While it is true that in the eighteenth century Ukrainian political and socioeconomic life was characterized by its increasing integration with that of the Russian Empire and isolation from that of the rest of Europe, in the realm of culture Ukraine remained a distinct and fertile ground where contemporary ideas in education, art, architecture, and literature from western and, in particular, east-central Europe were able to flourish. The new intellectual currents eventually made their way northward to Moscow. The trend whereby Ukraine served as a conduit for western culture (often through a Polish prism) had begun in the seventeenth century, and it was continued and accelerated until the end of the eighteenth century.
Much of the cultural development in eighteenth-century Ukraine was expressed in a religious context, as in earlier eras. The western-oriented Uniate church, with its own hierarchy headed by a titular metropolitan of Kiev, functioned primarily on lands in Poland-Lithuania. Analogously, the Orthodox church remained the dominant religious body in Russian-ruled Ukraine. Like other institutions, however, the Orthodox church became more and more integrated into the Russian Empire.
The integration of the Orthodox church
The process of integration had begun in 1686, when the Orthodox Metropolitanate of Kiev became jurisdictionally subordinate to the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church in Moscow instead of to the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople. Initially, the Orthodox church in Ukraine retained many of its traditional privileges, and during the reign of Hetman Mazepa (1687-1709) it even expanded and increased its wealth and prestige. But with the fall of Mazepa and the decline of political autonomy on Ukrainian lands, the distinct status of the Orthodox church was undermined.
Under Tsar Peter I, the Russian Orthodox church itself underwent a profound structural transformation, and this was to have an impact on Ukraine. In 1721, the tsar abolished the office of the patriarch and replaced it with a council of bishops.
The Holy Synod, that henceforth would be the highest governing body of the Russian Orthodox church. At the same time, the tsar issued a new constitution for the church. In it, there was no mention of the self-governing status of the Metropolitanate of Kiev, which was downgraded to an eparchy administered directly by the Holy Synod. In the years that followed, the archbishops appointed to Kiev called for the restoration of the Kievan metropolitanate, and in 1743 it was restored. Nonetheless, the tsarist government continued to interfere in its affairs. For instance, the Kievan metropolitanate’s six eparchies in the course of the eighteenth century were either lost to the Uniates in Poland-Lithuania (Luts'k, L'viv, and Przemysl) or placed under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox church; Kiev’s metropolitan or archbishop was appointed by the Russian government or by the Holy Synod; and, after 1770, the title of the hierarch was changed to Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia. It is interesting to note that while the term ‘Little Russia’ was dropped from the title, the designation ‘Galicia’ was retained to provide ideological Justification for Russia’s claim to western Ukrainian territories (Galicia, Volhynia, and Podolia), which at the time were still within Poland. In effect, the metropolitan of Kiev became little more than the holder of an honorific title, since in practice he had jurisdiction only over the eparchy of Kiev.
After the abolition of the Hetmanate in the 1770s and 1780s, the integration of the Orthodox church continued. The Holy Synod took over the right of appointing archimandrites (abbots) to monasteries, a right until then exercised by the Kievan metropolitan; all monastic property was secularized; and forty-two of the existing sixty-one monasteries and convents were closed. In administrative structure, eparchial boundaries were redrawn (1785) to coincide with Russia’s provincial boundaries: the Kiev, Chernihiv, and Novhorod-Silvers'kyi eparchies were formed from the Hetmanate; and the Kharkiv eparchy from Sloboda Ukraine. Finally, after 1799 and for the next 120 years, until the demise of the Russian Empire, there was no metropolitan of Kiev who was a native of Ukraine.
The Uniates in the Russian Empire fared even worse, especially during the reign of Empress Gatherine II. In the 1770s, over 1,200 Uniate churches were given to the Orthodox in the Kiev region, and after 1793-1795, when the Russian Empire acquired the Right Bank, Volhynia, and Podolia during the Second and Third Partitions of Poland, another 2,300 Uniate churches and over 100 clergy were forced to become Orthodox. Finally, in 1796 the Uniate Metropolitanate of Kiev, whose eparchies on former Polish-Lithuanian territory were still functioning, was formally abolished.
