1. Historical circumstances of Ukraine in the context of Baroque culture.
2. Educational process and intellectual activity in Ukrainian lands.
3. Arts of Ukrainian Baroque.
1. The Baroque was the leading cultural phenomenon in the XVII – beginning of the XVIII centuries. The Baroque (from French – “rough of imperfect pearl”) is a style in arts and the cultural period, which emphasizes luxury, elegance and balance of bright colors, details and decorative ornaments in harmony of their subordination to the whole. It had originated in Italy and flourished chiefly in countries that were strongly affected by the Counter-Reformation. Roman Catholic Church encouraged Baroque style, promoting the idea that the arts should communicate religious themes through direct and emotional involvement.
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a stronghold of Catholicism and a field for Counter-Reformation movement was very sensitive to Baroque tendencies. Ukrainian lands under the rule of Poland also were influenced by Baroque culture. But due to indigenous impulse of Ukrainian culture Baroque style there was not simply the copy of European stylistic features but Ukrainian modification of them, that is usually called Ukrainian or Cossack Baroque.
That impulse to the development of Ukrainian Baroque was from the cossackhood. Cossacks (from Turkic – free man) had appeared at the territory of Ukraine since the XV century as defenders of frontier regions from nomads and as protectors of trade caravans travelling the steppe routs. The history of Ukrainian Cossacks has three dimensions: their struggle against the Tatars and the Turks in the steppe and on the Black Sea; their struggle against national-religious and social-economic oppression by the Polish magnates; their role in shaping of the autonomous Ukrainian state. Since 1654–1667, when Ukraine was split along the Dnieper river, and till the end of the XVIII century Cossacks were leading social force in both banks of the Dnieper. They influenced social and political life of Ukrainian lands, as well as their cultural life. The ideal of Cossackhood as Ukrainian knighthood has been romanticized and idealized in folklore since that time. Ukrainian bards (kobza players, bandura players, lira players) accompanied Cossacks in military campaigns.
The artistic tradition of Ukrainian wandering bards, kobza players, bandura players, and lira players is one of the most distinctive elements of Ukraine's cultural heritage. While kobzars first emerged in Kyivan Rus', bandurysts and lirnyks appeared and became popular in the 15th century. Kobzars often lived at the Zaporozhian Sich and accompanied the Cossacks on military campaigns. The epic songs they performed served to raise the morale of the Cossack army in times of war, and some were even beheaded by the Poles for performing dumas that incited popular revolts. As the Hetman state declined, so did the fortunes of the kobzars, and they gradually joined the ranks of mendicants, playing and begging for alms at rural marketplaces.
Kobzars. Wandering folk bards who performed a large repertoire of epic-historical, religious, and folk songs while playing a kobza or bandura. Kobzars first emerged in Kyivan Rus’ and were popular by the 15th century. Some (eg, Churylo and Tarashko) performed at Polish royal courts. They lived at the Zaporozhian Sich and were esteemed by the Cossacks, whom they frequently accompanied on various campaigns against the Turks, Tatars, and Poles. The epic songs they performed served to raise the morale of the Cossack army in times of war, and some (eg, Prokip Skriaha, Vasyl Varchenko, and Mykhailo, ‘Sokovy's son-in-law’) were even beheaded by the Poles for performing dumas that incited popular revolts.
As the Hetman state declined, so did the fortunes of the kobzars, and they gradually joined the ranks of mendicants, playing and begging for alms at rural marketplaces. In the late 18th century the occupation of kobzar became the almost exclusive province of the blind and crippled, who organized kobzar brotherhoods to protect their corporate interests. A few performed at the Russian courts of Peter I, Elizabeth I, and Catherine II (eg, Hryhorii Liubystok and O. Rozumovsky).
Bandura. A Ukrainian musical instrument similar in construction and appearance to a lute. The bandura has 32–55 strings: the 8–14 bass strings (bunty) are stretched along the neck, and the 24–43 treble strings (prystrunky) run along the side of the soundboard. Before the 20th century the bandura had various shapes and tunings (basically diatonic), but in recent times it has been standardized. The modern bandura is usually chromatic, with a basic tuning in G major/E minor; the range is from AA to G3. The Chernihiv bandura is 109 cm by 51 cm in size. The bandura differs from other lutelike instruments by the presence of the prystrunky, on which the melody is performed (the bunty are used only for accompaniment), and the absence of frets. Each string produces only one note.
