Hryhorii Skovoroda

Skovoroda is the greatest philosopher Ukraine has produced, and the most Ukrainian of its wanderers. He was born in the Cossack village of Chornukhy in the Poltava region, studied at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, sang in the imperial court choir in Saint Petersburg, and could have had any career the empire held out to him. He turned down each one in turn. He spent his last decades as an itinerant teacher, walking the roads of left-bank Ukraine with a flute and a Bible in his bag – a Socrates of the Ukrainian steppe.

His thought rests on three worlds. There is the macrocosm, the great universe; there is the microcosm, the human being, who contains that universe within; and there is the symbolic world of the Bible, whose images point beyond themselves to God. To know yourself, he taught, is the whole of wisdom, because in yourself you read the image of God stamped there. From this comes his central phrase, srodna pratsia – kindred labour: happiness is possible only in the work you were born for, and a person driven by force into work against their nature will be wretched no matter how well it pays. He carried Socrates' "know thyself" and Paul's "inner man" onto Ukrainian soil and gave them a home there.

He wrote his own epitaph: "The world tried to catch me and never did." It deserves to be read more widely than he meant it. The Russian empire, then and now, has tried to catch him too – filing him under "Russian philosophy," annexing the thinker of a culture he had walked away from. But he thought and wrote on Ukrainian ground, in the Ukrainian tradition, in a language soaked in the living Ukrainian vernacular. The world tried to catch him and did not. Neither has the empire.