Grigory Savvich Skovoroda was a philosopher of Cossack origin, who wrote primarily in the Sloboda Ukraine dialect of the Russian language. He was also a poet, teacher and composer of liturgical music. His significant influence on his contemporaries and succeeding generations and his way of life were universally regarded as Socratic, and he was often called a "Socrates."
Background
Grigory Savvich Skovoroda was born on was born into a small-holder Ukrainian Cossack family in the village of Chernukhi in Lubny Regiment, Cossack Hetmante, Russian Empire (modern-day Poltava Oblast, Ukraine), in 1722. His mother may have been of partial Crimean Tatar ancestry.
Education
Grigory Savvich Skovoroda was a student at the Kiev Mogila Academy (now National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy) (1734-1741, 1744-1745, 1751-1753) but did not graduate.
In 1741, at the age of 19 due to his uncle Ignatiy Poltavtsev he was taken from Kiev to sing in the imperial choir in Moscow and St. Petersburg returning to Kiev in 1744. Grigory Savvich spent the period from 1745 to 1750 in the kingdom of Hungary and is thought to have traveled elsewhere in Europe during this period as well. In 1750 he returned to Kiev.
From 1750-1751 Grigory Savvich taught poetics in Pereyaslav. For most of the period from 1753 to 1759 he 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 (also called Kharkiv Collegium). After an attack on his course on ethics in 1769 he decided to abandon teaching.
Career
Haunted by worldly and spiritual powers, the philosopher led a life of an itinerant thinker-beggar. In his tracts and dialogs, biblical problems overlap with those examined earlier by Plato and the Stoics. Skovoroda's first book was issued after his death in 1798 in Saint Petersburg. Skovoroda's complete works were published for the first time in Saint Petersburg in 1861. Before this edition many of his works existed only in manuscript form.
In the final quarter of his life he traveled by foot through Sloboda Ukraine staying with various friends, both rich and poor, preferring not to remain in one place for too long. During this time he dedicated himself to individual hermit-like monastic life and study.
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 Church Slavonic language, Greek and Latin and did a number of translations from Latin into Russian.
Three days before he died, he went to the house of one of his closest friends and told him he had come to stay permanently. Every day he left the house early with a shovel, and it turned out that he spent three days digging his own grave. On the third day, he ate dinner, stood up and said, "my time has come." He went into the next room, lay down, and died. He requested the following epitaph to be placed on his tombstone: "The world tried to capture me, but didn't succeed."
Grigory Savvich Skovoroda died on 9 November 1794 in the village called Pan-Ivanivka (today is Skovorodinovka, Zolochiv district, Kharkiv region).
Personality
Grigory Savvich was described as a proficient player on the flute, torban and kobza.