The oldest record of a bandura-like instrument in Ukraine is an 11th-century fresco of court musicians (skomorokhy) in the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. This lute-like instrument is probably the ancestor of the bandura and the kobza. The two instruments were related, but distinct. The kobza was smaller in size and had fewer strings, but these were fretted. Around the 16th century prystrunky were added to the bandura, and from that time only one note was obtained from each string. During the 17th and 18th century the bandura was very popular at the Zaporozhian Sich, among the common people, and at the gentry manors. In the 18th century the bandura displaced the kobza, and both names are now used synonymously. Old banduras were symmetrical. Their shape limited the number of prystrunky and thus the range of the instrument.
And after decline of Hetman state bards wandered across Ukraine and glorified prominent past of Cossackhood. Also, during the XVII–XVIII Cossack aristocracy supported actively cultural development, inspired and sponsored Ukrainian Baroque culture.
2. In 1632 Kiev Epiphany Brotherhood School was transformed by Petro Mohyla to Collegium, i.e. institution of higher learning offering philosophy and theology courses and supervising a network of secondary schools. The leading center of higher education in 17th- and 18th-century Ukraine, which exerted a significant intellectual influence over the entire Orthodox world at the time. Established in 1632 by Petro Mohyla through the merger of the Kyiv Epiphany Brotherhood School with the Kyivan Cave Monastery School (est 1631 by Mohyla), the new school was conceived by its founder as an academy, ie, an institution of higher learning offering philosophy and theology courses and supervising a network of secondary schools. Completing the Orthodox school system, it was to compete on an equal footing with Polish academies run by the Jesuits. Fearing such competition, King Władysław IV Vasa granted the school the status of a mere college or secondary school, and prohibited it from teaching philosophy and theology. It was only in 1694 that the Kyivan Mohyla College was granted the full privileges of an academy, and only in 1701 that it was recognized officially as an academy by Peter I.
In founding the school, Petro Mohyla's purpose was to master the intellectual skills and learning of contemporary Europe and to apply them to the defense of the Orthodox faith. Taking his most dangerous adversary as the model, he adopted the organizational structure, the teaching methods, and the curriculum of the Jesuit schools. Unlike other Orthodox schools, which emphasized Church Slavonic and Greek, Mohyla's college gave primacy to Latin and Polish. This change was a victory for the more progressive churchmen, who appreciated the political and intellectual importance of these languages.
Church Slavonic, the sacral language, and Ruthenian, the literary language of Ukrainians and Belarusians closest to the vernacular, continued to be taught, while Greek was relegated to a secondary place. The undergraduate program, based on the liberal arts, was designed to develop the basic skills of public speaking rather than to pass on a body of knowledge, and was organized into five grades. The three lower grades were essentially grammarian. They were preceded by an introductory grade, analog or fara, devoted to reading and writing and elementary Latin, Polish, and Slavonic. The first grade provided an introduction to Latin grammar. In the next grade, grammatical continued to be used for Latin syntax, readings from Cicero and Ovid were analyzed, and Greek grammar was introduced. In the syntaxis grade was completed and Greek continued to be studied. Besides Ovid and Cicero, some works by Catullus, Virgil, Tibullus, and Aesop were read. Each grade required a year to complete and included some instruction in catechism, arithmetic, music, and painting.
The intermediate level consisted of two grades, in which students began to compose Latin prose and verse. The first, poetica, took one year and provided a grounding in the theory and practice of literature, and a close study of the writings of Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Curtius, Martial, Virgil, and Horace. Polish Renaissance and baroque poetry (Jan Kochanowski, Samuel Twardowski) and, later in the century, some Ukrainian poetry (Ivan Velychkovsky) were also read. The two-year rhetorica grade completed the secondary-school program. Cicero and Aristotle's Poetics were studied in the course of mastering the rules of elegant composition. In both grades students absorbed much prose and verse information on secular and biblical history, mythology, and classical geography for the purpose of rhetoric, not of knowledge.
