Reliable, Possible, and Improbable About Student Years of Hryhorii Skovoroda

Abstract

To this day the biography of young man Hryhorii Skovoroda is mostly a set of assumptions and conjectures than history about his life based on more or less authentic facts. Even the year of the philosopher’s birth is not as obvious as it is commonly supposed. Excessive trust in the specific work of Mykhailo Kovalynskyi about Skovoroda attempts to adjust those up to thinker’s time sources to much later information of Kovalynskyi’s work harm the critical study of Hryhoriy Savych’s biography. In this article on the basis of both well-known and new facts the established historiographical statements about the time of Skovoroda’s birth and education are revised or questioned. He could not start his studies at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy before 1738/39 and completed them, most likely, no later than January 1750. It seems the gap in Hryhorii’s studying because of his singing in the court chapel lasted longer than scholars assumed before.