A Russian artillery assault last Friday demolished the ancient home of Ukraine’s beloved poet and philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda, as well as a museum dedicated to his work.
Skovoroda lived in a small village near Kharkiv, distant from any apparent military objectives such as a railway or weapons store. The attack appears to have been planned, and it is not the first since the Russian invasion began in February.
Skovoroda was a key player in the 18th-century cultural renaissance in Ukraine; this year marks the 300th anniversary of his birth.
In a video address on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the attack against the home of a man “who taught people what a true Christian attitude to life is and how a person can know himself.”
“It seems this is a terrible danger for modern Russia: museums, the Christian attitude to life, and people’s self-knowledge,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky reprised the theme when marking Victory Day, quoting Skovoroda’s words in another public message on Monday: “There is nothing more dangerous than an insidious enemy but there is nothing more poisonous than a feigned friend.”
Skovoroda’s legacy has come to represent what Zelensky and other Ukrainians refer to as a conflict between two world views: that of individual liberties and democracy versus new authoritarianism fueled by bigotry.
Oleh Synyehubov, the governor of Kharkiv, stated on Telegram: “The occupants have the ability to damage the museum where Hryhoriy Skovoroda labored in his final years and was buried. But they will not erase our memories or values!”
While many volunteers and professionals in Ukraine’s cultural sector hurried to safeguard institutions and monuments around the nation when the war began, churches, museums, sculptures, and art collections have been damaged.
In his Saturday statement, Zelensky stated that Russian soldiers have damaged approximately 200 historic sites since the invasion began.
It’s unclear whether the majority of these were purposely targeted, but considering Vladimir Putin’s disparaging attitude toward Ukrainian culture, it wouldn’t be surprising.
Cultural hooliganism has undoubtedly occurred in Russian-occupied territories. A statue of Taras Shevchenko, another great Ukrainian poet, was fired numerous times and seriously damaged in the town of Borodianka outside Kyiv. For weeks, Russian and Chechen forces held the town.
Tsar Nicholas I exiled Shevchenko from Ukraine in 1847, “under the closest monitoring, without the freedom to write or paint,” as Nicholas requested, for his poem “The Dream,” which satirized Russia’s subjugation of Ukraine.
Shevchenko is usually considered as the creator of modern written Ukrainian. His perspective would have clashed with Vladimir Putin’s belief, expressed in February, that “modern Ukraine was totally built by Russia, or, to be more accurate, by Bolshevik, communist Russia.”
In March, a museum in Borodianka that housed two dozen pieces by the late Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko was hit and burned down. The degree of her artworks’ destruction is unknown, while a spokesperson from the Maria Prymachenko Family Foundation claims that the paintings were saved. Pablo Picasso loved Prymachenko’s vibrant paintings and even labeled her an “artistic wonder” after seeing a display of her work in Paris in 1936.
A number of Ukrainian churches have also been demolished, many of them far from any military target. An 18th-century wooden church in Lukyanivka, just outside Kyiv, was burned — one of several structures in the region damaged when Russian soldiers retreated from the area around Kyiv in April.
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