Final Friday, the historical house of Ukraine’s precious poet and thinker Hryhorii Skovoroda used to be destroyed through a Russian artillery strike, in conjunction with a museum of his paintings.
Skovoroda’s house used to be in a tiny village now not a ways from Kharkiv — nowhere close to any glaring army objectives comparable to a railway or ammunition depot. The assault seems to were a planned act of cultural vandalism, and now not the primary because the Russian invasion started in February.
Skovoroda used to be a number one determine in Ukraine’s cultural renaissance within the 18th century; this yr is the three hundredth anniversary of his start.
In a video cope with on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the assault in opposition to the house of a person “who taught other people what a real Christian perspective to lifestyles is and the way an individual can know himself.”
“It kind of feels this can be a horrible threat for contemporary Russia: museums, the Christian perspective to lifestyles and other people’s self-knowledge,” Zelensky mentioned.
Zelensky reprised the theme when marking Victory Day, quoting Skovoroda’s phrases in any other public message on Monday: “There may be not anything extra unhealthy than an insidious enemy however there’s not anything extra toxic than a feigned pal.”
Skovoroda’s legacy has develop into symbolic of what Zelensky and different Ukrainians name the battle between two global perspectives — the ones of person freedoms and democracy in opposition to a brand new authoritarianism pushed through prejudice.
The governor of Kharkiv, Oleh Synyehubov, mentioned in a submit on Telegram: “The occupiers can spoil the museum the place Hryhoriy Skovoroda labored for the closing years of his lifestyles and the place he used to be buried. However they’ll now not spoil our reminiscence and our values!”
Whilst many volunteers and staff inside Ukraine’s cultural sector rushed to offer protection to establishments and monuments during the rustic all over the onset of the struggle, church buildings, museums, statues and artwork collections have suffered injury.
Zelensky mentioned in his Saturday cope with that Russian forces have destroyed just about 200 heritage websites because the starting of the invasion.
Whether or not these kinds of were intentionally focused is open to discuss however given Vladimir Putin’s dismissive view of Ukrainian tradition it will rarely be sudden.
There have indisputably been acts of cultural hooliganism in spaces occupied through the Russians. A statue of any other outstanding Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, within the the city of Borodianka outdoor Kyiv, used to be shot at a number of instances and badly broken. The city used to be occupied through Russian and Chechen troops for weeks.
Shevchenko’s poem “The Dream, ” which satirized Russia’s oppression of Ukraine, used to be thought to be subversive and led him to be banished from Ukraine through Tsar Nicholas I in 1847, “below the strictest surveillance, with out the freedom to put in writing or paint,” as Nicholas demanded.
Shevchenko is broadly thought to be the founding father of the fashionable written Ukrainian language. His outlook would were at odds with Vladimir Putin’s view — as he put it in Februar — that “trendy Ukraine used to be completely created through Russia or, to be extra actual, through Bolshevik, communist Russia.”
Now not a ways from Borodianka, a museum containing two-dozen works of the overdue Ukrainian folks artist Maria Prymachenko used to be struck and burned down in March. The level of wear to her works of art stays unclear with a consultant from the Maria Prymachenko Circle of relatives Basis alleging that the works had been rescued. Prymachenko’s brilliant art work had been admired through Pablo Picasso who as soon as known as her an “inventive miracle,” after visiting a display of her paintings in Paris in 1936.
Quite a lot of Ukrainian church buildings were destroyed, too — lots of them nowhere close to any army goal. Simply outdoor Kyiv an 18th century wood church in Lukyanivka used to be destroyed — one of the houses within the house razed to the bottom as Russian forces withdrew from round Kyiv in April.
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CNN’s Olga Voitovych and Kostan Nechyporenko contributed to this file.