The Uniates could do little to reverse the policy of a government intent on destroying their church. In contrast, the Ukrainian Orthodox were recognized and even supported, although only to the degree that they could be made to fit into the framework of the Russian Orthodox church. The changes in the status of the Orthodox church in Ukraine were opposed by some Ukrainian hierarchs, but welcomed by others. Those who opposed the changes were either arrested by the tsarist government (Metropolitan loasaf Krokovs'kyi in 1718 and Archbishop Var-laam Vonatovych in 1730) or transferred (Metropolitan Tymofii Shcherbats'kyi in 1757)- Others not only welcomed but actually implemented the changes. Among Them were the highest officials in the Russian Orthodox Holy Synod: its first president, Stefan lavors'kyi (then metropolitan of Riazan'), and its first two vicepresidents, Teodosii lanovs'kyi (then archbishop of Novgorod) and Teofan Prokopovych (then archbishop of Pskov). All were Ukrainians who had previously played dominant roles in the religious and cultural life of the Metropolitanate of Kiev. In the end, the tsarist government and Russian Orthodox church authorities provided enough incentives to Ukrainian hierarchs to make them actively participate in implementing policies which by the close of the eighteenth century had fully transformed the Orthodox church in Ukraine into an integral part of the Russian Orthodox church.
As in previous centuries, the church continued to play a leading role in Ukraine’s educational system. The vast majority of elementary schools were located next to village churches and were run by the parish sexton (diak). By the eighteenth century, the level of education in Ukrainian territories within the Russian Empire was relatively high, and foreign visitors frequently commented on the degree of literacy among the population at large. For instance, there were more elementary schools per number of inhabitants on Ukrainian territory than in neighboring Muscovy and Poland. In the Hetmanate during the 1740s, of 1,099 settlements within seven regiments, as many as 866 had primary schools. An earlier survey, from 1732, lists 129 such schools in less densely populated Sloboda Ukraine.
At the secondary level, the most important institution remained the Kievan Collegium, established by Metropolitan Petro Mohyla during the 1630s and transformed into an academy in 1701. In the eighteenth century, the Kievan Academy provided a twelve-year program in philosophy and theology. Latin remained the most important language of instruction, followed by Church Slavonic and Greek. As part of the general process of integration throughout the empire, however, Russian became the language of instruction in all subjects after 1765. By the second half of the century, besides courses designed to prepare young men for the priesthood, engineering, modern languages (German and French), music, and painting were being taught. The secular subjects notwithstanding, an increasing emphasis was placed on the training of clerics. Thus, before the 1780s, of the some 1,150 students studying each year, 75 percent planned secular pursuits, whereas three decades later, of over 1,100 students, more than 95 percent were preparing for the priesthood.
The importance of the Kievan Academy was felt far beyond Ukraine. It was the oldest and most influential center of higher learning within the borders of the Russian Empire. Most of the leading hierarchs and intellectuals of the period in both Ukraine and the Russian Empire as a whole (lasyns'kyi, lavors'kyi, Prokopovych, Konys'kyi, Tuptalo), as well as many noteworthy political figures (Hetmans Mazepa and Orlyk and Catherine IPs chancellor Aleksander Bezborod'ko) and the secular philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda, were graduates of and/or teachers at the Kievan Academy. It is largely owing to graduates of the academy who moved north that the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries have come to be known as the ‘Ukrainian Era’ in Russian intellectual history.
Besides the Kievan Academy, there were secondary schools and/or theological seminaries in Chernihiv (est. 1689, theological seminary 1776), Kharkiv (est. 1727), Pereiaslav (est. 1738), Poltava (est. 1779, later transferred to Kateryno-slav), and Novhorod-Sivers'kyi (est. 1785). Music was an essential component of religious services, and a school for voice was established (1737) at the Het-manate’s capital of Hlukhiv to ensure a steady supply of musicians. Three of the empire’s greatest choral composers graduated from the Hlukhiv school - Maksym Berezovs'kyi, Dmytro Bortnians'kyi, and Artem Vedel'. Finally, as part of Russia’s territorial expansion beyond the Hetmanate into southern Ukraine and the opening of the province of New Russia, during the second half of the eighteenth century the imperial government established professional schools in the new cities of lelysavethrad (a medical-surgical academy), Mykolaiv (an agricultural school), and Katerynoslav (a music school). Thus, at the elementary as well as the secondary and professional levels, Ukrainian territories in the Russian Empire had a relatively well developed educational system during the eighteenth century.
The eighteenth century witnessed the flourishing of Ukrainian architecture and painting. The almost uninterrupted sequence of uprisings, civil war, and foreign invasions that had marked the era of the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolution, the Period of Ruin, and the last years of the Mazepa era finally came to a close. This meant that in most Ukrainian lands - both Galicia and the Right Bank under Polish rule and Transcarpathia under Austrian rule, and the Russian-ruled Hetmanate and Slo-boda Ukraine - a period of peace and stability was established. Not surprisingly, this era coincided with what has been described as the golden age of Ukrainian art.