Kyivan instructors, like the instructors of Polish and other European schools, prepared their own Latin manuals of poetics and rhetoric. The remarkable efflorescence of Ukrainian baroque literature was closely connected with the school's philological program.
Higher education consisted of a three-year philosophy program that paved the way to four years of theology. In spite of the king's prohibition, some course in philosophy was usually taught, and in 1642–6 a theology course was offered. In the mid-1680s a full philosophy and theology program was given a permanent place in the curriculum. Logic, physics, and metaphysics were the main parts of the philosophy program. The philosophy manuals prepared by the school's professors, of which about 80 have survived, show that there was no uniform system of thought, but that each course reflected the preferences and abilities of the instructor. The basically Aristotelian philosophy taught in the school was derived not from Aristotle himself but from his medieval interpreters and was supplemented with doctrines from Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, humanists such as L. Valla, L. Vives, and D. Erasmus and the Protestant scholar P. Melanchthon, and the Jesuits F. Suárez, P. da Fonseca, and L. de Molina. At the beginning of the 18th century Teofan Prokopovych showed an interest in R. Descartes and F. Bacon. From the middle of the 18th century on orders from the Holy Synod the academy adopted C. Wolff's philosophy. The theological courses at the academy consisted of commentaries on Catholic theologians such as R. Bellarmine, F. Suárez, T. González, and the Polish Jesuit T. Młodzianowski. In method, if not in content, they were very Thomistic. The only attempt to work out an independent theological system was Petro Mohyla's Pravoslavnoe ispovedanie ... (Orthodox Confession ..., 1640).
From its beginnings, the academy had close ties with the Cossack starshyna, which provided it with moral and material support. Hetman Ivan Petrazhytsky-Kulaha approved Petro Mohyla's plans for the new school in 1632 and granted it a charter. The school, in turn, educated the succeeding generation of the service elite. In the 1640s, when the Orthodox hierarchy sided with the Polish Crown against the rebellious Cossacks, Cossack sons continued to attend the college. Among them were the future hetmans Ivan Vyhovsky, Ivan Samoilovych, Pavlo Teteria, Ivan Mazepa, and Pavlo Polubotok. Bohdan Khmelnytsky established the tradition of hetman grants in money, lands, and privileges to the college. The Kyiv clergy's opposition to the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654 severely strained their relation with the Cossacks. During the Cossack-Polish War (1648–57) and the Ruin period (1657–87), the activities of the college were severely disrupted. Its buildings and property were looted and destroyed several times by Muscovite and Polish armies. The strong Hetman state that emerged in Left-Bank Ukraine after the Ruin period provided favorable conditions for the college's growth. Supported generously by Hetman Samoilovych (1672–87), the school began to flourish towards the end of his rule, and during Hetman Mazepa's reign (1687–1709), enjoyed its golden age. The enrollment at the time exceeded 2,000.
At the same time, Moscow's expanding political power and increasing interference in Ukrainian affairs threatened the academy's freedom and well-being. Gaining control of Kyiv metropoly in 1686, the Patriarch of Moscow attempted to end the intellectual influence of Kyiv on Muscovite society by placing almost all Kyiv publications on an index of heretical books. It was forbidden to print books in Ruthenian. Although in 1693 Patriarch Adrian eased the linguistic restrictions, Ukrainian books were denied entry into Muscovy. The academy's golden age came to an abrupt end with Ivan Mazepa's defeat at the Battle of Poltava in 1709. The school's properties were plundered by Russian troops. Students from Right-Bank Ukraine, which was under Polish rule, were no longer admitted. By 1711 the enrollment fell to 161. Graduates of the academy were encouraged to seek positions in Moscow or Saint Petersburg. Peter I's ban on Ruthenian publications and religious texts in the Ukrainian recension of Church Slavonic was a heavy blow to the academy.
