The humanistic school and Ukrainian literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth century

This thesis explores the relationship between educational philosophy and Ukrainian literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its central premise is that the school system adopted by Orthodox Ukrainians toward the end of the sixteenth century had a demonstrative influence on the nature of Ukrainian writings during subsequent periods. In this connection, the trivium courses in both West European and Ukrainian schools are examined as the sources for a didactic concept of literature that was intimately connected to the close parallelism between Renaissance rhetorical and poetical theory.;Chapter II examines the development of pedagogical thought in early-modern Europe. It focuses on the humanistic trivium, its religious profile, and the attitudes toward literature that it promoted through the pursuit of pietas litterata. The next chapter links these developments with analogous phenomena in the Ukraine. Chapter IV discusses the attitudes toward secular knowledge and, especially, toward classical material. It demonstrates that the nascent Ukrainian school found it difficult to balance training for the civic life and service for the church. By the mid-seventeenth century resistance to the "pagan arts" and secular knowledge had been overcome.;In the final chapter Hryhorij Skovoroda (1753-1790) is examined as an example of the lasting impact the humanistic educational establishment had on Ukrainian culture. Besides discussing his tracts and colloquies as paradigms of human discourse intended for use in the Slavic theological republic, emphasis is placed on the presence in his prose oeuvre of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam--the teacher of teachers.;After setting up the problem in the Introduction, Chapter I surveys the historico-cultural situation in the Ukrainian lands just prior to the renascence of the late-sixteenth century. It is shown that dissatisfaction among Volhynian and Galician Orthodox believers with political conditions in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as their desire to restore Rus' traditions led, among other things, to the adoption of an upper-track educational system.