In architecture, the flurry of reconstruction and new building in the Ukrainian or Cossack baroque style that characterized at least the first half of Mazepa’s rule was continued during the era of stability following the hetman’s downfall. The baroque churches, modeled especially on churches in Poland, became ever larger in size. Often topped with several gilded or azure domes, these structures also had elaborate facades marked by the typical baroque half-columns and incomplete pediments, and heavily decorated interiors ingeniously illuminated by the illusionary use of light. Despite the fact that these buildings were for Eastern-rite Christians and were located within the borders of the Orthodox Russian Empire, they clearly looked Catholic in spirit, prompting critics to deride them as products of the ‘Ukrainian Jesuit baroque.’
Among the more important native architects of this era was Ivan Hryhorovych-Bars'kyi. He was best known for his Kiev structures, such as the Trinity Church of the St Cyril Monastery (1750s), the Church of the Holy Protectress in Podil (1766), and the pavilion-like municipal water fountain known as the Felitsiial (Samson’s Fountain, 1748-49), as well as for his contribution (together with that of Andrii Kvasov) in the completion of the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin (1752-63) in Kozelets'.
Other architectural trends prevalent in western Europe at the time - neoclassicism and the rococo - were also brought to Ukrainian lands by foreign architects. The restraint and simplicity of neoclassicism were visible in the main belfry of the Monastery of the Caves (1731-45) and especially in the reconstruction of the Kievan Academy (1736-40), both by the German architect Johann-Gottfried Schaedel. In contrast, the rococo, which evolved from the baroque, carried on the baroque’s interest in elaborate decorative elements but used much finer lines that created a sense of lightness and delicacy. Although the technique was employed in some of the structures designed by Hryhorovych-Bars'kyi, it is in the work of the Italian architect Bartolomeo-Francesco Rastrelli that the most outstanding examples are found. Most famous for his impressive structures in imperial St Petersburg, Rastrelli also brought the rococo to Kiev in the Imperial, or Mariins'kyi, Palace (1750-55) and in the exquisite splash of gold and azure in the Ghurch of St Andrew (1747-53).
Not surprisingly, the baroque was even more prevalent in western Ukrainian lands, which were within the sphere of the Roman Gatholic cultural influences of Poland and Hungary. It is from this period that derive the proportionally massive baroque St George Cathedral in L'viv (1745-60) and Town Hall in Buchach (1751), both by Bernard Merderer-Meretini, the Pochaiv Monastery Church (1771-83) by Gottfried Hoffman, and the very Italianate Dominican Church in L'viv (1745-49) by Martin Urbanik.
Wooden architecture was known throughout Ukraine, but it was particularly extensive in the Carpathian Mountain region, where lumber was abundant. Wooden churches were constructed in great numbers especially in mountain villages during the eighteenth century. These structures, small in scale, still dot the landscapes of southern Galicia as well as Transcarpathia and the Rusyn/Ukrain-ian area of present-day northeastern Slovakia - the latter areas with their rustic settings providing especially elegant and subtle renditions of Gothic and baroque styles in wood.
Painting also flourished in eighteenth-century Ukraine. Since Ukraine functioned as a conduit for western cultural influence, it is not surprising that it was there that the heretofore restrictive rules of Byzantine iconography first broke down among the Orthodox East Slavs. Not only was post-Renaissance naturalism introduced into Ukrainian paintings and murals of religious inspiration, but secular portraiture also became popular as a result of the demands of the Polish noble estate and upwardly mobile Cossack starshyna. But notwithstanding latter-day art historians who speak in glowing terms of a Ukrainian school of painting under Flemish influence, the portraits from this period are rather awkward, unrefined in style, and hardly comparable even to those of second-rate artists in Flanders. As for religious paintings, most of them reflect Polish baroque models, whose sentimentality, imbued with the Catholic enthusiasm of the Counter Reformation, is often of dubious aesthetic value.
In its literary production, eighteenth-century Ukraine was typical of the baroque era, with its wide variety of themes and stylistic complexities. Style often became an end in itself, with the result that, as in the scholastic milieu of the Kievan Academy, form became more important than content. The language used in literature and other writings was a highly stylized form of Church Slavonic (and sometimes Latin or Russian). The opacity of Church Slavonic and its divorce from the spoken Ukrainian vernacular contributed to the formalistic and not particularly vibrant qualities of most of the works of the period, which were in sharp contrast to the spirited works of religious polemic that characterized the seventeenth century.