After Peter I's death, Ivan Mazepa's endowments were returned to the academy. Thanks to the support of Hetman Danylo Apostol and the administrative talents of Metropolitan Rafail Zaborovsky (1731–42), the school revived. New courses in modern languages, history and mathematics, medicine, and geography were added to its curriculum. The enrollment rose steadily from 490 in 1738–9 to 1,110 in 1744–5. Graduates were encouraged to complete their education in European universities and many sons of wealthy Cossack families studied abroad. The academy continued to educate the civil and ecclesiastical elite of the Hetman state and the Russian Empire. Catherine II's abolition of the Hetmanate in 1764 and secularization of the monasteries in 1786 deprived the academy of its chief sources of financial support. The school became a ward of the Russian imperial government and its importance declined rapidly. By the end of the century it was reduced to an eparchial seminary.
The academy's adaptation of European education was largely conditioned by the social and religious demands of early 17th-century Ukrainian society. Hardly touched by the Renaissance and Reformation movements, it placed little value on the vernacular Ukrainian language and felt no need for a secular culture. It defined itself mostly in religious terms and, therefore, made the preservation of the Orthodox faith its primary concern. By arming the Ukrainian members of the leading estates in the Polish Commonwealth with the languages and intellectual tools of the dominant culture, the academy fulfilled the demands placed on it by society. Accustomed to a defensive, conservative posture, the intellectual elite nurtured by the academy failed to capitalize on the new opportunities offered by the Hetman state. Its literary and scholarly achievement had a decisive impact on the development of Ukrainian culture and provided a firm foundation for later accomplishments.
Many of the most prominent Ukrainian intellectuals of that epoch were connected to the Kiev Collegium. L. Baranovich, I. Maksimovich, S. Yavorsky, T. Prokopovich served at the faculty. Professors of Collegium had impact on the development of Ukrainian baroque literature. Also there were many poems and dramas of unknown authorship there. There were poems of various shapes, in which images from Christian and Antique worlds were mixed. Excess, playfulness, ornamentation, and using allegories (demonstrative form of representation explaining the meaning other than the words that are spoken) have prompted scholars to refer them to Baroque. Panegyric (a formal public speech/verse, delivered in high praise of a person or thing), epigram (a brief, clever, and usually memorable statement) were widely represented.
Dramas were represented by morality-play (didactic allegorical drama) and mystery (religious drama at the base of liturgy with Biblical plot). P. Berinda, G. Konysky, M. Dovgalevsky were the most famous dramatists of the period. Students and seminarists composed intermezzos (comic interludes inserted between acts or scenes of a play), especially for the plays which were in the repertoire of vertep, specially arranged puppet theatre. School drama, a special genre of religious dramaturgy, was created by students or teachers of brotherhood schools and Kiev Collegium. T. Prokopovich, the prominent religious policy activist was also known as the author of the school drama “Vladimir” (1705).
Although the religious tales, sermons, and secular chronicles are of interest, they nonetheless belong more to the realm of the ‘written word’ than to literature. Literature in its purer form developed in poetry and drama. Although a large corpus of poems survived (many of them in manuscript), no really major poet emerged. Many of the poems are of unknown authorship. Some have the name of the author encoded into the poem, acrostics being popular at the time; there are also poems in various shapes (cross, half-moon, pyramid, etc) and so-called crabs, which could be read both from left to right and from right to left. Such excess, playfulness, and ornamentation have prompted some scholars to refer to the period as the baroque. Poetics were taught at the Kyivan Mohyla Academy and in the brotherhood schools, and most of the poems show traces of having been school excercises. Written in syllabic meters, they mix images from the Christian and the ancient worlds. Allegory is a predominant trope, and much use is made of certain set images (‘emblems’—a scythe for death, dove for purity, etc). Along with poems of religious or moral content, which stress the vanity and brevity of earthly life, there are numerous panegyrics and heraldic poems devoted to verbal description and the glorification of coats of arms. Epigrams are also quite widely represented. Those by the archpriest Ivan Velychkovsky are perhaps the most interesting.
