Hryhorii Skovoroda

Hryhorii Skovoroda, also Gregory Skovoroda or Grigory Skovoroda (Latin: Gregorius Scovoroda; Ukrainian: Григорій Савич Сковорода, Hryhorii Savych Skovoroda; Russian: Григо́рий Са́ввич Сковорода́, Grigory Savvich Skovoroda; 3 December 1722 – 9 November 1794), was a philosopher of Ukrainian Cossack origin who lived and worked in the Russian Empire. He was a poet, a teacher and a 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".

Skovoroda, whose native tongue was vernacular Ukrainian, wrote his texts in a mixture of three languages: Church Slavonic, Ukrainian, and Russian, with some elements from Latin and Greek and a large number of Western-Europeanisms. Different views exist about how to characterize the base language upon which he developed his highly individual idiom. One scholar has identified this base language as the variety of Russian spoken by the upper classes in Kharkiv and the surrounding Sloboda Ukraine region; this version of Russian contained many Ukrainianisms. According to another view, he wrote some of his works in the Ukrainian variety of Church Slavonic and others in the old Ukrainian literary language. The majority of his surviving letters are written in Latin and Greek.

He received his education at the Academia Mohileana in Kiev (now Kyiv, Ukraine). He led the 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. Many of his works existed only in manuscript form before this edition.

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