Dead Friends: The World of Hryhorii Skovoroda – The American Spectator

твої дерева живі дерева

сплелись корінням з тілами предків

у страсний тиждень з кори б’ють кров’ю

виходять лики

Your trees are living trees

Roots entwined with the bodies of forefathers

In Holy Week, blood is beaten from the bark

And faces emerge

– Myroslav Laiuk, “Дерева” (“Trees”) (2013)

May 7, 2022

A Russian artillery shell rends the air overhead as it describes a parabolic arc beginning in a howitzer tube, reaching its apex high in the expansive sky above northeastern Ukraine, and terminating at the DMS coordinates 50°09’25.6”N 35°46’04.7”E. The inevitable impact takes place just off Peremohy Street in the modest village of Skovorodynivka, about an hour’s drive northwest of besieged Kharkiv.

As death rains down on the streets of Skovorodynivka, similar arrivals are taking place throughout Ukraine, war crime after war crime, obscenity after obscenity, compounding on an hourly basis. Missile salvos directed at Kostiantynivka kill two and injure nine, airstrikes against Bakhmut destroy 13 houses and kill another civilian, and the wanton bombardment of Pryvillia claims the lives of two boys aged 11 and 14, while wounding two girls aged 8 and 12. An even more infamous war crime is committed this day in Bilohorivka, where of the 90 noncombatants who sought shelter in a school basement, only 30 will emerge alive after the structure is pulverized by Russian projectiles. Further to the west, Mykolaiv is hit by yet another rocket barrage, and six cruise missiles plow into the port of Odesa, with two hitting the international airport, and the remainder leveling a furniture company warehouse and a nearby apartment building. Desperate fighting rages along a frontline 1,500 miles in length, entire cities are reduced to grim heaps of calcined rubble, the list of dead, wounded, and missing grows ever longer, and now this savage war has come to the secluded village of Skovorodynivka.

There is nothing of any strategic value here that could possibly warrant such an attack, unless one counts the carp-filled Koropchatnik pond, or the rustic Muravs’kyy Shlyakh tavern, with its picturesque views of the tree-lined Panski Shtany reservoir. A Russian high-explosive shell comes crashing down all the same, demolishing what mendacious Kremlin propaganda channels will call a “military base,” but which in reality is Skovorodynivka’s lone claim to cultural fame: the National Literary and Memorial Museum of Hryhorii Skovoroda. In happier times, which is to say just a few months earlier, the museum was a place of pilgrimage where visitors could pay homage to the 18th-century poet, philosopher, and composer of liturgical music Hryhorii Savych Skovoroda, sometimes called the Ukrainian Socrates, who ended his days on the grounds of the Kovalevsky family estate here in what was once the village of Pan-Ivanovka, but was in 1922 renamed in the writer’s honor.

The aftermath of the artillery strike leaves the neoclassical garden pavilion-turned-museum in shambles. Heinz Rein, the post-war German practitioner of Trümmerliteratur, or “rubble literature,” evoked such a scene in his haunting novel Berlin Finale (1947): “the stumps of their mutilated buildings rise naked and ugly among the heaps of rubble, they loom like islands from the sea of destruction, torn and shredded, the spars of roofs which have been blown away like ribs of stripped skin, the windows as blind as eyes with permanently lowered lids, occasionally blinking glassily, the walls bare, having shed their plaster, looking like aging women whose faces have been ruthlessly wiped of foundation and rouge.” The museum’s curators were able to spirit away the majority of the institution’s holdings, including manuscripts, paintings, furniture, and Skovoroda’s cherished violin, but several statues, too heavy to move, were reluctantly left behind. A photograph by Sergey Kozlov, taken in late May, shows one of the sculptures, a full-length portrait, standing singed but unbroken amidst a welter of brick and timber and crumbling plaster. “Observe humankind,” wrote Skovoroda in his fable The Poor Lark, and you will find that “it is a book that is black,” every bit as black as the charred rubble of the National Literary and Memorial Museum of Hryhorii Skovoroda.

Fire may have engulfed the museum, but thankfully some of the most important features of the site escaped the inferno. The 700-hundred-year-old oak tree with its cavernous tree hollow, inside which Skovoroda liked to place his writing table and chair, was damaged during the Second World War, but the remaining snag survived this round of fighting, as did the nearby granite bas-relief of the poet and the sign informing visitors that this is indeed “the giant oak under which G.S. Skovoroda loved to work.” And, most importantly of all, Skovoroda’s famous gravesite was unscathed. Three days before he died, the Ukrainian Socrates is alleged to have experienced a premonition of his imminent demise, and set about digging his own grave, the better to lessen the burden on his fellow men. When he indeed passed away on the appointed day, November 9, 1794, at the age of 48, he was laid to rest in his garden burial plot, beneath a tombstone bearing the words he had requested be engraved thereupon: “The world tried to catch me, but never could.” Another tree grew over Skovoroda’s resting place, its roots entwining with his remains, its leaves providing shade to devotees over the years, though it too has been reduced to a limbless snag.

In his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky informs his listeners of the news from Skovorodynivka, and draws the appropriate conclusion:

Last night, the Russian army fired a missile to destroy the Hryhorii Skovoroda Museum in the Kharkiv region. A missile. To destroy the museum. A museum of the philosopher and poet who lived in the 18th century. Who taught people what a true Christian attitude to life is and how a person can get to know himself. Well, it seems that this is a terrible danger for modern Russia — museums, the Christian attitude to life, and people’s self-knowledge. Every day of this war, the Russian army does something that is beyond words. But every next day it does something that makes you feel it in a new way. Targeted missile strikes at museums — this is something not even a terrorist can think of. But such an army is fighting against us.

July 5, 2022

The campus of the H.S. Skovoroda National Pedagogical University in Kharkiv has just been hit by a Russian missile, this time launched from a base across the border in Belgorod. Three floors of the building at Valentynivska Street have collapsed, concrete and steel girders are strewn everywhere, and a nightwatchman will eventually be pulled lifeless from the rubble. Before the strike, the entrance to the academic building had been graced with a bronze sculpture of Skovoroda in a contemplative pose, situated next to a wall featuring the poet’s enjoinder that “We will build a better world, we will make a brighter day come.” Leo Tolstoy considered Skovoroda to have been a “wise man,” “intelligent and learned,” and begged his personal secretary to send him material related to his intellectual precursor; the Russian symbolist writers Viacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely lauded his writings; and Joseph Brodsky considered him to have been “the first great Slavic poet.” How different are the Russians of our day, with their senseless attacks on Skovorodynivka and Kharkiv, as they instead systematically efface monuments to Skovoroda from the face of the Earth.

Again in his nightly address, President Zelensky is obliged to address the consequences of the Russian strikes:

Today in Kharkiv, the Pedagogical University was destroyed by a Russian missile strike — the main building, lecture halls, university museum, scientific library. This characterizes the Russian invasion with one hundred percent accuracy. When it comes to the definition of barbarism, this strike fits the bill the most. Only an enemy of civilization and humanity can do such things — strike missiles at a university, a pedagogical university. Already the second object dedicated to Hryhorii Skovoroda was damaged by this strike — a monument that was on the square in front of the university. It was covered with debris, but still the monument is not broken. And the Skovoroda museum located in the Kharkiv region burned down after Russian shelling back in May. However, paraphrasing the most famous words of Skovoroda, no matter how hard the occupiers try to catch us, they will fail. We will endure. And we will restore everything.

Aug. 24, 2022

On the occasion of Ukraine’s Independence Day, the Sokil Philharmonic in the city of Kolomyia stages an adaptation of Skovoroda’s The Poor Lark, with proceeds…