Remarkable among the many religious poetasters were Kyrylo Stavrovetsky-Tranquillon, who used lines of irregular length close to those of folk dumas; Ioan Maksymovych, who presented religious truths in a broad narrative manner; and Klymentii, Zynovii's son, who is notable for the sheer number (369) of opinionated poems which he composed at the beginning of the 18th century. Arguably the best poet of the period, the peripatetic philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda wrote religious and morally didactic poetry. The popularity of his live-and-let-live theocentric philosophy as expressed in the collection Garden of Divine Songs, (1753–85) can be seen in the fact that some of the poems became folk songs. His Kharkiv Fables(1774) marks the beginning of the fable genre in Ukrainian literature. Quite widely known toward the end of the period was the collection of religious poetry The Praise Book(1790), from Pochaiv, with many poems based on legends and apocrypha about the Mother of God.
Equally important was the development of the dramatic genre. Western European morality, miracle, and mystery plays were part of the Jesuit school curriculum in Poland and from there entered the curriculum of the brotherhood schools. Joined with the study of poetics, school drama concentrated on the development of poetic dialogue. One early example of a dramatic dialogue is the collection of Christmas poems of Pamva Berynda (1616). Soon afterward, full-length dramas were composed, such as the widely known play by an anonymous author Alexis, Man of God(1673). To captivate the audience and to provide relief from their often-heavy didacticism, plays were interrupted by entr'actes consisting of humorous dialogues called intermedes. Those contained rather down-to-earth slapstick humor, but also, at times, social commentary in the form of mocking stereotypes of members of the various social strata of the time—Polish lords, Jews, Cossacks, Gypsies, and peasants—as in an untitled play by Mytrofan Dovhalevsky [1737] or in Heorhii Konysky's The Resurrection of the Dead, (1746). Students and seminarians were more than willing to compose intermedes, especially for the plays which were part of the repertoire of the puppet theater, the vertep. (Texts for vertep dramas have survived only from the 1770s.) Since the students and wandering precentors presented the vertep at village and city fairs, both the serious mystery plays and the slapstick interludes reached a wide audience. The most famous play of the time, Vladimir (1705) by Teofan Prokopovych, is unusual in its blurring of the strict division between the serious and the comic. Glorifying Volodymyr the Great for christening Rus’, Prokopovych merges the comic and derisive elements with other elements of the play and so initiates the genre of tragicomedy. A much weaker tragicomedy, dealing with the fall in morals of the day, is Varlaam Lashchevsky's Tragedokomediia ... (1742). Of interest also is the drama God's Grace Which Has Liberated Ukraine (1728), by an anonymous author. It moves away from religious themes and deals with events during the Bohdan Khmelnytsky period. The use of personifications in the play to portray such ‘personages’ as Ukraine or News is also quite typical of the time.
Although the Cossack period in Ukrainian literature lasted until the end of the 18th century, it had begun to decline with the signing of the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654, when Ukraine came under ever-increasing Russian domination. All through the Cossack period most of what was written in Ukraine was written in the bookish language, which in the 18th century came under the strong influence of the Russian language and consistently grew farther away from the vernacular.
One of the most famous alumni of the Kiev Collegium was G. Skovoroda, a philosopher and a poet of Ukrainian Baroque. He created the treatise on Christian morality and several philosophical dialogues, a lot of songs, poems, fables, some of which became widely known and took their position in Ukrainian folklore. Philosopher and poet, he was educated at the Kyivan Mohyla Academy (1734–53, with two interruptions). He sang in Empress Elizabeth I's court Kapelle in Saint Petersburg (1741–4), served as music director at the Russian imperial mission in Tokai, Hungary (1745–50), and taught poetics at Pereiaslav College (1751). He resumed his studies at the Kyivan academy, but left after completing only two years of the four-year theology course. He spent the next 10 years in Kharkiv, teaching poetics (1759–60), syntax and Greek (1762–4), and ethics (1768–9) at Kharkiv College. After his dismissal from the college he abandoned any hope of securing a regular position and spent the rest of his life wandering about eastern Ukraine, particularly Slobidska Ukraine. Material support from friends enabled him to devote himself to reflection and writing. Most of his works were dedicated to his friends and circulated among them in manuscript copies.
