Hryhorii Skovoroda - Life

Life

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 1750 in Hungary and is thought to have traveled elsewhere in Europe during this period as well. In 1750 he returned to Ukraine where he taught poetics in Pereyaslav from 1750-1751. For most of the period from 1753 to 1759 Skovoroda was a tutor in the family of a landowner in Kovrai. From 1759 to 1769, with interruptions, he taught such subjects as poetry, syntax, Greek, and ethics at the Kharkоv Collegium. After an attack on his course on ethics in 1769 he decided to abandon teaching.

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.