Contenuto e significato del prologo al Narciso di Hryhorij Skovoroda

Abstract

Hryhorij Skovoroda (1722-1794) was an alumnus at the Kyivan Mohyla Academy, an institution founded in 1632 that played a crucial role in Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its courses were held primarily in Latin, and Greek and Hebrew were also taught. Skovoroda is considered the last exponent of Ukrainian baroque and founder of Eastern European philosophy. The significant influence of his thinking can be found in many Russian and Ukrainian writers and thinkers. The article focuses on the writing and publication of Skovoroda’s dialogue Narcissus and its Prologue. The figure of Narcissus is, unusually, positive for Skovoroda and connected to the theme of know thyself in the Augustinian sense. He was led to make this association by an iconographic tradition which can be traced back to certain late medieval representations of Narcissus as a symbol of the contemplative life. From the ontological point of view, it is suggested that Skovoroda’s ontology is a Christian Plutarchism: a transformation of Stoic individual hegemony into an ability to grasp the invisible divine, in a perspective close to St. Augustine. The Prologue is Skovoroda’s philosophical testament: an original synthesis of Latin culture and humanism with modernism and Hesychasm’s spirituality.