Although there is no sharp distinction between Skovoroda's literary and philosophical works, his collection of 30 verses (composed from 1753 to 1785) titled Sad bozhestvennykh pesnei (Garden of Divine Songs), his dozen or so songs, his collection of 30 fables (composed between 1760 and 1770) titled Kharkiv Fables, his translations of Cicero, Plutarch, Horace, Ovid, and Muretus, and his letters, written mostly in Latin, are generally grouped under the former category. Some of his songs and poems became widely known and became part of Ukrainian folklore. His philosophical works consist of a treatise on Christian morality and 12 dialogues.
Skovoroda preferred to use symbols, metaphors, or emblems instead of well-defined philosophical concepts to convey his meaning. Moreover, he delighted in contradiction and often left it to readers to find their way out of an apparent one. In the absence of explicit statements of doctrine and expected solutions to obvious problems, it is sometimes uncertain what exactly Skovoroda had in mind.
For Skovoroda the purpose of philosophy is practical—to show the way to happiness. Hence, the two central questions for him are what happiness is and how it can be attained. For him happiness is an inner state of peace, gaiety, and confidence which is attainable by all. To reach this state, some understanding of the world and oneself and an appropriate way of life are necessary. Skovoroda approaches metaphysics and anthropology not as a speculative thinker, but as a moralist: he does no more than outline those truths that are necessary for happiness. His basic metaphysical doctrine is that there are two natures in everything: the ideal, inner, invisible, eternal, and immutable; and the material, outer, sensible, temporal, and mutable. The first is higher, for it imparts being to the second. This dualism extends through all reality—the macrocosm or universe, and the two microcosms of humanity and the Bible. In the macrocosm the inner nature is God, and the outer is the physical world. Skovoroda's view on God's relation to the world is panentheist rather than pantheist. In man the inner nature is the soul; the outer, the body. In the Bible the inner truth is the symbolical meaning; the outer, the literal meaning.
From this metaphysical scheme Skovoroda drew a number of fundamental conclusions for practical life. Since the universe is ordered by a provident God, every being has been provided with all that is necessary for happiness. The assurance that what is necessary is easy and what is difficult is unnecessary (for happiness) brings peace of mind. It also serves as a criterion for the material conditions of happiness: we need only those goods that are necessary to health and are available to all people. But to dispel anxiety about material security is not enough for happiness. Active by nature, humans must also fulfill themselves in action by assuming the congenial task or vocation assigned to them by God. To pursue one's task regardless of external rewards is to be happy, while to pursue wealth, glory, or pleasure through uncongenial work is to be in despair. Furthermore, since vocations are distributed by God in such a way as to ensure a harmonious social order, to adopt an uncongenial task leads to social discord and unhappiness for others.
The doctrine of congenial work is the central doctrine in Skovoroda's moral system. Although it is not metaphysically plausible, it expresses his faith in the creative potential of human beings and the possibility of self-fulfillment in this life for everyone. Although they were never presented in a systematic fashion, Skovoroda's ideas form a remarkably coherent system. His chief authorities are the ancient philosophers (the Stoics, the Cynics, Epicurus, Plato, and Aristotle), from whom he selects the basic elements of his own teaching. Following the patristic tradition, he treats the Bible allegorically: he holds that its literal meaning (anthropomorphic God and miracles) is external and false, and that its inner, symbolic meaning coincides with the truth known to the ancient philosophers. In this way he reconciles secular learning with Christian faith.
