Skovoroda: the wandering philosopher and the three worlds

Hryhorii Skovoroda was born in 1722 in a Cossack village in the Poltava region, studied at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, travelled through Hungary, Austria and probably Italy, taught briefly and badly at two seminaries, and then stopped.

From roughly his forties until his death in 1794 he had no fixed residence. He walked between villages and estates in the Sloboda region, staying with people who would have him, teaching whoever wanted to be taught, writing dialogues and letters, and carrying a flute. He declined a bishopric. He declined a chair. He declined an invitation to the imperial court, reportedly telling the messenger that the state needed people who could plough and he was not one of them.

The three worlds

The core of his system is a division into three worlds, each of which has a visible and an invisible aspect.

The macrocosm is the universe. The microcosm is the human being. The third world is the world of symbols, which for Skovoroda means principally the Bible, understood not as history but as a coded text whose surface meaning is a shell around something else.

Each world has an outer form that can be perceived and an inner reality that can only be reached by interpretation. The visible universe is the shadow of an intelligible order. The visible person is the shadow of a true self. The literal text is the shadow of a meaning. The philosophical task, in all three cases, is the same operation performed on different material.

Kindred labour

The idea with the widest reach outside philosophy is what he called srodna pratsia — kindred, or congenial, labour.

Every person, on this account, has a nature suited to a particular kind of work. Happiness consists in finding it and doing it. Misery consists in doing work one is not made for, however prestigious or well paid. A society in which people are pushed into unsuitable roles produces both bad work and unhappy people, and the two failures are the same failure.

It is a straightforward idea and it lands harder than it should, partly because it was written by someone who acted on it at considerable cost. Skovoroda had every conventional career available to him and declined all of them on precisely this reasoning.

Self-knowledge

Running through everything is the injunction to know yourself, which he takes from the classical tradition and pushes further than most. For Skovoroda self-knowledge is not introspection or self-improvement. It is the discovery of the invisible person inside the visible one — the aspect of a human being that belongs to the intelligible order rather than to the material one.

The famous epitaph, which he is said to have composed himself, reads: the world tried to catch me, but did not. It is carved on his grave at Skovorodynivka and it is the most quoted sentence in Ukrainian philosophy — used, over two centuries, to mean roughly whatever the person quoting it needs it to mean.

What he became

Skovoroda's afterlife is larger than his readership. He appears on the five-hundred-hryvnia note. He is invoked in political speeches, in literature, and in arguments about what Ukrainian culture is for. Modern readers have made him a proto-existentialist, a Christian mystic, a Cossack Diogenes and a national philosopher, and the texts are ambiguous enough to support most of these.

The museum at Skovorodynivka in Kharkiv region was destroyed by a missile strike in May 2022 and is being restored. That fact has, unavoidably, become part of how he is now discussed.

For a first reading, the dialogues are more approachable than the treatises, and the letters are more approachable than either. He wrote in a mixture of Church Slavonic, Ukrainian and Latin that is difficult in the original; the modern Ukrainian editions are the practical entry point, and there are competent English translations of the major dialogues.

Related in this archive

• The folk calendar: a working year organised by ritual
• Molfars: the Carpathian practitioners and what they were for
• Koliada: the winter cycle, the twelve dishes and a calendar that moved

I am not equipped to write about philosophy; but the story of a man who refused three appointments and kept walking touches something familiar in working life. The idea of kindred labour — doing the work that suits you — reminds me of the question I have asked for years when hiring: can this person do this work, or do they merely have to.