age was Hryhorii Skovoroda. The son of a poor Left-Bank Cossack, Skovoroda enrolled in the Kiev Mohyla Academy at the age of twelve. His long and varied education included extensive travel in the West and legend has it that he walked through much of central Europe in order to observe the people more closely. He mastered Latin, Greek, Polish, German, and Old Church Slavonic and was thoroughly familiar with the philosophical writings of ancient and modern writers. Between 1751 and 1769, Skovoroda intermittently taught poetics and ethics at the colleges of Pereiaslav and Kharkiv. However, the antagonism of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to his unorthodox views and pedagogical methods led him to abandon formal teaching and to undertake the life of a wandering philosopher.

Often called the “Ukrainian Socrates,” Skovoroda traversed his native Left Bank and Sloboda Ukraine on foot, engaging all types of people in markets, roads, and village gardens in probing philosophical discussions. His major concern was the attainment of true happiness for the individual. According to Skovoroda, the key was to “know thyself” and to do in life that for which one was naturally suited. Personal independence had to be maintained at all cost and unnecessary riches and honors avoided. This conviction led Skovoroda to criticize the starshyna and clergy openly for their exploitation of the peasantry. His numerous writings included collections of poetry, textbooks on poetics and ethics, and philosophical treatises. Living as he preached, Skovoroda enjoyed great popularity among the common people and many of his views were incorporated into folk songs and dumy. It is said that for his gravestone Skovoroda prepared the following epitaph: “The world tried to entrap me, but it did not succeed.”

This vibrant, multifaceted cultural epoch drew to a close at the end of the century. As a result of Peter I’s conquests, Russia obtained its long-sought-after “window to the West” in the Baltic – and Ukraine’s invigorating role as transmitter of cultural influences became redundant. Imperial borders greatly reduced Ukraine’s contacts with the West. Now it was Russia – benefiting from direct access to Europe as well as from the westernizing efforts of its monarchy and from the “brain drain” from Ukraine – that moved to the cultural vanguard. Meanwhile, Ukraine, isolated and defensively traditionalist, sank into provincialism. Having lost its political autonomy, it was now in danger of losing its cultural distinctiveness as well.