Interest to the history provoked the teachers of the Collegium to compile historical texts: T. Safonovich created the “Chronicle” (1672), I. Gizel compiled the “Synopsis” (1674). Also, several Cossack chronicles appeared: the anonymous Samovidets Chronicle (ca 1654), “The Chronicle” by G. Grabyanka (1710) and S. Velichko (1720). Fascination with the lives of saints and with the extraordinary also gave rise to a renewed interest in history, which fostered the development of the historiographic genre. Teodosii Safonovych, a teacher in the Kyivan Mohyla College, compiled a history (Kroinika) in 1672 composed of previous Kyivan Rus’ as well as Polish chronicles. Even more prominent was the historical compilation Sinopsis, published in 1674 in Kyiv and attributed to Innokentii Gizel. The work was republished many times and remained a basic historical text throughout the period. The momentous upheavals of the Bohdan Khmelnytsky period were recognized for their historical importance by the contemporary participants. Several Cossack chronicles appeared. Although strictly speaking those chronicles belong more to historiography than to literature, their style and influence on the Ukrainian Romantics played an important role in the later development of literature proper. Three chronicles deserve special mention: the anonymous Samovydets Chronicle, which begins with the Khmelnytsky uprising and ends in 1702; the Hryhorii Hrabianka Chronicle (1710), which concentrates on the Khmelnytsky period but begins in antiquity and ends at the beginning of the 18th century; and the Samiilo Velychko chronicle, completed after 1720. The last is perhaps the most lively and interesting of the three. In vivid and colorful language Velychko chronicles events and attempts to give the reasons for them, as well as to draw a moral for future generations. Not quite in the same genre but equally lively and interesting is the autobiography of Illia Turchynovsky. His adventures vividly portray the life of the wandering students-preceptors who played an important role in the development of literature, especially poetry and drama.
Baroque music of Ukraine is closely connected with N. Diletsky, a musician, the first theorist and the author of several a cappello concertos composition treatises. Church music is identified with names of composers D. Bortnyansky, A. Vedel.
3. There are two traces of Baroque architecture in Ukrainian lands. The first one is evident in Lviv because of its geographical and cultural location in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in that period. Western-European stylistic features are in Church of St. Peter and Paul (1610–1630), the first, became a model for the Church of Purification (1642–1644) and Ascension Catholic Church in Rudki (1728). Buildings in central and north-eastern Ukraine are usually attributed to proper Ukrainian (or Cossack) Baroque. Cossack Baroque architecture emerged during the Hetman era of the XVII–XVIII centuries as a representation of Cossack aristocracy. Its distinctive features were: more constructivist design, more moderate ornamentation, simpler in form comparatively to Western European principles of art. Examples of Ukrainian church architecture are: Trinity Cathedral of the Chernigov Trinity Monastery (1679), the Church of St. Catherina in Chernigov (1715), Holy Ascension Cathedral in Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky (1695–1700), Nikolay Military Cathedral in Kiev (1695). Many medieval Rus churches were significantly reconstructed and expanded in Baroque motives: church domes and exterior and interior ornamentation were added (Kiev Cave Monastery, Vydubichi Morastery, Pochaiv Monastery, St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev). Secular Baroque architecture is signified by transition from castles to palaces, the process which started in Renaissance Ukraine. Baroque palaces of Ukraine are Mariinskiy (1750) and Klovsky (1756) in Kiev, Kachanivka near Chernigov (1770s), Sofiivka upon Kamianka (1796).
Ukrainian baroque architecture was representative of the lifestyle of the kozak aristocracy. At that time most medieval churches were redesigned to include a richer exterior and interior ornamentation and multilevel domes. The most impressive exponents of this period are the bell tower of the Pechersk Monastery and the Mariinsky Palace in Kyiv, Saint George's Cathedral in Lviv, and the Pochaiv Monastery. A unique example of baroque wooden architecture is the eighteenth century Trinity Cathedral in former Samara, built for Zaporozhian kozaks. The neoclassical park and palace ensemble became popular with the landed gentry in the late eighteenth century. Representative samples are the Sofiivka Palace in Kamianka, the Kachanivka Palace near Chernihiv, and the palace in Korsun'-Shevchenkivskyi.
Ukrainian folk architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows a considerable influence of baroque ornamentation and neoclassic orders while preserving traditional materials like wood and wattled clay. Village planning remained traditional, centered around a church, community buildings, and marketplace. The streets followed property lines and land contours. Village neighborhoods were named for extended families, clans, or diverse trades and crafts. This toponymy, dating from medieval times, reappeared spontaneously in southern and eastern Ukrainian towns and cities, such as Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Simferopol that were built in the eighteenth century.