Professor Leonid Ushkalov’s Skovorodiana

Abstract

The article analyzes the contribution of Professor Leonid Ushkalov’s scientific works to the intellectual matrix of Kharkiv Philological School and Skovoroda studies. He outlined in his researches such complex problems of literary and philosophical reasonings by H. Skovoroda as the source of his works; genre-artistic features of his poetry versification; a fable definition by Skovoroda as an independent literary genre of philosophical style, and a parable as a model of a fable and philosophical dialogue peculiar fusion; vivid mythological and biblical imagery and the original structure of treatises; deployment in magnificent Baroque forms and in biblical, mythological, emblematic images in the plane of Christian Neoplatonism of philosophical and theological thoughts in the theologian’s «Socratic» dialogues; Skovoroda’s Biblical noematics and heuristics as a text comprehensive allegory of the Holy Bible; the influence of works by Skovoroda on the new, modern and contemporary Ukrainian literature and a great number of other issues, each of which has the prospect of deploying into a separate Skovoroda studies discourse. In particular, it is stated that L. Ushkalov offered more than three hundred themes for further works about H. Skovoroda’s creative activity.