Works in two volumes

The first volume includes the works of G. Skovoroda, written in 1750-1775. The volume opens with a collection of poems "The Garden of Divine Songs". From "The Garden" songs of philosophical value have been selected. "Kharkov Fables" and subsequent works, including two recently found ones, "Conversation 1" and "Conversation 2", characterize the thinker as a philosopher who placed the ethical-humanistic concept at the center of his system. The volume concludes the "Conversation Called the Alphabet, or the Primer of the World".

PHILOSOPHICAL HERITAGE OF HRYHORIY SKOVORODA

Hryhoriy Skovoroda is a great Ukrainian philosopher, humanist and educator, an outstanding poet of the XVIII century, who made a huge contribution to the development of philosophical thought of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. It embodies the long tradition of philosophical thinking of these peoples, its unity with the living wisdom of the working masses, their hopes and aspirations. From the heights of the modern historical epoch in the life of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, when they, in a single fraternal family of the peoples of the Soviet Union, are paving the way to the communist future of all mankind, the ideological and cultural heritage of Skovoroda has acquired a new illumination, in which the features that unite the people's democratic culture of the past with the modern tasks of the revolutionary transformation of the world stand out more expressively than ever before.

Hryhoriy Savvich Skovoroda was born on December 3, 1722 in the village of Chernukhi of the Lubny regiment in the Poltava region in the family of a landless Cossack. After receiving primary education at a rural school in Chernukhy, Skovoroda entered the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. There are no direct documents about the time of Skovoroda's training. Until recently, the only correct chronological outline, based on the research of N. I. Petrov[1] According to his conclusions, Skovoroda entered the academy in 1738, where he studied until 1750 with a break in 1742-1744 (when Skovoroda was in the court chapel in St. Petersburg). Then, in 1750-1753, he was in Hungary, and after his return in 1753 he taught at the Pereyaslav seminary.

L. E. Makhnovets subjected N. Petrov's data to a critical check, also using additional archival documents and new publications. As a result, the dates of Skovoroda's life from 1734 to 1755 were clarified[2]. According to JI. Makhnovets, Skovoroda entered the academy in 1734 at the age of 12 and studied there for the first time until December 1741, then he went to St. Petersburg. Returning from the court choir in 1744, Skovoroda studied at the academy until August 1745, when, together with the mission of General Vishnevsky, he left for Hungary, where he stayed until October 1750. Upon his return from abroad, Skovoroda taught poetics at the Pereyaslav Seminary in the 1750-1751 academic year.

In 1751-1753, Skovoroda again and for the last time found himself in the academy, studying in the classes of theology. From here, as the best student, he was recommended by Metropolitan T. Shcherbatsky as a home teacher to one of the richest landowners of the Pereyaslav region, S. Tomar. In the estate of Tomara in the village of Kovray, Skovoroda was with a break in 1755 until the summer of 1759. Since 1759, he worked as a teacher at the Kharkov Collegium, but because of his freethinking and ill-will of the collegium's mentors, he was again forced to leave teaching. The last time Skovoroda was invited to teach was in 1768: he read a course of lectures on ethics in the Additional Classes at the Kharkov Collegium. But since the educational concept of Skovoroda's morality did not coincide with the official church one, in 1769 he was dismissed from his post and deprived of the opportunity to engage in pedagogical activities, for which he had both the ability and the relevant knowledge. Hryhoriy Skovoroda still found a way to be useful to his people. For the last 25 years of his life, he wandered around Ukraine, preaching his philosophical teaching among the people. It was in the 70s and 80s that Skovoroda created the main philosophical dialogues, treatises and parables. He died on November 9, 1794 in the village of Ivanovka (now the village of Skovorodinovka, Zolochiv district, Kharkiv region).

It is impossible to answer the question of what Skovoroda is like as a thinker and writer without highlighting the era in which he lived and worked.

The life and work of Skovoroda took place in the XVIII century and are associated with those socio-economic and cultural processes that characterize the life of Eastern Ukraine and the Russian state of that time. In the middle of the 18th century, in Russia and Ukraine, which was part of Russia, the development of the feudal-serfdom economic structure was completed and capitalist relations developed intensively. The socio-economic development of Ukraine in the 18th century followed the path of increasing commodity-money relations, expanding domestic and foreign markets, which was accompanied by a sharp increase in the exploitation of the peasantry and the land-poor Cossacks, and the deterioration of the financial situation of urban artisans. On the basis of the exploitation and constant enslavement of the working people, there was a further enrichment of secular and ecclesiastical feudal lords, merchants, and Cossack elders. Usury flourished, bribery and lawlessness in administrative institutions. Legislation became an expression of the interests of the new ruling classes defending their privileges.

From the middle of the 18th century, tsarism especially intensified its colonialist policy of social and national enslavement of Ukraine. In Left-Bank Ukraine, Catherine II in 1764 replaced the nominal hetman's power with the so-called Little Russian Collegium, putting K. Razumovsky at its head. And ten years later, by decree of August 3, 1775, Catherine II liquidated the Zaporozhye Sich, annexing its lands to the Novorossiysk province. A few years later (in 1782) serfdom was finally introduced on the Left Bank and Sloboda Ukraine. Instead of traditional regiments, vicegerencies were created - Kiev, Chernigov, Novgorod-Seversk, and later Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav.

In the second half of the 18th century, the antifeudal struggle acquired a particularly wide scope. In the period of the formation of Skovoroda's philosophical views, in the 60s, the Haidamaka movement reached its highest strength in the Right-Bank Ukraine, which was an expression of the people's struggle against feudal-serfdom and national-religious oppression by the Polish nobility. The echo of Haidamatchina was also heard on the Left Bank, where Skovoroda lived. In 1773-1774, the Pugachev uprising took place, which received a response in Ukraine. All these events took place in front of Skovoroda and had a direct impact on the formation of his ideas. Their echoes are clearly heard in Skovoroda's letters and compositions of the period of the formation of his worldview.

The circumstances of life favored the student of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in the knowledge of life. For two years he lived in St. Petersburg, where he had the opportunity to become more closely acquainted with the advanced Russian culture and at the same time to learn the depraved morals of the royal court, which was the reason for his departure from the court chapel.

Skovoroda also met with humiliation from the Pereyaslav landowner S. Tomara, in whose estate he worked as a teacher, and from the Pereyaslav bishop Nikodpm Srebntsky while teaching at the Pereyaslav seminary. But a particularly colorful figure, who fully represented the world hated by Skovoroda, was the Belgorod bishop P. Kreisky, to whom the Kharkov Collegium was subordinated. After the death of this spiritual pastor in 1768, as evidenced by the posthumous inventory of his property, there remained "ten marked bags in the head" of gold and silver, many other valuables and a large number of "drinks and poisons of various kinds" [4]. And at the same time, he in every possible way delayed the opening of additional classes, referring to the lack of funds. Not the best was Skovoroda's former classmate at the academy, a vain careerist, Bishop Samuel of Mpslav. Skovoroda saw around him cruel landlords, imbued with a thirst for enrichment and a desire for political domination.