The Language of the Works of the Ukrainian Baroque Writer Hryhorii Skovoroda

Abstract

A crucial role in the process of reviving Ukrainian identity is played by the Ukrainian language, which in the conditions of war serves not only as a mark of the own/alien, but also weighs a lot as a kind of intellectual weapon. For centuries, the Russian Empire had been appropriating the civilizational, scientific, and cultural achievements of the Ukrainian people; in return, it imposed on them a complex of inferiority, encouraged them to mankurtism. A significant part of the population of Ukraine succumbed to Russian manipulations and renounced their native language in favour of Russian. The tolerant attitude of the Ukrainian citizens towards the dominance of the Russian language in Ukraine became one of the hundreds of reasons for the present Russia–Ukraine war, which has been taking the lives of many thousands of defenders of Ukraine, as well as the lives of many thousands of its civilian residents, for the tenth year now. The time has come to defend everything that is Ukrainian from the grasping hands of the Rashists. The Ukrainian nation has preserved its native language and literature in spite of all the bad weather and winds of history, developed it to match the world’s artistic peaks. Ukrainian literature desperately needs a modern, objective reading of works of art without ideological layers, restoration of the fair facts of writers’ biographies, freedom from the toxicity of Russian propaganda, under the influence of which even well-known philological scholars – not only in Ukraine, but also in emigration – fell under the influence. As an example, it would be appropriate to recall the debate on the language of Hryhorii Skovoroda’s works, which lasted for more than two centuries due to the fact that Russian scientific circles labelled the work of the outstanding Ukrainian humanist as Russian. The debate ended with the conclusions of Professor Leonid Ushkalov as late as in the 21st century. Restored by L. Ushkalov, the authenticity of the texts of the works of Hryhorii Skovoroda made it possible to eliminate the mistakes made by the scribes and free the thinker’s works from Russification layers, returning him to the bosom of the Ukrainian literary baroque. L. Ushkalov proved the predominant percentage of Ukrainian language works of H. Skovoroda using the data of statistical calculations. The examples given by L. Ushkalov from the works of H. Skovoroda testify that such lexical, phonetic, grammatical categories are quite naturally used in the Ukrainian language and are completely absent in the Russian language. The lingua mixta of Hryhorii Skovoroda’s works consisted of Ukrainian, Church Slavonic, and Latin vocabulary, which was characteristic of Ukrainian baroque literature. This proves that Hryhorii Skovoroda’s work belongs to Ukrainian literature.