Perhaps the most popular branch of literary activity was drama. This genre developed during the seventeenth century under the influence of Polish and Latin plays staged in the brotherhood schools and at the Kievan Collegium. By the eighteenth century, Ukrainian drama had evolved into a distinct form in the works of writers like Dmytro Tuptalo, Teofan Prokopovych, and lurii Konys'kyi. In a cultural environment where religion continued to play a dominant role, it is not surprising that the most widely produced plays were Christmas and Easter dramas, enactments of the lives of saints, and morality plays. There were also a few works of a largely or exclusively secular nature, the best known being two historical plays by Teofan Prokopovych, about the Kievan prince Volodymyr the Great {Vladymyr, 1705) and the Cossack hetman Bodhan Khmel'nyts'kyi {Mylost' Bozhyia, or The Mercy of God, 1728). Other secular forms, albeit of smaller proportions, were the intermediia, or interlude, and, later, the vertep, or puppet play; these were often performed during the entr’actes of morality plays and were distinctive for their comical nature, occasional political satire, and use of the Ukrainian vernacular.
Several genres of poetry were produced during the eighteenth century, including spiritual verses, love and erotic poetry, epigrams, parodies, and patriotic verses glorifying contemporary leaders. The best-known creators in these genres were Ivan Velychkovs'kyi, Klymentii Zynov'iev, Dmytro Tuptalo, and Stefan lavors'kyi.
There is one writer who stands out among all others from the eighteenth-century, Hryhorii Skovoroda. Although he wrote numerous lyrical poems {Sad bozhestvennykh pesen', or Orchard of Divine Songs, 1735-85), he is best remembered in Ukraine and Russia for his philosophical writings. As the ‘Ukrainian Socrates,’ Skovoroda looked to the classical past and in particular followed the admonition of Socrates, Know Thyself. Most of his philosophical writings (in Russian or russianized Church Slavonic) and his teachings as a ‘wandering scholar’ from 1769 until his death a quarter century later had to do with the search for happiness - not happiness derived from material wealth, but happiness attained through self-knowledge. Self-knowledge, he argued, would allow the individual to live life according to the natural order and therefore in accordance with God’s will. Despite his use of philosophical models from ancient Greece, Skovoroda typified the other-worldly religious spirit that continued to dominate the culture of eighteenth-century Ukraine.
Among the few writers to depart from the purely religious motivation characteristic of the eighteenth century was a group of what might be called ‘Cossack intellectuals.’ As the intellectual exodus from Ukraine to Muscovy that began in the late seventeenth century continued and even intensified during the eighteenth century (for instance, it is estimated that between 1700 and 1762 as many as 70 percent of the upper Russian church hierarchy alone were natives of either Ukraine or Belarus), the places of some of these clerical intellectuals were taken by Cossacks serving in the Hetmanate administration. These intellectual chancel-lerists were most interested in the historical exploits of the social stratum they claimed to represent - the Cossacks. Accordingly, the tradition of Cossack chronicles, begun in the previous century, was continued in works like the Litopys Samo-vydtsia, or Samovydets' Chronicle, probably by Roman Rakushka; Events of the Most Bitter... War... between the Zaporozhian Hetman Bohdan Khmel’nyts'kyi and the Poles, by Hryhorii Hrabianka; and the four-volume Tale of the Cossack War against the Poles, by Samiilo Velychko, all compiled during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. The works of Hrabianka and Velychko, in particular, presented the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolt as a Ukrainian national uprising, and it was this interpretation that deeply influenced the subsequent Ukrainian national movement when these chronicles were published for the first time between the 1790s and the 1840s.
The Cossack chroniclers continued a tradition established by their medieval forebears, whose aim was simply to record the events of a given epoch without concern for historical perspective. Beginning in the 1730s, however, a new kind of work began to appear, one which traced historical events in Ukraine from the days of Kievan Rus' and connected them with the Cossack period. Such an approach implied a sense of historical continuity which, in the minds of certain readers, might provide an ideological justification for the maintainance of Cossack autonomy. The first work of this kind was the popular and readable Kratkoe opisanie Malorossii (A Short Description of Little Russia), written in the 1730s but not published until four decades later. Several similar historical treatises were written during the last decades of the Hetmanate’s autonomous existence, and their authors (Hryhorii Pokas, Petro Symonovs'kyi, Stepan Lukoms'kyi) all argued from historical and political precedent for the idea of Cossack distinctiveness. Although the attempts to sustain autonomy for the Hetmanate after the 1780s eventually proved futile, the work of these Cossack chroniclers set the stage for a fundamental change from a cultural environment in which religious concerns were foremost to one in which secular ideas and a concern for the rights of the individual and the nation would be pervasive.
For this change in Ukraine’s intellectual evolution to be effected fully, a new mind-set and ideology had to be introduced. That ideology would come in the form of nationalism, the precepts of which, as we shall see, would dominate Ukrainian thinking throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. But before turning to that new era in the history of Ukraine, it is necessary to review events in the eighteenth-century Right Bank and Galicia.
World History
